This week as Oak Park observes Independence Day, one of its native sons will think back to the fireworks he saw 61 years ago”not a boisterous, joyous celebration, but a torturous phalanx which he endured nearly every day as a fighter pilot in World War II.
The fireworks were 50-caliber or larger bullets and shells packed with volatile explosives that showered the air with sharp fragments of steel bursting around him until it blackened the sky. Despite these daily threats, Captain William Cullerton, a graduate of Fenwick High School, continued to fly until the day he was shot point blank by a German soldier and left on the ground for dead.
Before that harrowing experience, however, he has many pleasant memories of Oak Park and especially the woman who gave him the incentive to survive a hellish escape from an enemy firing squad.
It was while Bill was a sophomore at Fenwick that he met Elaine Stephen, a year younger. As he says of her, “I knew she was the love of my life; it’s what got me through the war.”
The two had seen each other at an ice skating party, and their eyes were as glazed as the ice on the rink. Because of her last name, her friends called her “Steve,” and by the end of high school, she was making plans in the hopes of adding “Cullerton” to it.
All that changed on Dec. 7, 1941 when Japan attacked the U.S. Naval forces at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Cullerton responded immediately, and knowing he wanted to fly, enlisted with the U.S. Army Air Corps. Quickly accepted, he was the 10,000th cadet to join in the state of Illinois, and as such, was awarded a free flight in an open cockpit BT-13 Air Corps plane at what was then known as Municipal Field (today’s Midway Airport). “That was my first taste of flying,” he said, recalling his greenhorn aviation days.
It was a taste that suited his palate well and led to one of the most accomplished records by any single pilot in the war. Elaine saw him off at Union Station as he left for training in Texas. It was an emotional parting, with a lot of tears, but she was confident it would only be a temporary one. “I always felt Bill would come back,” she said. “He was just that type of person.”
As Cullerton was shipped to Foster Field in Victoria, Texas for advanced training in P-51 fighter planes, Elaine anxiously counted the days, and partially as a distraction from worrying about him, enrolled at Rosary College, now Dominican University, to study for a degree in English. That was merely a front, she admits. “It was called waiting for a husband,” Bill laughed, looking back on it. “That’s true,” she agreed.
Elaine freely acknowledged that she spent the next two years preparing for and planning a wedding. Little did Bill know this when his unit, the 357th Fighter Squadron of the 355th Fighter Group, was sent overseas in May of 1944.
It was a bad time to be entering combat for anyone in the European Theater of the war. Within a week, 10,500 men were to lose their lives on the beaches of Normandy.
Cullerton was a replacement pilot for those who were either lost in battle or had served their full tour of duty. Unlike previous units, his was the first to be immediately given the sophisticated P-51 Mustang planes, which were the latest in state-of-the-art technology.
Each aircraft could carry three bombs and housed 2,500 rounds of 50-caliber bullets in their six machine guns. Capable of speeds up to 450 mph, it could outrun anything in the sky. Cullerton named his plane, “Miss Steve,” and had her name painted across its nose.
Aerial combat
At the time, the Army Air Force was losing two thirds of its bombers to enemy planes and anti-aircraft shells. Bombing raids on Berlin had begun and the 355th was assigned to provide protective cover.
Cullerton engaged many German fighters in direct air-to-air combat, and on Aug. 16, over Hildesheim, Germany, scored his first aerial victory against an Me109, the most feared of Luftwaffe planes.
That was just one of five more to come, including the downing of a renowned German colonel, who had Cullerton lined up in his sights and was ready to pull the trigger.
However, Cullerton lowered the landing flaps on “Miss Steve,” slowing the plane to a virtual stop in mid-air. The colonel sped past him, and Cullerton instantly poured several rounds into the surprised Third Reich commander’s aircraft. Smoking, it broke apart and fell into the forest below.
Cullerton today doesn’t dwell on his achievements; instead he thinks about those he didn’t accomplish. He describes the pain of watching bombers go down after an enemy plane managed to slip through their defenses. It didn’t happen often with his unit, he said, but when it did, seeing the 10-man crew disappear in a ball of flame was a terrifying image. “It always broke my heart,” he said.
To boost his morale, he received almost every day a new letter in the mail from Elaine. Those were replied to each time with a short (“Too short,” she said) response from Cullerton who nonetheless felt those words of comfort were what got him through the war. While she wrote them, though apparently not hinted at in the letters, she was preparing for their marriage.
By then, the prospect of a happy reunion was increasing. So many German planes had been shot down, the bombers saw little fighter activity and Cullerton’s group was switched to strafing duties. It was their responsibility to dive down on airstrips and railroads or truck convoys and shred whatever they could with their machine guns.
Cullerton was particularly adept at this, having destroyed 21 aircraft on the ground and countless tanks and other vehicles along the way. He credits his record to especially good eyesight.
He could make out objects on the ground that none of his squadron mates could even identify as a shadow. “It was a God-given gift,” he claimed. “At 15,000 feet, I’d say, ‘You see that tank next to that barn?’ and no one else could see it.” It earned Cullerton the nickname “Eagle Eye.”
Down behind enemy lines
On his last mission, a strafing run on April 5, 1945 at an airfield in Anzbach, Germany, no eyes”no how sharp”could have spotted the rifles and anti-aircraft cannon that would bring an end to his military flying career.
He had made one pass and destroyed two planes on the runway (for which he never officially received credit). Seeing more, he lined up for a second time and felt a thump, “like hitting a curb with your car,” he recalled, and noticed fire blazing in streams behind his wing.
The orange licks of flame grew larger and smoke began to surround the cockpit. Taking one last look at his motor, he realized he would have to bail out. “I knew I had to go. She was going to blow.”
Cullerton jumped and glided to the ground after pulling the ripcord on his parachute. He described it as a surreal experience, watching his pack of cigarettes (he no longer smokes) fall with him. “I’ll never forget it,” he chuckled, “I was floating in space, trying to pull the ripcord, and I saw my Old Golds float by.”
The loss would soon be the least of his concerns. Downed over enemy territory, he knew it wouldn’t be long before German search parties came looking for him.
Within 20 minutes, sirens began wailing and German troops scoured the region. Cullerton cut the lines on his chute and hid under thorn bushes and anything else he could find. Not daring to move during daylight hours, he dug up raw potatoes at night for food and ran toward an unknown battlefield he could hear in the distance with hopes of finding friendly forces there.
Reaching the front lines, he felt the Allies to be close, and advanced only to be caught by S.S. officers.
They were fleeing the Allied movements and had little time to process a captured flier, so one of the soldiers grabbed Cullerton’s 45-caliber pistol and pointed it at him, then said, in English, “The war is over for you.”
A single bullet ripped into Cullerton’s stomach and he fell over in pain. The platoon then marched on, leaving him for dead. For three days, he lay in the same spot, feeling a large wet stain on his belly and back. When finally it dried, he figured the wound had closed sufficiently for him to move, and he started to stand.
A body robber found him and took what little possessions he had left, then brought Cullerton to a Nazi hospital to collect a bounty on American uniforms and hostages.
That turned out to be a blessing in disguise. There he met a doctor who was Jewish, and in gratitude to the Americans, protected Cullerton from his S.S. captors.
The wound, though, was deep and had become infected. The bullet left a gaping hole in his liver that should have, by all medical logic, killed him long before he arrived. “The doctor said there wasn’t anything he could do,” Cullerton recalled. “He told me I was going to die.”
When Cullerton showed signs of improvement, however, the physician continued to inform the Nazis that his patient was too weak to leave. Finally, unable to hold them off any longer, the doctor arranged for Cullerton to escape.
Late at night, a manure truck pulled up beside his second floor window and waited to hear a thump. When Cullerton landed, the driver was to pull away and head toward the Allied lines. At the appointed hour, he climbed onto the windowsill and the doctor pushed him off into the truck. “He shoved me into a big pile of you know what,” related Cullerton.
Regardless of his glamorousless exit, he remains grateful to that unknown angel who saved him from the firing squad. “He risked his life time and time again to save me,” he noted.
The adventure was harrowing”for Elaine as much as for himself. Cullerton was listed as “Missing in Action,” and his parents informed her of the situation as soon as they officially received notice of it. Even today, she looks back and shudders at the memory. Sixty-one years later, it still brings tears to her eyes. “It was a very nervous time,” she said, “but I never gave up.”
Know your baseball
Neither did Cullerton. When the manure truck had gone as far as it could, he jumped out, re-opening his old wound, but was close enough to the Allied lines to hear their artillery fire. Figuring the troops would have to follow a certain road to surround the Germans, he stuffed himself in a culvert pipe and waited for the American advance.
A couple of days later, Sherman tanks from the 12th Armored Division came rumbling overhead. Searching for booby traps beside the road, a private found Cullerton, and he thought he was saved. The tank’s platoon leader, however, thought he might be a spy or saboteur, and threatened to shoot Cullerton if he moved. Barely able to stand, he awaited his fate once again.
Judging by the look on the commander’s face, Cullerton feared becoming a prisoner of war of his own country, or worse, a victim of friendly fire. He stood there waiting what “seemed like forever” until the American leader stepped up to him and asked, “Who is Ted Williams?”
Cullerton said he was never so relieved by a question in his life. “I said, ‘He’s a hitter with the Boston Red Sox.” After that, his liberators broke into celebration. They fed him brandy and eggs and treated him like a hero. “They loved to free Americans,” he said. “It was their hobby.”
The 12th Armored Division had freed Cullerton to return home, and the first person to greet him as he stepped off the train was Elaine with her family and his together. That was June 15, 1945″the day Cullerton also discovered that all this time, Miss Steve had been making arrangements for a wedding. Once he was back, she wasted no time in seeing those plans to fruition.
Only allowing for enough time to bring in relatives for the ceremony and finding a weekend where they could all attend, Elaine’s dream came true when they were married June 30 at Ascension Church. Both remember it fondly. “Things didn’t look really good for me late in the war,” Bill said, “but Miss Steve never gave up on me. She planned the perfect wedding.”
Following that came the perfect honeymoon. Bill’s second passion”besides his wife and flying”was fishing, and they spent a month at a small rental cabin in Hayward, Wis. A week after returning to Oak Park, the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan and the war was over”this time for everybody.
Cullerton went on to found his own company manufacturing fishing lures and hunting equipment, then started his signature radio show, “The Great Outdoors” on WGN. He is quite possibly the only Oak Park-area native to have a state park and marina named in his honor and is surely the only one to have ever been attacked by a hippopotamus (that came on a safari in Africa).
Sixty years after what he would undoubtedly say is his favorite catch, Elaine and Bill renewed their vows at a special ceremony at Ascension Church.
For their 60th anniversary, he wanted to give her something special, something to remind them of the bond that kept them eternally optimistic during the war. Harkening back to the old P-51, commonly known as the Mustang, he had a new 2005 Ford Mustang painted according to the color scheme and markings of the lost plane with which he so bravely upheld the honor of her name.
“I think he bought it just as much for himself,” she said. “He drives it like it’s his plane.”
Cullerton recently suffered a mild stroke, however, and these days doesn’t have the opportunity to travel as much as he would like. He and Miss Steve reside in a private gated community in the far western suburbs, sharing memories and cherishing four generations of the family.
For Bill Cullerton, though, the shining light remains a romance that never dimmed over more than half a century. “Steve was and still is my whole life. She always will be.
“It’s all about Steve,” he said.
David Wendell, an amateur aviation historian and former Oak Park resident, now lives in the southwest suburbs.