Hero’s honor bittersweet and 58 years late

Friday, March 7, 2003 | 2:40 a.m.

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WEEKEND EDITION: March 8, 2003

A day after Memorial Day 2000,Betty Krause received a letter from one of her husband's World War II bomber crewmen. More than 50 years after the fact, he had written to thank former Lt. Wesley Krause for saving his life during combat.

A day earlier, 79-year-old Wesley H. Krause, a longtime Las Vegan and former prisoner of war who was beaten by the Gestapo but refused to divulge information, had died peacefully at the couple's San Bernardino, Calif., summer home.

"It was bittersweet, knowing that he was being thought about so many years later but that the letter arrived too late for him to see it," Betty Krause said.

What really caught her eye about the letter was that its writer, Jack M. Petersen, the radio operator on the doomed "Ohio Air Force" bomber, wrote that he had filled out the forms to recommend Krause for a medal in 1945.

Although her husband had received a Purple Heart and the POW Medal, Betty Krause knew he never received a medal denoting valor for the 1944 mission in which his plane was shot down in Europe. She had always wondered why her husband wasn't decorated.

A retired longtime Las Vegas paralegal and determined widow with plenty of time on her hands, Betty started writing letters to find out why her husband's courage in battle had gone unrecognized by his country for more than half a century.

In mid-January, after two frustrating years of encountering military red tape, she finally received the posthumous honor for her husband -- the Distinguished Flying Cross.

It arrived 58 years after the original paperwork was filed. The citation accompanying the medal reads in part that Krause exhibited "outstanding heroism and selfless devotion to duty" under enemy fire during the mission.

"Sen. Richard Bryan got the ball rolling after I didn't get answers," Betty said. "When he left office, Sen. John Ensign took over and got the job done.

"The process had been so frustrating. I wrote to a military records center in Missouri six times before they wrote back telling me I had to submit the paperwork to Randolph Field in Texas. When I got the medal, it came in a brown paper envelope with no explanation as to why it took so long."

Bryan said Krause's story is common for widows or veterans seeking forgotten medals, especially from World War II.

"I helped facilitate hundreds of these requests, and this was common from World War II because after the war everybody just wanted to get home," Bryan said. "A lot of paperwork got lost in the shuffle."

Bryan said not every request from a congressman results in someone getting a medal. Proper documentation must accompany the medal request, and the military must verify that the heroics indeed took place.

Bryan said there is nothing like the feeling of correcting a wrong and getting an aging warrior his just due. One veteran with tears streaming down his face once told Bryan after receiving his medal, "America never forgets."

Bryan said he hopes today's military, with its sophisticated computers that are far more efficient than the old typed, triplicate forms, will prevent incidents of lost medals for future generations of military personnel.

Among the paperwork that helped get Krause his honor were notarized letters from two surviving crewmen.

"I was surprised to learn that Lt. W. Krause had not received his medal for bravery," wrote Petersen in a July 25, 2000, affidavit, calling Krause a hero "in every sense of the word."

Attempts to reach Petersen at his last known address in Seal Beach, Calif., were not successful.

"He (Krause) put his own life at great risk ... to let those of us who were still alive bail out safely," Robert A. Dwyer, the plane's navigator, wrote in a July 17, 2000, notarized affidavit. "When I tried to express my gratitude (in 1995), he said, 'Anyone would have done the same.' "

Dwyer died in January 2002, Betty Krause said.

Krause's mission began March 16, 1944, when the nine-man crew took off from England in their B-17E for a bombing mission over Ausburg, Germany.

"We could see in the distance the contrails of German fighters coming up," Krause said in an unpublished and undated memoir. "The next thing I knew ... two planes (were) coming straight at us with their wing guns blinking.

"Then there was a loud explosion, and smoke filled the cockpit, temporarily knocking me out. When I came to seconds later, the plane was at a 45-degree angle and heading for another plane."

With his co-pilot dead and his own forehead peppered with shell fragments, Krause struggled to bring the plane under control. The plane dropped its bombs and turned around. Krause ordered the six other surviving crewmen to bail out. He followed them.

They were spread out over the French countryside. For two weeks farmers and members of the French Underground hid Krause before he was captured by the Germans and taken to a Gestapo-run prison, where he was tortured, interrogated and starved for four months.

In September 1944 Krause was transferred to a Luftwaffe -- German Air Force -- prisoner of war camp, where treatment was more humane.

"I had my first shower in four months, and it was quite a shock to see your body, which was literally skin and bones," Krause wrote in his memoir, indicating he was down to 80 pounds from his normal 145.

The Russians liberated Luft Stalag 1 in May 1945, and Krause caught a ship home a month later.

After the war he married Betty, whom he had known since they were children growing up in Las Vegas. He became a locomotive fireman, father of two, grandfather of four and great-grandfather of two.

For a long time he refused to talk about the war, but as his grandchildren grew older and more inquisitive, he loosened up and informed them of some of the horrors.

"It's not so much the medal that would have made Wesley happy," Betty Krause said. "What he would have enjoyed more was knowing that his crew had such respect and good feelings toward him.

"He would have loved to have known that. And I believe he does."