Korean War veteran receives medals after 55 years

  • Published
  • By Laura Dermarderosian-Smith
  • 301st Fighter Wing
FORT WORTH, Texas --  She was only 15 years old at the time, but Norma remembers the day her brother came home. He sat his whole family down, told them the story, and said it would be the last time he would talk about it.

He kept his word for nearly 50 years until he wrote an autobiography, not for others to read, only his family. He devoted four chapters to the story he told just once before: what he thought, what he felt, what he endured as a Prisoner of War in Korea.

Now, Franklin Henry Hall will have to add a chapter to his autobiography when he recalls the Christmas he received the Purple Heart and the Prisoner of War medals. Col. Kevin E. Pottinger, commander of the Air Force Reserve's 301st Fighter Wing, Fort Worth, Texas, officially presented Airman First Class Hall with the medals in front of family and friends in the Fellowship Hall at the First United Methodist Church in Athens.

"I was thoroughly flabbergasted to see what happened here this morning," said the 74-year-old Korean War veteran. He had no idea he would be receiving these medals or that his family planned this ceremony. He thought he and his wife, Phyllis, were helping his daughter look for property in the area when they told him they needed to make a stop at the church.

"Now, I understand why Phyllis said to put on this, put on that. I didn't have a clue before that, but I was motivated to put on my flag [pin]. I did that not knowing what was going to happen," he told his audience as he stood in front of the podium after receiving the medals.

In the chapters he wrote describing that period of time fifty-five years ago, Mr. Hall did not know what was going to happen then either.

He was 18 years old when he enlisted in the Air Force. One of his temporary duty assignments, which would be for 25 missions, was to the 307th Bomb Group, Kadena Air Force Base, Japan, as a right blister gunner on the B-29 called the "The Cat Girl".

He recalled that their 19th mission was supposed to be a 'milk run' and explained why. They were flying at night because the enemy fighters didn't have the technology to see them, and the target they were bombing didn't have antiaircraft guns on site. They were the third B-29 in a run of 15 to strike the railroad marshalling yard that night when they came under fire.

"The next split second brought a flash of another plane firing at us from straight out at the three o'clock position," he recounted. "I did not even have a chance to touch the radio button this time, before there was an explosion of our plane."

All he knew was that he couldn't see or hear. What he didn't know was if he was falling with the plane or outside of it. Either way, he said, he didn't have a choice but to pull the rip cord. When he was descending, he learned why he couldn't see: blood from a wound had frozen over his eyes.

Known to be the only survivor of the 12 men aboard, he parachuted into enemy lines. Having landed on a thatch roof in a North Korean village during the middle of the night, he hoped he could escape before being noticed. Unfortunately, he ran into a dead end and was surrounded by what he thought were civilian military. In fact, he wrote, "they were just a bunch of kids, but they had rifles and showed a definite anxiousness to use them."

What seemed like a lifetime, he remembered, was only 24 hours from the time he left Okinawa to that point in time -- freezing, injured, his arms tied behind him as Chinese soldiers led him on foot to the next village. They walked "across furrowed fields and dense brush along creeks," he wrote in his autobiography. "The area was very hilly ... as we walked over these areas the ground was frozen and iced over. I was constantly slipping on one of these furrows, or tripping on a root or plant along the way."

As they stopped for the night, he had time to think about God, he said, and questioned why this was happening to him. It wasn't until he realized he was probably the only one from his aircraft that survived, that he became grateful for being alive. It was at this point, he recalls, he started to get 'really' close to God ... not only to help him with anything he would have to endure, but to help comfort his family back home.

They brought him to his initial destination and placed him in what he described as a "four foot square, five foot deep" hole in the ground. They covered the hole with a mat and kept him in this cold, dark place for three days until they felt he would be ready to talk.

His interrogator, he said, "spoke better English than I did." He later found out that this North Korean received a degree from Rice University in Houston, not far from his hometown, Pasadena, Texas.

What he remembers most about this earlier time was "staying alive and finding something to smoke, in that order." Creatively enough, he managed to make cigarettes from discarded peanut shells and paper. He writes, "I couldn't really say at this moment which was more important: smoking or living. I didn't think one was possible without the other."

After six weeks, his captors moved him to a POW camp. "There is no way of explaining the experience that would make it real without a great deal more word power than I have," he writes. "Suffice it to say, we lived through the worst that a society can induce on another and survived both mentally and physically."

The hostilities in Korea ended by the middle of 1953. Having spent eleven months as a prisoner, Airman Hall, along with other prisoners of war, was being released. They all had to wait their turn, as prisoners from both sides were being exchanged, one for one. As he approached the bridge that would take him to freedom, he thought, "This, obviously, was that magic portal from Hell to Heaven."

"I feel like I turned on a show and I only got the middle part," said Colonel Pottinger prior to presenting Airman Hall with his medals. For others whom the Hall family has shared this autobiography with, there is that same desire to know more about the man and his faith.

Mr. Hall married his high school sweetheart when he returned from Korea and they had six children. During their teen years, his children only knew that their father was a POW, but they never knew anything else about his experience until he wrote his autobiography.
Looking back at her childhood, his daughter Tanya recalls her father, although loving, being strict on them and not tolerating the "I can't do ...".

"Now, I know he knew that by God's grace anything and any goal could be accomplished," she said. "He wrote for his family a story of his life and from this, I realize how much power the word surrender has, not to the enemy, but to your faith to see you through all of life."

It was only a few years ago, through a chance encounter with a man who wore an unusual lapel pin that caught her eye, Tanya began a search that led to her father receiving the Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals. The man told her the 'silkworm pin' was given to people who weren't paratroopers, but had to parachute out of aircraft. After reading her dad's story, she felt he qualified for one and wanted to get it for him. In a quest to further complete this chapter in her father's life, she started to look for medals he earned but never got.

Still many other veterans of past wars have yet to receive, or be credited with, these medals. Sadly, they will not know the benefits they earned along with them. There are many various reasons for this, but to many of these veterans and their families, it's hard to understand them.

"I'll never feel I deserved it. I will never be able to justify in my mind having been shot down and captured, to deserve any kind of medal," said Mr. Hall. "But, I do appreciate you being here.

"Of all things that have occurred in my life, it has all revolved around the blessings of God and the blessing of family, and in that particular sequence," said Mr. Hall after he received his medals. "Without God, nothing else is good, with family, it makes it all worth while ... and I'll accept the accolades."

Now after fifty-five years, Norma will hear the story her brother will tell, probably more than once: the day the Air Force presented him with the Purple Heart and Prisoner of War medals.