He quickly thought to wrap himself in the parachute before losing consciousness, but not before he remembered his dog tags. Once on the ground, Cole remembered bleeding profusely. “And I was being hit coming down, I could see the bullet holes going through the parachute,” he said.
I landed on the enemy side.”Īs Cole parachuted behind enemy lines he was wounded, hit in the arm and leg by gunfire. “By the three or four minutes that happened between by the time he got out and by the time I bailed out, he landed on the American side. His prior experience as a glider pilot helped him stabilize the plane until he and his co-pilot could exit the aircraft.Ĭole recalls his co-pilot struggling after getting stuck in radio wires. On January 2, 1945, his plane was shot down by anti-aircraft fire over Belgium. And I was in it, right in the middle of it,” Cole recounted during an August 1989 interview with the Holocaust Resource Center of Buffalo. Army.Ĭole flew an artillery observation plane for the 776 th Field Artillery Battalion and was involved in the Battle of the Rhineland and the Ardennes Campaign, known as the Battle of the Bulge, Hitler’s last major offensive against the western front. Later, he sought and received a discharge from service in Canada and signed up for the U.S. Instead, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force prior to the United States entering the war. When World War II broke out in Europe, Cole sought to join the Allied Forces, but his application was initially declined. His father’s work restoring older homes eventually brought the family to Western New York, where Cole attended Buffalo Public School #32 and high school at Fosdick-Masten Park, today known as City Honors.Ĭole served as Captain of the swim team and led the team to become champions from 1932 to 1933. Cole, whose wartime actions read like a “Hollywood script,” died Friday at the age of 107.Ĭole, a former prisoner of war and Purple Heart recipient, was born in New York City on September 1, 1914.
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