A crowd of people had gathered around the American crewman, who turned out to be Lavoie's navigator, second lieutenant Donald Irwin, cradling a broken arm. When Lavoie asked for splints to set the broken limb, a young boy spoke to the crowd in German and soon two pieces of wood were offered to Lavoie for the job. As he was splinting Irwin's arm, a German soldier, complete with rifle and swastika on his uniform, carne upon the scene and made the two men prisoners. While many of the facts of that day are blurred in Lavoie's memory, some are crystal-clear. He was marched out of the field to a nearby road where several fellow crewmembers were being held prisoner. Most memorable was the radio operator, Tech Sergeant Freeman Penney, whose hair was standing straight up and was caked with blood. He also had a small wound on his cheek, because of the shortage of CO2 cartridges at that stage of the war, American aircrews had been ordered not to pull the strings that automatically inflated their Mae Wests unless they were in an emergency. Standing beside a road in Germany as a prisoner, disgusted and discouraged, Freeman Penney suddenly pulled the strings, inflating the life jacket. The crowd of Germans surrounding the Americans fled, thinking that the "luftgangster" was setting off a bomb which he had tied to himself."

After the excitement died down, Penney, looking down at his feet, said in a panicky way to Lavoie "Ralph, I can't do it. I can't bring my toes up to touch my shins!" Lavoie responded that he didn't think anybody could do that to which Penney said, "Well, I did on the way down!" When Lavoie questioned him, Penney recounted that a 2Omm shell had exploded over his parachute while it was in the damaged B-17, nearly shredding the shoulder straps-. He was well aware that when he pulled the ripcord to open his chute, the few strands of material still holding the straps together would break and he would be tipped upside down, probably falling out of his chute.

Initially Penney thought he would ride the plane down, but after further consideration, he decided to bail out and take his chances in the air. As he expected the shoulder straps broke. Penney found himself hanging by his leg straps which were up around his crotch. As he reached up to try to grab the straps, they started slipping down his legs. The more he reached, the farther down they went. He finally reached a point where he pulled his toes in, claiming to Lavoie that he had touched his shins, made hooks out of his feet, and hung head first, landing on his shoulders when he reached the ground. This position resulted in profuse bleeding from his facial cut, which filled his hair with blood and accounted for it standing straight up when he was first seen on the ground by Ralph Lavoie.

On a tragic note, the "Yankee Powerhouse" had exploded shortly after Lavoie had bailed out, killing Lieutenant Riches, who had been unable to set the automatic pilot, and stayed with the plane allowing the other men to jump free. A flaming piece of aircraft debris struck Bill Waller's parachute, setting it afire and sending him to his death. He had been the right waist gunner on the B-17. Thus four of the crew perished, and six survived. The dead were buried by the Germans in the New Cemetery in Oldenburg, close to where their plane had crashed.

Lavoie and his fellow crewmembers were taken to Dulag Luft, near Frankfurt, which was the main interrogation center for American airmen captured by the Germans. Many threats, including the firing squad, were made against the prisoners in a quest for information, but there was very little physical abuse at Dulag Luft. The center was ran by the Luftwaffe, which considered itself a very professional service and viewed enemy airmen as fellow professionals. The Germans wanted to know the names of commanding officers, the location of bases both in England and America, future bombing objectives and other military information. The prisoners were bound to only reveal name, rank and serial number. It was a grueling ordeal, very distressing to Lavoie. After being questioned closely by two German officers, a third came into his cell and put a notebook down on the table which was entitled "384th Bomb Group - 547th Bomb Squadron" and had Captain Dillingham's name on it! With the open society that existed in the United States, the Germans were able to piece together all sorts of information published in the newspapers about soldiers on leave, shipping out, changing bases and attending different military schools. When interrogating prisoners, the Germans were seeking confirmation when they couldn't get any new information, and were surprisingly good at it.

After about five days; Lavoie was taken out of his cell and briefly reunited with his crew. They were together for about 10 minutes before the officers were taken in one direction to their POW camp, and the non-commissioned officers, including Lavoie, were shipped to Luft Stalag VIIA in southern Germany near Munich. Having lost his flying coveralls, Lavoie was dressed in his long johns and his bright blue electric "heat' suit which plugged into the B-17 to keep the fliers warm. Dirty and bearded, his hair tousled and uncombed, he was escorted to the railroad depot for transportation to Luft Stalag VIIA. In defiance of his guards, Lavoie flapped the trapdoor which was built into the rear of the electric suit at the German civilians along the main concourse of the railroad station. This gesture ended abruptly when he heard the distinctive sound of a bullet being chambered in a guard's rifle.

Waiting for Lavoie at VIIA were approximately 200 other American enlisted men shot down previously. They stayed in this camp for several months. The International Red Cross did not know of their presence and they received no Red Cross parcels or packages from home. Lavoie did receive an overly large pair of trousers to cover his blue suit, and settled down to "learn how to live as a prisoner of war". There was a lot to learn and very little food. Lavoie remembers American airmen who reminded him of monkeys in the zoo, taking their food rations to the top bunk, covering it and coveting it, so no one could take it from them. To see Americans acting in such a manner was always very distressing to him.

The war had moved to Sicily, and American infantrymen taken prisoner there were transported to Stalag VIIA. As the German Air Force controlled aviator prisoners and the German Army controlled infantry prisoners, it was decided to move the 300 American airmen by railroad boxcars, called the "40 and 8's" because they could carry either 40 men or eight horses, to Luft Stalag XVIIB in Krems, Austria, near Vienna. With so many vigorous and patriotic young men incarcerated and seeking outlets for their energies, the camp was a hotbed of activity and intrigue. There were carpenters, actors, policemen, athletes, teachers and criminals all in one place, a microcosm of American society. The prisoners held academic classes, produced plays and accomplished many things with few materials. They built miniature stoves with blowers in them for greater efficiency, and their engineering feats with ordinary tins cans was amazing. The most important item for barter was cigarettes. They replaced money as a medium of exchange in the camps. The source of this wealth was the Red Cross parcels distributed to the prisoners, and sometimes a package from home. When the intensified bombing of Germany disrupted the internal transportation system, parcels became scarce, resulting in fewer cigarettes and, importantly for most prisoners, less food. The contents of the Red Cross parcels were also used to bribe or trade with the guards, and Lavoie said laughingly that you could have bought your way out of Germany if you had enough soap, cigarettes, instant coffee and chocolate. There was humor in the camps as well. Lavoie shared a birthdate , April 20, with Adolph Hitler, and on that day the rest of the prisoners sat him off by himself and no one would talk to him for the day.

Ralph Lavoie had been a POW for a little more than six months when he decided to break out of Luft Stalag XVIIB on the cold and snowy night of December 3, 1943. With him was Jim Proakis, a New Yorker who had already tried to escape the camp by climbing onto the undercarriage of a garbage wagon that was leaving the camp but he was spotted and caught. The two airmen learned of a planned escape that was being organized with the assistance of a German guard who was bribed with the promise of a large sum of money when the war ended. He was to cut the outer wire while a team of ten prisoners cut the inner wire and the coils of wire between the fences. Lavoie and Proakis decided to follow the original ten through the wire to freedom. Unfortunately, the other camp guards learned of the planned escape, and the ten Americans were warned by the guard involved in the plan not to attempt the escape. Lavoie and Proakis were not privy to this information as they were not part of the original plan, and paid the price.

Because of the inclement weather, they thought the guards might be less alert. They crossed the warning wire behind Barracks #36, crawling on their stomachs, but were soon caught in the spotlight of the guard towers. The two started crawling back towards the barracks as bullets flew overhead. Hoping to reach the protection of a nearby air raid trench, Proakis, against the advice of Lavoie, jumped to his feet and started running. He was immediately cut down by machine gun fire. Lavoie continued for a short distance until he was hit in the left leg. The force of the bullet flipped him over onto his back. The firing continued for a few minutes (one POW estimated that 150 shots had been fired) but Lavoie did not suffer any other injuries, although his left leg was severely wounded. He lay in the open for a few minutes after the firing stopped until he saw silhouetted against the tower lights two German guards, one officer and one enlisted man approaching him. The officer had a pistol in his hand and the other guard had a rifle. Lavoie was not unduly concerned by the presence of these weapons. As he said, "After all, it was wartime and I was a prisoner trying to escape. There had been a lot of shooting. But what came next I did not expect.

When the officer realized I was still alive, he aimed his pistol right at me and fired. I can't tell you the surprise that I felt, as I did not expect anyone to stand over me and try to murder me. I asked him not to shoot, pleaded that he not shoot. But he stepped back and got ready to fire again. Using my good right leg I tried to roll my body back and forth to create a poor target. After his second shot, he ordered the enlisted man to hold me still by placing the butt of his rifle on my chest as he continued to fire at me. It turned out that one shot went through my right shoulder, one through my neck, left side, one off one of my ribs and one through my left cheek which came out of my wide open mouth, which was screaming at him.

"He fired at me about five times at which point I think he had emptied his pistol. I thought I was fatally hit, for I suddenly became very weak," said Lavoie. The German officer also fired a bullet into Proakis' head. The men in the camp, lead by Kurt Kurtenbach, argued with the guards in an attempt to provide aid for Lavoie and Proakis. Kurtenbach was the man of confidence in the camp, a term used to designate the enlisted man in charge of all POW negotiations in the camp with the German administration. After considerable discussion and argument, Kurtenbach and some other POWs received permission to check on the two escapees, and upon finding Lavoie still alive, loaded him on a stretcher and carried him to the camp first aid station. Along the way Lavoie fashioned a tourniquet on his wounded leg with his belt. His injuries were extensive and severe, especially to his leg. The lower femur was shattered, as well as the upper-knee joint. He had two flesh wounds in the other leg and one bullet had passed through his right shoulder, another through his neck and a third glanced off his ribs, as well as the bullet that passed through his cheek and open mouth.

While the Germans were firing at Lavoie and Proakis, a stray bullet went through the wall of Barracks #35B, hitting a prisoner, Bill Binnebose, in the buttocks. Binnebose, who had been shot down while flying in the B-17 'Our-Bay-Bee" (335th B.S. 95th B.G.) on the August Schweinfurt raid, was carried in a blanket by his fellow POWs to the hospital, where a French POW doctor operated on him for almost three hours. The German bullet had ripped through his intestines and was lodged in his stomach. He recovered and was returned to the regular POW camp after three months in the hospital.

Lavoie was in the same hospital, carried there by two teams of four POWs each. He owes his life to those men who got him into the hand of the surgeons in time. When the Germans dug a grave for Proakis, they also dug graves for Lavoie and Binnebose, assuming they would die from their injuries.

Reflecting on this life-threatening event, Ralph Lavoie said "Upon entering the service, I never thought I would get killed. I never seriously considered ever being killed. With all the millions of men who were in the war some were going to get hurt, and who was I to avoid that? So my inward wishes always were that if I lost anything, I would lose a leg, and not a hand or an arm, because I thought if I had my two hands I could always do something. It's probably hard to believe, but that night after the shooting stopped and I sat up and realized that my leg was seriously injured, I thought 'At least it's a leg .' While it didn't lessen the moment, and it's hard to believe that anyone would even think of something like that at a time like that, it is what went through my mind at the time."

Lavoie awoke from his operation to find a French POW in the next bed giving him a direct blood transfusion. When he was finished, the man got up from the bed and cleaned the medical instruments involved as if he was the hospital orderly. This remarkable man, named Jackie Brunnel, had been a prisoner of war for four years and cared for Lavoie during his many months of recuperation. Much to his relief, Lavoie was able to count ten toes on his feet when he looked under the sheets of his hospital bed. His first thought was "What do I have to worry about?" His leg was in a 30 pound traction weight with a nail through his shinbone just below the knee, stretching the leg out in hopes that the shattered bones would heal. It was six months before the leg had healed enough to be put in a cast which extended from his toes to his hip, and during that time Jackie Brunnel was Lavoie's faithful helper, lifting him in and out of bed.

His doctor was a French-naturalized citizen from Czechoslovakia named Kisselnick, a man whose face and character Ralph Lavoie will never forget. He was brilliant, speaking eight or ten languages, and was also a prisoner of war. The first thing he told his patient was that if any infection set in he would have to amputate immediately because he did not have adequate drugs to fight serious infection. Lavoie recounts that he had faith in his doctor and faith in his God, and his leg healed.

Because the shooting of Lavoie and Proakis by a German officer could cause serious repercussions within Germany (Lavoie refers to himself as a "hot potato"), Dr. Kisselnick thought he could have Lavoie transferred to a hospital in neutral Switzerland, where he would have been interned for the duration of the war. However, before that could occur, an exchange of prisoners of war between Germany and the United States and Great Britain was announced. In July of 1944 a team of Red Cross doctors, including Germans, Swiss and French, toured the POW camps and examined Prisoners for possible repatriation. If a man was judged to be unable to ever fight again, he became eligible for repatriation. Dr. Kisselnick, strongly supported by Ken Kurtenbach, the Camp Leader, fought successfully to have Lavoie included in the Allied group for repatriation.

When Lavoie left Luft Stalag VIIB in August of 1944, there were more than 5,000 American airmen in the camp as well as approximately 25,000 other prisoners of war, mainly French, Serbian and Russian The "repats" were taken first to Nuremberg to join other eligible POWs, continuing their journey by train and then boat across the Baltic Sea to Sweden. Another train took them across that neutral country to Goteborg, where they boarded the Gripsholm, a Swedish liner. When the ship sailed for England, there were 1200 British POWs and approximately 250 very happy Americans on board. The British were disembarked at Liverpool, and the Gripsholm sailed for the United States, arriving on September 26, 1944. Lavoie said that the ship sailed south and then north along the American Atlantic coast, while the crew took the time and effort to "fatten them up" and otherwise improve the physical condition of the repatriated prisoners before docking in New York Harbor.

Lavoie was taken to Halloran General Hospital in the Bronx where he had a joyful reunion with his family. Several days later he was reunited with his "precious Mary", and they set their wedding date, November 30, 1944. During his recuperation, Lavoie corresponded with the families of his fellow crewmen, and George Riches parents sent him a pair of train tickets to their town in Ohio as a wedding present. As much as Ralph and Mary were not eager to spend their honeymoon grieving with his pilot's family, Lavoie felt he owed it to his friend's memory. It was the start of a lifelong friendship, not only with the Riches but also with other members of that small Ohio community. Later in the war, Lavoie wrote to the commanding officer of the 384th Bomb Group explaining Lt. Riches' heroism in keeping their plane aloft until all the crewmen still alive were able to bail out. The letter resulted in a Silver Star decoration for Riches, and was a great consolation and a source of pride for his family.

Lavoie spent the next two years in and out of Army hospitals being treated for his shattered knee as well as chronic osteomyelitis, a bone infection. While the program was initially successful, the infection returned and has been with him constantly throughout his life. Although it requires daily bandaging, Lavoie believes "it is a very small price to pay to be home safe, to be married and the father of four wonderful sons and the grandfather of ten beautiful children".