Frank Goplen, who turned 100 years old Saturday, has told the story of his World War II service many times.
Schoolchildren have always been his best audience. They ask the best questions. They will hug him as he leaves the classroom.
It wasn’t always that way. Growing up, Mary Goplen and her two siblings had only the sketchiest of details of their dad’s wartime service as an airman in the Army Air Corps or his time in a German prisoner of war camp after he and his crew parachuted over Europe from their crippled bomber.
All that they knew, indisputably, was that rutabaga was never permitted at the dinner table. Goplen ate a lot of rutabaga during his captivity in a POW camp in the last nine months of the war in the mid-1940s — that and bread made from sawdust.
“We always joked about that,” he said. “As part of our wedding contract, rutabaga would never appear in our house.”
Yet, as significant and defining as the war was in his life, it didn’t and shouldn’t, from Goplen’s point of view, overshadow things that happened subsequently — like his life spent with his wife to whom he was married for nearly 70 years until her death at 91 or raising a family or working at IBM where he was the chief designer on 30 patents or catching a near-world-record barracuda on a Florida fishing trip or so many other things
That was the stuff that gave life joy, that gave life meaning.
The war, on the other hand, was an evil necessity. Fewer than 120,000 — or less than 1% — of the 16.1 million Americans who served during World War II are alive as of 2023, according to The National WWII Museum.
Among a dwindling number of WWII POWs still alive in Minnesota, Goplen’s voice is among the last living links to a conflict fought to overthrow dictatorships and preserve fundamental freedoms. He tells his story to reinforce and preserve the memory. He’s still doing that.
“I was 18 years and I needed to go help our country,” he said.
Goplen was co-piloting his 39th bombing mission on July 1, 1944, when his B-24 bomber was damaged by three bursts of anti-aircraft fire over Munich.
With the gas systems shot out and two engines disabled, they made for Switzerland. But the plane was losing altitude and getting slower all the time.
So the 10-man crew bailed over Austria. Goplen parachuted into a small village, where a local militia member was waiting for him and said the war was over for him.
For a time, Goplen and others were held in a civilian jail by local police. It was a dangerous situation. Civilians there were angry and looking to exact revenge. Eventually, prisoners were taken by rail to Stalag Luft I near Barth, Germany. The guards along the route were “cruel.”
“Our arrival at the prison camp was a relief. Having the gates close behind you separated you from the civilian population. That was the scary part. There were cases where prisoners were lynched,” Goplen said.
There were 15,000 to 16,000 allied service members in the prison camp, and Goplen tried to use the time as best he could. He learned how to play bridge. The prisoners were often better informed than their captors about the state of the war. American prisoners huddled around a low-powered radio smuggled inside camp that broadcast BBC news. The Germans were losing.
The worst part, Goplen said, was the uncertainty, thinking of home and knowing his dad had received a telegraph that his son was missing in action. It was easy to assume the worst.
Yet, in Goplen’s case, in an almost freakish coincidence, home was never completely absent as he discovered two airmen prisoners from Zumbrota. He hadn’t known them before, because he had graduated from Wanamingo and they from Zumbrota.
The day they learned that President Franklin Roosevelt had died, Goplen and other prisoners broke out black armbands.
The prisoners knew that Germans were losing the war. The Russian army was advancing, the sound of their artillery explosions getting ever closer.
“When the Russians were getting close, the Germans were getting nervous,” Goplen said. “And when they got close enough, they left in the middle of the night.”
After nine months of captivity, Goplen’s first recollection of freedom was seeing a group of prisoners running at the barbed wire fence and tearing it down with their bare hands.
He also witnessed the dehumanization and death of the slave labor camps used by the Germans.
“You wouldn’t believe it. People laying in their bunks. They were a lot thinner than we were,” said Goplen, who weighed 127 pounds after returning home from the POW campus, down from 180 pounds when he joined the Army in 1942.
They were flown to an ex-POW-processing station in France. One day, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, showed up at the camp. Someone asked Eisenhower how long they were to stay at the camp. Eisenhower turned to his aide and said, “get them out of here.” The next day, they received shipping orders.
Goplen was preparing to be transported to the Pacific Theater where the battle with Japan still raged when the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan and ended the war.
Goplen didn’t talk about the war when he returned home. Not talking about it was the easiest way to forget. But memories had a way of burbling up. Goplen would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and have to be consoled by his wife, Mary.
“She was an expert at saying, ‘it’s OK, Frank,'” he said.
Goplen started to get involved with American ex-Prisoners of War when the organization started gaining traction. An ex-POW meeting was held in the Kasson VFW basement one day. It was the first time Goplen had participated in such an event.
A dozen ex-POWs were sitting in a circle, and they began talking to each other about their war experiences. Behind them was a circle of women, their wives listening to stories they had never heard before.
There was relief in sharing the stories, in telling people who endured similar trauma.
Goplen has spoken in numerous classrooms about his war experience since then. He has participated in local WWII roundtables. He does it for a simple reason.
“It’s important for kids to know that war is hell. That freedom isn’t free,” Goplen said.
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