Seconds earlier, while preparing for a bombing run nearly 25,000 feet over Steyr, Austria, the “Flying Fortress” sustained heavy damage from a lone German fighter plane — instantly killing the pilot, co-pilot, navigator and bombardier.

“That’s when all hell broke loose. I looked out the window and saw the No. 3 engine on fire, and I knew we were knee-deep in trouble. It wasn’t going to be a good day,” said Blitz, 86, of Manitowoc, recalling the afternoon events of April 2, 1944, that triggered 12 months in a prisoner of war camp and another three weeks marching 185 miles across Austria during World War II.

“The whole thing started as a bad dream and turned into a nightmare.”

The B-17, packed with bombs and rapidly losing altitude, veered right, then left, before dipping into a nosedive. Blitz, a radio operator, regained his balance and unloaded the payload of bombs — “which made me feel a little better at the time, because crashing in a plane full of bombs isn’t good.”

The situation quickly deteriorated as the plane’s wings snapped off and its fuselage split in half. The pieces — with Blitz in the back half of the fuselage — screamed toward a mountainside in the Alps.

“The gunners kept hollering, ‘We’re too low! We’re too low!’ so they covered up and braced for impact,” Blitz said. “I jumped out at the last second. These big pine trees were right by me, that’s how low I was, and my parachute opened up right away.

“Next thing I remember — I was knocked for 30 minutes — I’m in about 5 feet of snow — and this white snow is bright red with blood. I broke some ribs. My back was hurting. The snow, that’s what helped save me. If it had been the ground I hit, it would’ve been a different story.”

Thankfully for Blitz and his family, he’s alive to tell his story 65 years later — this Veterans Day.

For decades, Blitz tried to suppress the once-bitter memories of those brutal 13 months. He opened up about 15 years and, as daughter Betsy said: “Then it was a dire need for us to get it out of him. It was so important. We can’t possibly understand what it was like to go through that, but we wanted to try to understand. We’re very proud of Dad.”

‘Like Siamese twins’

Of the 10 crewmembers aboard “Little Joe,” Blitz, who was on his ninth mission, and fellow Staff Sgt. Charles “Eddie” Rosenauer, the top turret gunner, were the only ones who survived.

“For a while, Dan thought he was the only one who made it, and I thought I was the only one alive because I landed two miles away,” Rosenauer, 88, said during a telephone interview from his home in Pearsall, Texas.

“I got out of my part of the plane when I was about 500 feet off the ground. It was a real hard landing; damaged some vertebrae in my back. The only good thing — a little bit of the pain went away when I heard Dan made it.”

Blitz and Rosenauer reunited after being rounded up by local authorities. For the next 13 months, they were “like Siamese twins,” Rosenauer said. “We stayed together after that — in the camp barracks, the march, everywhere we went.”

Their first stop: Frankfurt, Germany, via boxcar, for seemingly never-ending interrogations.

“This guy (a German major) was from a university in New York,” Blitz said. “He was in the German army, but he studied in the States and spoke perfect English. He had a pack of Camels on the desk and pushed one over to me. He said, ‘Here, I know you smoke Camels.’ He told me where I was born. He told me where I had been stationed, where I trained in the United States. I didn’t tell him any of that. Those guys weren’t fools.

“And then they tried the old trick, saying the other guy spilled the beans about secrets, and so should I. I knew (Rosenauer) wouldn’t do that. I never bit on it. I saw too many movies to fall for that.”

Then, they boarded another boxcar for a seven-day trip back to Austria, where they wound up in Krems at Stalag 17B. The 250-acre prisoner of war camp housed thousands of military personnel, separated by nationalities. There were reportedly about 4,000 American prisoners at the camp.

Surrounding all of them: Searchlights, machine gun-wielding guards and a pair of barbed wire fences more than 12 feet high. A few feet inside the inner fence was the misnamed “warning wire” — cross it, and you were shot without warning.

“It was a miserable place to be,” said Blitz, referred to by the Germans as POW No. 106269.

‘We were starving’

Countless prisoners were shot and killed at Stalag 17B. Blitz witnessed one such incident involving an American.

“It was a winter night, and the guys trying to escape were dressed in white sheets,” Blitz said. “Right when these guys got over (the “warning wire”) all the lights turned on. These two guys got up and put their hands up and a guard shot one of them and let him die right there. We didn’t think that was very nice, after they surrendered.”

Added Rosenauer: “Seeing people shot and left to die on the ground was the worst thing. You can’t forget things like that.”

Others prisoners died a slower death due to starvation.

Blitz entered the camp weighing 130 pounds, and left weighing 89 pounds. Rosenauer went from 184 pounds to 127 pounds. Some men could best be described as walking skeletons.

“That was the big thing, we were so hungry. We were starving,” Blitz said. “The Red Cross parcels were scarce. I’m pretty sure that when they came in, the Germans stole a lot of them because they were hungry, too.

“Our typical meal was a loaf of bread, which was half sawdust. That was divided into 10 or 15 people. And soup. Lots of soup. Once a month there was supposed to be meat. But I never got it. I don’t think our barracks ever got meat. Although we did have Spam from the Red Cross. Good ol’ Spam.”

It was unbearably cold, too.

“We had just this very thin blanket — if you could even call it a blanket,” Blitz said. “And there was no heat in the barracks. We were always freezing.”

Blitz and Rosenauer slept within arm’s reach of each other in barracks 32A — nothing but a few strands of straw and cardboard for mattresses.

The barracks chief was a German named Schultz — “yeah, like ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ ” Blitz said.

Just like the popular TV comedy series in the late 1960s and early ’70s that depicted prisoners at a German prisoner of war camp, the men at Stalag 17B had some fun with their Schultz.

“One time we tied threads to the big houseflies in the barracks, and on the other end of the thread we tied a square of paper and let it go,” Blitz said. “Schultz would walk in and these pieces of paper are flying around the barracks. That was part of our fun; we’d drive him nuts.”

Blitz and Rosenauer said that the guards treated them with a degree of respect, for the most part, so long as they stayed in line.

“If somebody was missing during roll call, that was not good. Not good at all,” Blitz said. “They didn’t like that. They were in charge.”

Indeed. A sign at the camp read: “Any POW outside barracks at above time (9:30 p.m. to 5:30 a.m.) will be fired upon without warning.”

Once, Blitz served a week in solitary confinement, but he doesn’t remember what he did wrong.

“You got a pail of water and a piece of bread. That was it,” he said. “It’s just you in there.”

As a distraction from the putrid conditions, Blitz played cards, exercised and read books from Switzerland. Among those books: “Napoleon: The Portrait of a King,” “Introduction to Business Management,” “Bookkeeping Made Easy” and “Accounting — Principles and Practices.”

The Swiss came in handy another time, as well.

“They showed up in this nice Mercedes to make sure we were being treated well — which we weren’t, of course,” Blitz said. “They went into a building and some guys went over to their car and dipped Zippos into the gas tank for lighter fluid. So we had lighters for a couple of weeks. Poor Swiss. I hope they had enough gas to go home after that.”

Overall, though, the POW experience was anything but humorous.

“The conditions were horrible,” Blitz said. “We got deloused once a month. We didn’t actually take a bath. The delousing thing smelled like kerosene.”

When the prisoners weren’t getting startled by air raid sirens (Allied planes mistakenly bombed the other end of the camp one time) or conducting funeral services for a rat (“Poor rat,” Blitz said), they were scavenging parts for crystal radios.

“We’d trade cigarettes to the Germans for parts to the radio,” Blitz said. “We could get the BBC and Berlin on those things, and hear a little about what was happening outside the barbed wires.”

Through it all, Blitz said he never gave up hope.

“I guess I got through it by remembering home, the people and the things I did, and looking forward to going fishing when I got home,” he said.

‘That’s with me till I die’

Throughout his confinement at Stalag 17B, Blitz’s favorite creative outlet was writing in his journal.

“A Wartime Log: A Remembrance From Home Through The American Y.M.C.A.” was given to prisoners by the Swiss shortly entering Stalag 17B. A letter inside the journal read, in part: “This is intended to be kept as a permanent souvenir of the present unpleasantness.”

Writers were encouraged to write. Artists were encouraged to draw. Poets were encouraged to jot down lyrics.

“The journal was quite important to me,” Blitz said. “It kept me out of the nut house. … I saw a lot of men who struggled with being there. It was a way to let my mind escape.”

Blitz tore off a piece of his flight suit and wrapped it around the journal to serve as a protective cover. And it remains there to this day, as the journal remains tucked away in a safe place in Blitz’s home.

“I’ll never get rid of my journal,” Blitz said. “That’s with me till I die.”

Inside of it, unforgettable memories etched in verse, detailed sketches of planes in combat, a drawing of the tail end of his B-17 as it lay mangled on the ground, and other items taped in for safe keeping — among them, a rose, a swastika-emblazoned Nazi patch, a piece of straw from his bedding, and German matches.

“Just things I took with me,” he said. “Memories.”

Blitz received letters from home about twice a month. His high school sweetheart, the late Shirley Wedertz, and his parents, Vernon and Clara, were among the writers.

Back home, his anxious mother expressed thoughts in a small diary. A page reads: “It’s nine months today since Dan went down, and 2 months since his letter came. He is thinking of us today, I’m sure.”

‘I didn’t want to get shot’

His body and mind sapped of energy after 12 months in confinement, Blitz received news in early April 1945 that tested his will power.

The Germans, wanting no part of surrendering to the fast-approaching Russians coming from the east, gathered the prisoners and embarked on a 185-mile forced march west to Braunau am Inn — the birthplace of Adolph Hitler — on the Austria-Germany border.

There, the Germans planned to surrender to the Americans and spare themselves more brutal punishment at the hands of the Russians.

“We were told to pick up whatever we could and leave,” said Blitz, who traversed the countryside with Rosenauer by his side the entire way.

“The guards warned us and told us not to separate from our group. A few men strayed off and got shot and killed. Some men got beat.”

The prisoners covered an average of 10 miles per day, surviving on nuts and berries.

“We marched down roads and also through the woods and hills,” Blitz said. “We were up in the higher elevations, and sometimes we’d sleep on the ground when it was snowing, or in a barn. Some of the farmers were nice. They were desperate for soap, so we knocked on a door and traded our soap for eggs. We probably ate better on the road than we did at the camp.”

The most nerve-wracking moment came during a brief stop in a tiny town.

“There was a water pump fountain near the center of this town,” Blitz said. “I was dry, so I stopped and was trying to get the water primed so I could take a drink. This German behind me, he says in German, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!’ I said, ‘I’m thirsty, damn it!’ Then I heard him click his rifle. I said, ‘I’m not thirsty anymore.’

“I don’t know if he would have shot me or not, but I wasn’t about to find out. When I heard that click, I made my mind up and marched. I didn’t want to get shot.”

On May 2, 1945 — 13 months to the day after his B-17 was shot down — the march ended for Blitz, Rosenauer and the others from Stalag 17B. Out of the woods came American troops on motorcycles who zipped past and yelled, “You’re free!” The Germans stacked their guns in piles and surrendered.

“We were happy, but we were all in poor shape,” Blitz said. “I think we lost a lot of POWs those first couple of days at Camp Lucky Strike (in France) because of overeating. They got diarrhea so bad, they died. Our bodies weren’t used to nice steak and stuff like that. From then on, to be safe, we had eggnog, which I still like today.”

Blitz was fortunate to survive the confinement — or “furlough,” as it was termed in ensuing government paperwork. Years later, it was reported that during the latter stages of the war in Europe Hitler wanted all POWs killed, but he was met with resistance from within the German ranks.

‘I’ve moved on’