Ferndale WWII hero Joe Moser dies at 94

Joe Moser, a World War II fighter pilot who was captured and narrowly avoided death in a German concentration camp, died Wednesday, Dec. 2, at his Ferndale home. He was 94 and had been battling cancer.

Service arrangements are pending.

In August 1944, Moser was shot down during his 44th mission over France. After German guns positioned near decoy trucks downed his plane, one of his boots snagged when he tried to bail out. He barely escaped before the plane crashed near a farmhouse.

Moser was sent to a prison near Paris, where he joined other Allied airmen. The Germans called them “terror fliers” and shipped them in cattle cars to Buchenwald. Altogether, he and 167 other Allied airmen, including 82 Americans, spent two months in Buchenwald rather than in a humane POW camp, as called for by the rules of war.

Buchenwald was a brutal place. The airmen slept outdoors on rocky ground. Prisoners shriveled on a meager diet of foul food. Those too weak to work were killed and burned. More than 50,000 people died there.

Moser and the other airmen survived, in part, because they were soldiers under the command of their ranking officer, a flier from New Zealand. They marched and exercised together, and watched each other’s backs.

Surprisingly, German air force officers — perhaps from mutual respect for airmen, perhaps because of their disdain for the Gestapo and SS members who ran Buchenwald — moved the airmen to another POW camp just four days before they were scheduled to be executed at Buchenwald.

Then, in early 1945, the airmen were marched west through frigid winter weather because Russian troops were advancing from the east. Moser collapsed and nearly died, but two other prisoners carried him to the next village and he revived. Three months later, U.S. troops liberated Moser and other prisoners at a camp.

Perhaps a dozen of the 168 aviators held at Buchenwald are still alive, said Mike Dorsey of Los Angeles, who directed the documentary “Lost Airmen of Buchenwald,” which includes Moser’s story.

Moser is also the subject of a gripping memoir “A Fighter Pilot in Buchenwald,” written with the help of Bellingham author and businessman Gerald Baron.

“Joe was the most humble, unassuming, quiet man I ever met,” Baron said Thursday.

A Ferndale farm boy, Moser knew in high school that he wanted to be a pilot. Living on a farm, Moser would do chores in the morning, rush to school, attend football practice, then rush home for more chores and homework, Dorsey said Thursday.

“I think that kept him a grounded, humble person,” he said.

After the war, people discounted or refused to believe the idea that Allied airmen had been held at Buchenwald, so Moser didn’t share the details of his experience for nearly four decades.

“He was just known around town as the furnace repair guy,” Dorsey said. “No one knew he had this incredible story behind him.”

That changed after a newspaper account of his experience, and the follow-up publication of “A Fighter Pilot in Buchenwald.”

Moser was uncomfortable with the honors and attention he received, but he understood the importance of telling people what really happened and of remembering those who died in WWII and since, Baron said.

Earlier this year Moser received the French Legion of Honor award at a ceremony in Seattle. Moser also was the first person profiled for “Washington Remember: Their Sacrifice, Our Freedom,” an exhibit of WWII veterans put together by the Office of the Secretary of State.

In 2012, for a Veterans Day event, Moser raised the 12th Man flag at a Seahawks football game in Seattle.

Last May, he served as grand marshal of the Blossomtime Parade for Ski to Sea in Bellingham. The parade’s theme was “Honoring our Heroes,” but Moser didn’t put himself in that category.

“I went through an awful lot, but I don’t feel I’m a hero,” he told a Herald reporter then. “I thought they could find somebody better.”

After the 2011 premier showing of “Lost Airmen of Buchenwald” that filled Mount Baker Theatre, Moser, Baron and Dorsey went on stage to talk to the audience. Dorsey recalled someone in the crowd telling Moser, “We believe you now.”

“It was good to see the public embrace him like that,” Dorsey said. “His story came full circle.”

Baron said he visited Moser a few weeks before he died and asked him if he was glad that Baron had helped to make Moser’s story well-known. Baron said Moser replied, “I am now.”

“At the end, I know that he was so grateful that people had learned what he and others had truly done,” Baron said.

This story was originally published December 3, 2015 at 11:00 AM with the headline "Ferndale WWII hero Joe Moser dies at 94."