Memorial

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Wallace Bengson graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1938 as a mining engineer. Immediately upon his graduation, he was commissioned in the US Army Reserve, but was not called to active duty until January 1942. He worked as a mining engineer in Idaho and Utah and married Katherine Nagel of Grand Forks in 1940.

He took special officers training at Fort Benning, Georgia, and won both the wings of a pilot and a glider pilot. Prior to going into aviation as a bomber navigator in the spring of 1944, he was doing research work of a metallurgical nature in connection with aviation with headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. His work took him to practically every state.

On the return flight, the airplanes 43-38396 and 43-38445 collided in midair. Airplane 396 was seen to go down out of control with a hole in the right wing. It is believed it exploded after falling below the cloud cover. Airplane 445 went down, out of control, with the tail section sheared off.

Both planes crashed in Wieseck near Giessen.

Of the crew of nine men from airplane 396, seven were killed. Two men survived and were taken prisoner.

Wallace Bengson wasn't killed in the crash but was murdered, together with two crew members of the other crashed plane, Franklin Adams and Edmund Dornburgh. After they landed with their parachute, they were taken prisoner and handed over to the local police. At a certain moment, a police director, the Kreisleiter of the Nazi Party, a Hitler Jugend leader, an officer of the Sicherheitspolizei, and a civilian, called Ludwig Schardt, arrived at the police station and demanded that the prisoners be handed over to them. After the local police chief was ordered away, they showed up and used some force against the police agent who was guarding the airmen and took them with them. They marched them to the New Cemetery of Giessen. Before arriving there, they shot the three prisoners under an apple tree in the Marburgerstrasse. In November 1945, Ludwig Schardt was accused and found guilty of participating in the wrongful killing of these three men. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.