Marcia Plothow was young then, when her father first told the story. So young that she can’t remember the first time, exactly, because she can’t remember a time before she’d heard it; a time before her father would visit her and her brother at bedtime, especially with Christmas approaching, and they’d beg him and beg him to tell it again. It didn’t matter where they were — Florida, Nebraska, maybe Indiana; as a military family, no place was ever home for long. Yet, when her father’s bright eyes met theirs and he began to paint the scenes and people, home was never too far away.
Dad rarely started the story in the same place. He jumped around, depending on what themes he wanted to emphasize. How he wanted to shape the family lore. Sometimes he might include certain supporting details from early on, like the fact that he grew up poor in rural Idaho, where fudge and other sweets treats were a luxury. Or maybe, on a night when he was especially tired, he’d start near the end, with Christmas 1944 — 80 years ago this month. But often he’d start at the beginning, when a letter arrived at his family’s home in Salt Lake City.
It was the summer of 1942. Talk of invasions and troop movements filled the barbershops and Latter-day Saint meetinghouses in the wake of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II. Wendell B. “Mike” Terry, as Dad was then known, talked about rumors of war plenty himself, but more than war, he talked about Beverly “Bev” Dodge. They’d been together since 1941, when they met at a skating rink. She’d ignored him until she couldn’t anymore. “Do I know you?” she finally asked. “No,” he said with a smirk, “but you’d sure like to.” By Thanksgiving they were a couple. After Pearl Harbor came the letter. In January 1943, it read, he was to report for basic training at an Army base in New Jersey. Mike Terry was going to war.
The next six months on the East Coast taught him a lot about what he didn’t want. He didn’t want to be an infantryman. And he didn’t want to be a low-ranking grunt. He decided to pursue the Army Air Force, as an officer and a pilot. The pay and benefits were much better that way. He knew he wanted to marry Bev, and his chosen track would allow her to live with him until he was sent overseas. Pilot training was notoriously challenging, and many flunked out, but Terry steeled himself against failure with a lesson he traced to a Sunday School teacher, Sister Duckworth. “When it’s too hard for everyone else,” he liked to repeat, “it’s just right for me.” He graduated from flight school on January 7, 1944, almost exactly a year after his military service began, as a second lieutenant. Given about a week of leave, he needed to be on a train for Florida by January 16, which gave him just enough time to stop in Utah, marry Bev and bring her with him.
The wedding had been planned in his absence, but some missing paperwork made him late, arriving in Salt Lake City just seven hours before the couple was scheduled to be married in the Salt Lake Temple of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was about to be sent into a war where 40 Allied planes were getting shot down every day, so getting sealed to Bev for eternity, he felt, was essential. The next afternoon, they left for Florida.
Once they arrived, Terry trained on the coveted B-17 “flying fortress” — a four-engine heavy bomber that required a crew of 10, mostly to man the machine guns designed to protect it from fighter attacks. As pilot and leader of the crew, which stayed together and trained on the exact same plane it would use in combat, Terry was supposed to be the last man out if the B-17 ever went down. Many crews decorated their planes with colorful nicknames and graphics, but not Terry. His plane had no pictures and just three letters beneath the cockpit: BEV.
Terry banked right, but it was too late. The plane entered a downward, leftward spiral, what remained of the wing consumed by flames.
In July of 1944, Terry’s crew finished training and received its assignment: 8th Army Air Force, 1st Division, 305th Bombardment Group, with a home base in the British Isles. He said goodbye to Bev, who they were pretty sure was pregnant. She took a train back to Salt Lake City, while he flew his B-17 some 4,000 miles to a base north of London. His first assignment was quick — a 200-mile run into occupied Germany, near the Netherlands. He was told, however, that he needed to be tight and precise; the Germans could recognize which pilots were new, and that would make him and his crew targets. The crew dodged enemy fire, dropped its bombs and returned to base safely.
His next mission began on the morning of August 13. It had been about two months since D-Day, and the Allied troops were making progress in France. The Germans were trying to retreat and regroup. Terry’s task was getting behind enemy lines to bomb roads and bridges and limit the Nazi escape. This was a complex operation, with about 1,300 bombers and 131 fighters involved. The weather was lousy, so the planes had to climb to about 23,000 feet and rendezvous above the clouds before beginning their assault. As the first planes arrived high in the sky, they circled and circled in formation, waiting for the others, the whole sky alive with deadly weapons.
Their approach revealed the green French coastline — and something else. Puffs of black smoke. The hallmark of anti-aircraft fire. These munitions would explode at varying, preset altitudes, sending shrapnel spraying in every direction. From Terry’s spot behind the lead planes, he could only see the puffs as he cruised through the sunshine; in the relative calm of his cockpit, he couldn’t yet hear or feel their explosive energy. But as he drifted in the direction of the artillery, he knew that peaceful feeling wouldn’t last.
Soon BEV bumped and rattled and creaked as the munitions boomed all around. Terry managed to reach his target and drop his bombs, but right as he did, he heard the voice of his tail gunner. “Sir!” he said. “They’re tracking us!” Terry looked back and saw a trail of black puffs moving in their direction. Terry banked right, but it was too late. A shell detonated near the top of the left wing, tearing off a large piece that included an engine. The plane entered a downward, leftward spiral, what remained of the wing consumed by flames.
Terry ordered the crew of nine others to bail and did what he could to slow the death spiral. He managed to get everyone out, by parachute, until he was the only one who remained. What happened next, he wasn’t sure. He remembered the door was jammed, and the fuel tank was about to blow. He remembered thinking about Sister Duckworth, and her insistence that he embrace hard things. He remembered saying a prayer. And he remembered the stunning force of, somehow, getting sucked into the open sky, whizzing past a pair of machine gun barrels on his plane, and plummeting toward the French countryside below.
He opened his parachute a mile up in the sky, Germans shooting at him from down below. Their bullets missed, but he hit the ground hard, smacking his head and getting knocked near unconscious. When he managed to stand, he found himself a few feet away from German SS troops, with the signature skull and crossbones on their military caps.
They’d also captured his bombardier and took both Americans to a French chateau-turned-command-center, where they interrogated them and then, rather than offering a spot in the chateau, sent them to sleep in a car along with armed guards. Squeezing each other’s arms with Morse code, the Americans hatched an escape plan. The Germans planned to sleep in shifts, so Terry and his fellow airman would pretend to fall asleep. Knowing their German guard would be exhausted, they figured pretending to sleep would bait him into falling asleep, too. Then, they’d run. The bombardier escaped first, and Terry joined him after waiting five minutes, but he was too noisy. The car’s shifting springs woke the guards, and they pursued and recaptured Terry.
As punishment, his German captors beat him until his eyes were so bloody and swollen that when he woke, his wrists tied to a sturdy tree branch, he feared he’d gone blind. He eventually managed to wipe away enough blood to see, but he was in such bad shape that the Germans decided they needed to find a Red Cross medic.
Terry was eventually taken to Stalag Luft I, a Nazi POW camp in north-central Germany near the Baltic Sea that was predictably frigid in winter. He was assigned to a wood-plank barrack and an 18-by-24-foot room with 23 other men. They slept on straw mattresses, without insulation, and had a small fireplace for heat. Guards rationed them one lump of coal per day. Food was rationed even more closely. Prisoners got 4.5 ounces of meat — less than half of a typical ribeye steak — per week, with similarly miniscule amounts of dried vegetables, cheese and bread. The only exception was potatoes; each prisoner got 16 tuberous ounces per day. They showered once a month. And some unlucky souls got to experience all that misery while also getting letters from home calling them cowards for getting captured. “Dear son,” read one letter recorded in Terry’s journal, though thankfully not addressed to him. “I’m sorry you got the sweater I knitted. I made it for a fighting man.”
Back home, Bev learned her husband was alive via a flurry of postcards from ham radio operators across the country. They’d picked up a POW message for her from the Berlin short-wave station. “My darling wife,” her husband had said, “just a word to let you know I am well and all right.”
Terry and his fellow prisoners had to burn twigs and other debris to keep warm. Sometimes they sang carols, or told stories about their families.
As Christmas approached, Terry had spent close to four months at Stalag Luft I. The days got shorter and colder. Coal rations had run out, so Terry and his fellow prisoners had to burn twigs and other debris to keep warm. Sometimes they sang carols, or told stories about their families. Sometimes they huddled together for warmth.
On Christmas morning, the camp’s commander ordered everyone outside for a surprise. They’d received a shipment, he told the prisoners, of Red Cross care packages. The men cheered. Briefly. There weren’t enough packages for everyone, the commander continued, so he planned to raffle them off to two men per barrack — meaning the odds of any one man winning were about 125-to-1. Terry was that one.
The package contained some basic toiletries — tooth powder and pencils and gloves. It also contained a journal, which Terry would use to document his memories and musings. But most importantly, it contained a can of powdered milk, a packet of sugar and two squares of chocolate — all potential ingredients, Terry discerned in the moment, to make something like chocolate fudge. He hadn’t tasted anything sweet in half a year. He figured this small gift to himself would be the closest he’d get to experiencing the Christmas he pined for. At least until another idea occurred to him.
He poured the powdered milk into a saucepan and mixed it with water. Then he flattened the can, folded up the edges and crimped them shut as best he could — a makeshift baking dish. He added the chocolate and the sugar to the saucepan, stirred, and watched it bubble atop a fire built into the dirt floor. When it was mixed and melted, he transferred it to the baking dish to cool. Silent, intense stares from his cellblock mates pierced the chilly air. So did a joyful melancholy, as the smell of chocolate interrupted all the other unspeakable smells. When the fudge cooled, Terry carefully sliced it into 24 individual pieces. He later told his family that he was inspired by Jesus Christ’s example; that if Jesus were there instead of him, that’s what he would do. He’d share. The baking dish was palm-sized, and each piece was no bigger than a fingernail. A sudden anticipation swept through the 18-by-24-foot cell nonetheless.
“Merry Christmas,” Terry told his fellow prisoners, and handed out the pieces.
The other inmates savored the moment in different ways. Some of them ate the whole little square in one bite. Others licked it, savoring every granule of sugar. Terry, meanwhile, made his own piece last as long as he could, taking one little birdie nibble once a day for three days, until it was all gone.
The Red Cross care package contained powdered milk, a packet of sugar and two squares of chocolate — all potential ingredients to make something like chocolate fudge.
Stalag Luft I wouldn’t be liberated until May. Germany was on the verge of losing the war by then, and the prisoners knew it. It was just a matter of whether the Russians or the Americans would reach them first. The American POWs wanted the Americans to arrive first for obvious reasons, but they’d also heard vicious rumors about the Soviet troops and the Eastern Front, where fighting was so bitter and brutal that it accounted for more casualties than all the other theaters of World War II combined. With the tide having turned against the Germans, the Russians, rumor had it, were feeling vengeful. And they were getting so close that, on May 1, the German guards fled and the prisoners were left to wait for the Russians to arrive.
Terry spent the in-between visiting the Baltic Sea. He had seen it from camp; it was just a few miles away but always felt so far. Now, with Russian machine gun fire roaring in the distance and getting ever closer, he figured this would be his only chance. On the way, German civilians begged him to take their daughters so that the Russians wouldn’t assault them, or worse. On the shores, he found an entire family — a mother, grandmother and three children — shot dead. There were no signs of a struggle. As if they’d come to look at the water one last time, then died willingly.
He finally arrived home in the summer of 1945, almost four years since he and Bev began their courtship. For the first time, he met Marcia, his 4-month-old daughter. And for the rest of his life, right up until he died at the age of 63 in 1987, he told her about the war. Most of all about the fudge, and how the act of eating it — and sharing it — brought him that much closer to her. To home.
Marcia is 79 now, having spent decades with Utah’s Alpine School District and retired in Pleasant Grove. Throughout those decades, she kept the flame of her dad’s story alive by telling it to her students, and to former Latter-day Saint general authority and author Gerald N. Lund, who published a book about it in 2017. Most of all, though, she continues to share the story with her dad’s descendants, of which there are nowadays too many for her to count. Just as she had begged and begged him, these days, they beg her. Especially when her telling comes with props: her dad’s journal and the original baking tray. When the story is finished, she tucks both into a box in her closet, where they can rest out of sight until next Christmas.
This story appears in the December 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.