In today’s age, we live in a world of short attention spans. The painful truth is that the sacrifices of past generations, of all of their arduous toil and hard efforts to create a better life for us, are going forgotten as the years march on. Along with our brave pioneers so often mentioned in these pages, the fighters of our wars deserve our reverence and attention, and especially worthy of our thoughts this Veterans Day are those of the Second World War, whose ranks have thinned to the degree that they’ve almost completely disappeared. They were the Greatest Generation, the sixteen million Americans who fought the Axis. Of that number, about 125 of them were Mokenians, men and women both. They were in nearly every theater of the war, with more than a few seeing bitter fighting. Some gave their lives, and some came home with injuries that changed them forever, but every one of them had a story. This Veterans Day, the author would like to share just one of them, that of local boy Edward L. Lauffer.
He first saw the light of day on January 31st, 1919, on the family farm at the southwest corner of 191st Street and 104th Avenue. The son of Louis and Elizabeth Lauffer, Edward was the scion of a well rooted Mokena family, his great-grandfather George Lauffer having arrived in our neck of the woods in 1846 from the German Rhineland-Palatinate. Edward grew up on the farm with two brothers and two sisters, and was an alumni of Mokena Public School, including its two year high school, being located in his day on Carpenter Street, in the same building that now houses Village Hall. Like a fair number of his classmates, he completed his final two years of high school at Joliet Township High School. Edward Lauffer was working as a welder in 1941 when the United States entered the Second World War, which had already been raging in full force for two years at that point. At first, his trade exempted him from military service, as it was deemed vital to the war effort, but eventually the young man came to enter the armed forces on July 26th, 1943.
Edward trained for one year stateside with the Army Air Corps, where he was classified as a pilot, but as chance would have it, there were no training openings for this position. At the end of this instructional period, Edward Lauffer of Mokena got his wings, a lieutenant’s rank, and became a newly minted navigator on a four-engine B-17, with which he departed American soil on October 28th, 1944 for the European theater of war. After bouncing around with detours in Newfoundland, Morocco, and Egypt, he ultimately touched down on November 11th near Foggia in southern Italy, which would be the new Lieutenant’s home for the next three months.
The B-17, also known as the Flying Fortress.
While in Italy, Lt. Lauffer and his crew became attached to the 301st Bomb Group of the 15th Army Air Force. As they did all of the village’s people in uniform, the Mokena Women’s Service Club took good care of Edward. In early 1945 they sent him some fudge for his birthday, which he wrote in a letter dated from Italy on January 18th, that it was not only “some of the best fudge I have ever tasted” but that it had made it all the way across the ocean without a single piece being broken! In another letter penned a few days later, he lamented the bad weather that had been preventing him from taking off and completing missions with his crew, before ending the note with “Hope the weather clears up so we can get this over with.”
Lt. Lauffer flew a total of 15 sorties, all by daylight, plotting his crew’s way through European skies marauded by Nazi fighters and raked with withering flak. With heavy bombs, they pounded the cradle of the Third Reich in Germany and Austria, as well as targets in Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and northern Italy. February 13th, 1945 was a mission laden with consequence for the young officer. That day, he was flying a run over Vienna, Austria, and as Lt. Lauffer was steadying his camera at the bomber’s small window to get a picture of the sky filled with flak explosions, his B-17 took a direct hit. He later described it as a “tremendous explosion,” and upon glancing out the windows on either side of the fuselage, saw that both wings were completely aflame, and the plane’s oxygen system had been destroyed by shrapnel.
The Mokenian ordered the crew through his intercom to put on their emergency oxygen, but the speaker was dead. There was no electricity, the hit had cut all the circuits. His B-17 stayed with their formation about two minutes, before it went into a slow, downward plunge. Having no other alternative, Lt. Lauffer bailed out at 25,000 feet. Of the normal complement of 10 airmen in his crew, three of his comrades never made it out of the plane. After his jump, Lauffer hit the bank of the Danube river, narrowly missing landing in the water itself. In no time flat, he was picked up and taken prisoner by five enemy soldiers, in what must have been a terrifying experience for our villager.
Word of Edward Lauffer’s fate took a while to reach home, but the headline of the March 2nd, 1945 edition of the News-Bulletin bellowed in huge, stark letters “Mokena Boy Missing in Action,” reflecting the fact that, at this time, no one could confirm that he had made it out of the flaming bomber. The same day they were notified of his missing status, Edward’s parents received a letter from him, and they had no idea whether or not he was still alive. His situation must’ve struck a deep nerve of anxiety and fear for his family and many friends, especially as his cousin and fellow Mokenian Lt. Oliver Lauffer, a bombardier belonging to an England-based squadron, had also gone missing with his crew over the North Sea after a raid over Germany a year and a half before. (Ollie Lauffer would later be officially declared killed in action. See the May 14th, 2021 entry in this blog for his complete story)
After being rounded up from the banks of the Danube, Edward was transported via horse-drawn farm wagon to a Luftwaffe base in eastern Austria, where he found two of his crew mates among the other prisoners. His first Austrian captors, while members of Hitler’s armed forces, could also be viewed as victims, as their homeland was forcefully (yet bloodlessly) annexed into greater Germany in 1938. Evidence of sympathetic sentiment from captor to prisoner is seen in the fact that at least one of Lt. Lauffer’s overseers gave him a glass of wine in this time, which the young Mokenian later remembered as “an excellent vintage that was very good.” One of them also spoke English with him, having worked in Boston before the war.
As a prisoner of war, the lieutenant was shuttled around the Reich before he was eventually interned, with the Mokena News-Bulletin later commenting with an impressed mien “by being a prisoner…Lt. Edward Lauffer perhaps got to see more of Germany than he would have in his line of duty, for in the capacity of prisoner he was taken by train and truck, tho mostly by train…from one camp to another many miles apart.” One stop was made at Oberursel near Frankfurt am Main for the navigator’s interrogation. During the questioning, his captors were gentle on him and used no torture to extract information. After a hard 15-day march from Nuremberg, his journey ended on April 18th, 1945, at the infamous Stalag VII-A at Moosburg in southern Bavaria. When Lt. Lauffer got there, the massive camp held over 29,000 Allied prisoners, finding himself surrounded not only by fellow Americans, but also by Australians, British, Canadians, French, Russians, and Serbs.
Due to his status as an officer, Lt. Lauffer was separated from the enlisted men at Moosburg. He would later reflect that his captors generally treated him and the other prisoners with respect and according to the rules of the Geneva Convention, but that there was an acute lack of food in the camp, as the Germans themselves were in dire straits at this juncture. At this time, Hitler’s Reich was in its death throes, and luckily for the Mokenian, his time spent in the gigantic prisoner camp was shorter than many of his fellow inmates, for 11 days after his arrival, on April 29th, he was finally freed by the American 4th Armored Division, bring an end to his harrowing experience.
On May 4, 1945, the News-Bulletin cheered “Liberated From Nazi Prison Camp” in its headline, and with a beam of sunlight in its words, announced that Louis and Elizabeth Lauffer had been notified of their son’s deliverance from Moosburg three days before. He was safe and sound, and “being nourished by Red Cross rations.” It was the first time they had heard anything about him since they received the notification that he had been shot down. Elizabeth was remembered to have exclaimed “Oh, this is fine!” when she got the news. It isn’t hard to imagine the Lauffers’ joy, and the immeasurable weight that had been lifted from their shoulders.
Lt. Lauffer was granted a leave, and on June 30th, 1945, made his triumphant return to Mokena, where the News-Bulletin was eager to interview him. Our small town paper ran a long piece detailing his story, saying that it was “hard to say which was the happiest” about his being back, Lt. Lauffer himself or his parents, and noted that “Edward…is very much in love with his job as a navigator and with flying.” The piece rounded out with a proud description of the medals adorning his uniform. Before he left the interview that day, Edward Lauffer signed the guest book that was kept in the Front Street News-Bulletin office for returning soldiers.
Edward Lauffer in his later years.
After marrying June Waters that July, Edward went on to keep a hardware store in Frankfort and would become the father of three daughters. The Lauffers later moved home and hearth to Texas, where the former navigator owned a miniature golf course. He loved playing bridge and skiing in Colorado, and in later years attended not only President Reagan’s inauguration, but the launching of the USS Reagan aircraft carrier. Decades after the war, Edward said that his faith saw him through the whole thing, and that his only regret was that not all of his comrades aboard their B-17 were able to make it out that day over Vienna. He crossed the great beyond on November 18th, 2013 in Texas. After so many years spent away, he was borne back to his old hometown, a hero making his final journey. Within the peaceful gates of St. John’s Cemetery, one dignified headstone bears the name of Edward Lauffer, complete with flyer’s wings and the inscription “Defender of Freedom.” Those of us now must never forget his sacrifices and those of the Greatest Generation, along with their deeds done to make the world a better place.
