Cokeburg native last surviving member of his WWII crew
Peter Ladisic during World War II
Peter Ladisic, center, dancies with a nurse as part of his rehabilitation to get used to his wooden leg during World War II.
The telegram Peter Ladisic’s family received to inform them of his injuries during World War II
Peter Ladisic, 92, a World War II veteran, reflects on his time in the service at his home in Cokeburg.
Peter Ladisic of Cokeburg holds the Purple Heart he received in World War II.
COKEBURG – Peter Ladisic can still describe the air battle that ended his stint as the tailgunner of an Allied bomber in vivid detail.
Looking from his turret at enemy fighters, the lessons he’d learned in training kicked in.
“I was firing this way – straight ahead,” Ladisic, 92, recalled during an interview last week at his home in Cokeburg. He next trained his machine guns on a fighter to his left. “I knew I got that guy, the lead guy,” he said “And then he lobbed a 20-mm (cannon shell) at my turret.”
Seventy-two years later, Ladisic is the last living member of the World War II crew that managed to fly the shot-up B-24 Liberator back over the Adriatic Sea, performing first aid on each other along the way, and land in a field near the Italian coast. He recalled his service as the nation celebrates Veterans Day today.
“I’m the last one of 10 of us,” he said. “My pilot died last year.”
His wife, Frances Teresa Miller Ladisic, died in 1989. He now lives alone in a small, well-kept log cabin near a “patch” of miners’ homes. He moved there after retiring from the locksmith shop he owned in Queens, N.Y., for 28 years.
One of nine children, Ladisic had to start working to support his family at 15 because his father had broken both legs in a coal mine.
He initially wasn’t allowed to drop out of Ellsworth High School.
“I told them, ‘I’m not gonna do no (school) work,'” Ladisic said. “They threw me out.”
That straightforward manner has never left him in the decades since, through the deaths of his three sons and his wife.
“He’ll tell me how it is,” said his daughter, Kim Thompson, 52, of Bentleyville. “He doesn’t beat around the bush.”
The willpower that got him kicked out of high school also stuck with him.
From the mine, he was drafted in 1943 and joined the Army Air Forces. In June 1944, he was shipped to the Mediterranean theater. He managed to notch 18 missions – some of which were multiple missions during the same sortie, he explained – in less than a month.
His plane wasn’t supposed to be on that last mission, a 1,500-bomber assault on Budapest, the Hungarian capital, targeting an oil refinery, but it was thrown in at the last minute.
Though a cannon shell blew him into the body of the plane during the chaos of the air battle, Ladisic managed to crawl back to his guns to keep shooting at the German planes. He needed a tourniquet for his right leg, which he lost, and broke the tibia and fibia of his left.
“I think the safest place after that was back in the turret,” he said.
Ladisic’s actions that day earned him a Distinguished Service Cross, the second-highest award given to members of the Army, and a Purple Heart.
The mission also changed the trajectory of his life.
He wound up in a full-body cast in a hospital in New York City.
While he was there, he sent a telegram to the widow of his plane’s ball gunner, who was killed during the Budapest run, and she came in to meet him.
“She walked in and, naturally, she cried,” Ladisic said. “I cried. Then she started visiting me every week. And I fell in love with her.”
He married Frances Teresa and adopted her son, Bruce, before they had two more sons and a daughter.
The bond he forged with crewmates from the “Rackenjammer” has persisted.
“Families still keep in touch with him, even after their soldiers have passed,” Thompson said.