George Stull

ASN:35293286

Newspaper Archives

“Much Can Happen in 20 Year Span”

COLUMBUS, O., Feb. 7, 1946– (INS) –  George W. Stull of Mt. Vernon, O., is only 20 years old—but into that time he has crammed marriage, the beginning of an education, war service, eight months as a Nazi prisoner, a narrow squeak with death and now the peaceful life of a student at Ohio State University. 

            Stull, enrolled in the College of Commerce and Administration as a freshman, was a member of the 82nd airborne outfit.  He was captured in September, 1944, after his group missed the designated target in Holland and landed inside the German lines.

            He recalls that he and his comrades were immediately surrounded by German troops, and several Americans—those who might have information which they would refuse—were shot immediately by the Nazis.

            Stull himself was shifted from prison to prison, until he lost his original outfit and landed in a camp near Munich.  There he was listed as a laborer and forced to help clear bomb damage and repair German railroads.

            It was while the young American airman was digging through the rubble of a bombed Munich home that he almost found himself among the number of nameless Americans who perished in individual acts of German brutality.

            Stull recounts he was whistling while at work in the bomb rubble one day when he and his comrades unearthed the bodies of German air raid victims.

            A Nazi officer nearby took offense at the continued whistling and beat Stull with a rifle butt, threating to shoot him the next time. 

            Except for the whistling “incident,” the prisoner-of-war days passed all too slowly in a dreary procession until the “really wonderful” day in April when units of the American Fourteenth Army liberated Stull.  

            The young paratrooper had married a Utica, O., girl before he went overseas. 

STL Archive Records

George Stull, 56, died January 14, 1981. God bless this hero.