Wonder Lake, IL.
Date of Birth: 9 May, 1913
Date of Death: 29 May, 1943
Branch of Service: USAAF (United States Army Air Forces)
Rank: Sergeant
Unit: 379th Bomb Squadron, 526th Bomb Group, Heavy, 8th Air Force
Aircraft Type and Position: B-17 Flying Fortress- Ball Turret Gunner
Place of Death: Commune of Crac’h, Morbihan Department of Brittany, North-Western France
Sergeant Robert M. Vanderstraeten
Robert Morse Vanderstraeten was born in Ghent, Belgium in 1913. When he was just six months old, his parents brought him to the United States, settling in the Chicago area to build a new life away from the destruction Belgium had endured during the First World War. The family made their way to Harvard, Illinois, where his younger brother Gustave arrived not long after, and brother Elmer followed in 1918. By the time the United States entered the Second World War, Robert was twenty-nine years old, married, and commuting from McHenry to work as a concierge in Chicago. He was inducted into the Army Air Forces on July 9, 1942, completed basic and air operations training, and departed for England.
As a ball turret gunner on the B-17 Flying Fortress “Up And At Them,” Robert and his crew of ten departed from Cambridgeshire, England on their first combat mission together, flying with the 526th Bombardment Squadron, 379th Bombardment Group. Their target was the submarine pens and support facilities at Saint-Nazaire, on the southern coast of Brittany—a critical German naval base that supplied and repaired U-boats prosecuting the Battle of the Atlantic, and one that posed a direct threat to any future Allied landing on the European mainland. The 379th’s motto was “Power and Accuracy.” That day, they would need both. The mission was among the most dangerous the group would fly, with heavy anti-aircraft defenses on the ground and an estimated forty enemy fighter planes in the air.
At 1712 on May 29th, 1943, five minutes after the crew hit their target, German Lieutenant Hans Zanjolz, flying a Focke-Wulf Fw 190, attacked the bomber and shot through the fuselage, disabling the aircraft. “Up And At Them” went down in a wooded area between Crac’h and Guidel, France. The plane burned for twenty-four hours. When the wreckage was finally reached, Vanderstraeten and five other crew members were recovered and buried nearby in Guidel. The squadron’s commander, Captain John O. Hall, the co-pilot, and the navigator survived the crash and were taken prisoner, eventually sent to Bavaria, where they remained until the war’s end.
That was not the end of “Up And At Them.” The village of Crac’h, in grateful memory of the crew’s sacrifice, erected a stone obelisk in a small park on May 3rd, 1997. Co-pilot 2nd Lieutenant Willard S. Thomas was there for its dedication. The monument stands to this day in quiet tribute to Robert, his crew, and all those who fought for the liberation of Morbihan, of France, of the world. Robert Morse Vanderstraeten, brought to America as an infant so his family could escape one world war, was killed fighting in a second. He rests today at Normandy American Cemetery in France, not far from the Belgian border and the country his parents had fled.
By Austin May
526th Bomb Squadron
379th Bomb Group
Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial
Colleville-sur-Mer
Department du Calvados, Basse Normandy
To visit the cemetery, click on his Headstone
