U.S. ARMY AIR CORPS George H. Bragdon   George Bragdon was 20 years old when he and his nine crewmates bailed out of their bullet-perforated B-17 and landed on a frozen German countryside. They had nearly completed their 25-mission assignment when everything went bad.  They were over Germany on their 21st raid when a huge swarm of enemy fighters riddled their plane and sent a farm boy from Eastbrook on a punishing odyssey that included 15 weary months in Stalag 17. Born in Fayette, Maine, 82 years ago, Bragdon was a small child when his family moved to Franklin. After three years, they resettled in neighboring Eastbrook.  Bragdon worked in the woods as a young man before pursuing opportunities in the Portland shipyards in 1938.  In 1942, at the age of 19, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. He was trained to be a waist gunner on a B-17, manning a machine gun poked through the fuselage halfway between the cockpit and the tail.  His training began in Fort Myers, Fla., which is considered a vacation paradise these days but was, in 1942, “a hell hole,” Bragdon recalled.  Training continued in Casper, Wyo., and Boise, Idaho. Then back to Maine to be flown from Bangor to England by way of Iceland and Scotland. From July 1943 until January 1944, from their English airfield, the crew of the B-17 flew into France and Germany making bombing runs. On Jan. 11, 1944, standing in his socks, he swept the night sky with his 50-caliber machine gun. Suddenly, racing shapes blazed at Bragdon’s plane. They were under attack by some 50 German fighters.  “I shot some down, but they hit us between the second, third and fourth engines. We had to bail out.”  The freezing night air was “so damn quiet,” Bragdon recalled. “You didn’t feel like falling.” The landing felt real enough, however. He hadn’t been wearing his boots when the plane was attacked, so Bragdon had only socks on his feet when he hit the ground at Bachausen.  Two hours later, feet freezing, Bragdon was marched to a German unit by a farmer armed with a pitchfork. He was herded along with seven other members of the crew — “two didn’t make it … they died on the ground.” The American prisoners were held for two days before being offered something to eat: potato soup. Then they were loaded on a train and taken to the Stalag 17-B prisoner of war camp.  The days were long and dreary.  “How was I? Skinny,” he said.  Bragdon recalls playing cards a lot, mostly bridge. He once scrounged ingredients from his K-rations to make a birthday muffin for a fellow prisoner.  After 15 months, the word started to spread among the barracks behind barbwire: the Russians were coming. “The Germans marched us north,” he said, leaving the sick prisoners behind.  But the Germans themselves were losing heart. One morning, Bragdon recalled, “they disappeared. We woke up and the Germans were gone. It was two days before the end of the war in Europe.  An American unit picked up the prisoners and soon Bragdon was aboard a Liberty Ship heading back to the States. He married Norma in 1947. They had two daughters and a son. Now they have six grandchildren and four greats.  In the course of recollecting his experience, Bragdon made two intriguing statements — equally definite — that would seem to cancel one another out. But they don’t. “I wouldn’t do that again for a million dollars,” he said at one point.  And near the end of the interview, recalling lost crewmates, remembering a couple of Mainers he met in Europe, describing a bombing run that brought him to North Africa, and the taste of blueberry pie and eggnog shortly after his liberation, he said, wistfully, “I wouldn’t have missed it for a million dollars.” — Stephen Fay