M. L. “Marty” Childress was born on May 26, 1922, in Vernon, Wilbarger County, Texas. He was the husband of June Marie Shearer Childress. He enlisted in the US Army on July 8, 1942, in Mineral Wells, Texas, completing 13 weeks of Basic Training at Camp Roberts, California. Following basic instruction, he was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, for paratrooper training, but in November 1942, he suffered a broken right leg during a training jump from the Free Towers. He was transferred to Fort Lawton General Hospital in Atlanta, Georgia, where, after two weeks without improvement, he underwent surgery. Two screws were placed in his leg during the operation, hardware that remained there for the rest of his life. After spending about a year on limited duty, Childress was reassigned to the Army Air Corps. He completed Gunnery School at Fort Myers, Florida, and continued training at MacDill Field in Tampa, Florida, eventually being placed on a B-17 Flying Fortress crew as a tail gunner. On June 23, 1944, he departed the United States for Italy aboard the aircraft he would later fly in combat missions, traveling overseas by way of the Azores and South Africa.

On August 29, 1944, the B-17G Flying Fortress serial 44-6369, flown by Lt. Duane Seaman’s crew of the 49th Bomb Squadron, 2nd Bomb Group, took part in a Fifteenth Air Force bombing raid against the Moravská Ostrava industrial complex in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The aircraft had only recently entered operational service—delivered in mid-July 1944 and deployed to Amendola Airfield in Italy by early August—before joining long-range attacks on German fuel, rail, and industrial targets. On this mission, later designated Mission 263, nine B-17s from the 2nd Bomb Group came under attack by 89 German fighters, and within twenty minutes, eight of them were shot down over present-day Slovakia and the Czech Republic, with one additional bomber crash-landing in Hungary. During the engagement, Seaman’s aircraft was forced down and crashed near the locality known as “Settini,” approximately one kilometer south of the present memorial marker. Unlike many of the other losses from that day, which resulted in 41 American fatalities, with 28 buried in a mass grave at Slavičín, all members of Seaman’s crew survived the crash but were subsequently taken prisoner and held in German POW camps.

SSgt Childress exited through the tail hatch under fire and landed near a forest, where local Czech civilians briefly hid him before a German patrol captured them. He endured imprisonment in multiple facilities, interrogations, mock executions, assault by hostile civilians, and witnessed severe mistreatment and starvation of fellow prisoners. Eventually sent to Stalag Luft IV, he endured the infamous 600-mile “death march” in freezing conditions with minimal food and shelter, during which hundreds died from exposure, wounds, and disease. He was finally liberated on April 25, 1945, by the 104th Infantry Division (“Timberwolves”) and soon returned to the United States. He died on December 4, 2009, and is now buried in the Gunnison Cemetery, Gunnison, Gunnison County, Colorado, USA.

Source of information: www.findagrave.com, www.leteckabitvakarpaty.cz