On a sunny morning in September 2022, a hummingbird swooped toward the side porch of a cheerful brick house in Delta Township. Target: the red impatiens blossoms planted alongside the porch railing. Spotting a woman sitting on the porch, the crimson flyer banked, made an instantaneous 90-degree turn and vanished.
“That was my dad’s delight,” the woman on the porch, Lynn Orta, said. “He thought they were the most amazing aerobatic performers.”
World War II bomber pilot Russell Hilding died Nov. 7, 2021, at age 100. He was the last surviving Buchenwald Airman.
This fall, Orta is sorting through her father’s things and getting ready to say goodbye to the place where Hilding and his wife, Marie, settled 80 years ago. 
Now hemmed in by malls and condos, the two-acre patch is guarded by towering pine trees Hilding planted himself in the 1950s. Despite the roar of traffic on North Canal Road, much of it heading toward nearby Horrocks Farm Market, the place still feels like it did in 1949 — a farmstead nestled in the woods.
Russell Hilding lived and worked in the Lansing area all his life, with one notable exception. Late in the war, when Hilding’s aircraft crashed in Nazi-occupied France, he ended up at the Buchenwald concentration camp, along with over 160 other captured Allied airmen.
He didn’t talk much about the experience. Most of what Orta learned about her dad’s wartime experience came from other pilots or conversations she overheard between her dad and her mom’s brother, a career Air Force officer who saw combat in World War II.
She recalls seeing archival footage of concentration camps on TV when she was in her teens.
“My mom would say, ‘Your dad was there,’ when Dad was out in the kitchen, popping popcorn,” Orta said. “It was just kind of expected that we’d step around and not approach it.”
In Hilding’s later years, they were watching the History Channel together one day when footage of Buchenwald came on the screen.
“He just said, ‘Ugh, Buchenwald,’” Orta recalled. “That was about all.”
‘Sorry, boys’
Russell Hilding was born June 6, 1921, on Prospect Street, on Lansing’s east side. His father, Arthur, was in the typewriter repair business — Wolverine Typewriter Co. at first, then Hilding Office Supply, at 329 S. Capitol Avenue.
Family lore has it that Arthur Hilding was lugging a heavy typewriter to an office at MSU when a wise guy student heckled him: “Wouldn’t it be easier to carry a fountain pen?”
Russell went up in a plane for the first time at age 14, at Lansing’s Capital Airport. The owner of a Ford Trimotor, also called the “Tin Goose,” a civilian craft made from 1925 to 1933, was giving free rides.
He was hooked. He started taking flying lessons at Lansing Airport within weeks.
The Ford Trimotor was a tough bird, flown by Amelia Earhart and Charles Lindbergh, famed for evacuating civilians during the 1942 Battle of Bataan and flying tourists over the Grand Canyon for 65 years.
It was the first and the last aircraft Hilding went up in.
Fewer than 10 of the 199 Trimotors made are still deemed airworthy by the FAA, but in 2018, Lynn Orta and her sister, Nancy, snagged their father a ride in one at Gerald Ford International Airport. Hilding was 96.
Hilding’s family moved to East Lansing when he was in grade school. As a senior, he was a model student and president of his East Lansing High School class. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, his dad encouraged him to enlist in the Army air corps and train as an aviator. He didn’t want his son to end up in the trenches, as his own brother did during World War I. After several months of training, he was assigned to the VIII Bomber Command.
He chose a bomber rather than a fighter craft because the experience was similar to that of a civilian airline pilot, which he hoped to become after the war.
He made it through 12 missions, flying a four-engine B-17 with the same 10-man crew.
In later life, Hilding often praised his crew, gunners and bombardier as “top-notch.”
“He loved that plane,” Orta said.
On July 13, 1944, 2nd. Lt. Russell Hilding and his crew took off from the Royal Air Force station at Rattlesden, near Suffolk, on the east side of England, on a mission to bomb a target near Munich. While flying over Germany, the B-17 was damaged by anti-aircraft fire, but Hilding kept control of the craft. A short time later, five German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters appeared in hot pursuit. Hilding tried to steer a course back to England, but the cloud cover was heavy, and the navigator, Claude Kelly, was unable to fix the plane’s position. When two engines sputtered out, Hilding knew they would have to jump. As soon as the plane broke through the clouds, he gave the order.
By the time Hilding’s crew was safely away, the crippled plane had flipped over. He managed to turn it right side up just long enough to get his parachute on and jump clear. As he went down, a fighter jet from his own formation swooped uncomfortably close to him, sucking the air out of his parachute. It took a heart-stopping few seconds for the parachute to billow out again, just before he came down in the middle of a field near Vendrest, Seine-et-Marne, in north-central France.
As he got to his feet, he saw a white Citroën driving toward him. A scale model of the Citroën is lovingly kept in a glass case in the study of Hilding’s Delta Township home, along with his Air Force insignia, Lansing Airport I.D. badge, a model of a B-17 and other mementos.
Two men got out of the Citröen and told Hilding they were with the French underground. They gathered up the chutes, stowed them away and ushered him to a nearby farmhouse.
For about two weeks, Hilding, his co-pilot George C. Mong and bombardier Raymond E. Wojnicz were sheltered and fed in a room above the barn. Hilding and Wojnicz stayed with a local baker for a few days, furnished with civilian clothing and false I.D. papers, and were taken by train to Paris.
The plan was to get them to neutral Spain, but it was not to be.
While staying with an English-speaking couple in Paris, Hilding and Wojnicz were walking down the street when a car pulled up next to them. The man inside announced, “Sorry, boys, but for you, the war is over.”
Their betrayer was Jacques Desoubrie, a Belgian Nazi sympathizer and a naked opportunist with expensive tastes. “Captain Jacques,” as he liked to be called, worked with the Gestapo to betray some 1,500 Allied airmen and over 100 members of the resistance at the going rate of 10,000 francs each. He was executed after the war in France.
Hilding and Wojnicz ended up in Fresnes Prison, south of Paris, cold, hungry and surrounded by the screams of prisoners being tortured by the Gestapo.
Wings of sand
On Aug. 15, 1944, as the Allies approached Paris, 167 Allied airmen and 2,000 French civilians interred at Fresnes Prison were herded into cattle cars on convoy I.264, one of the last to leave for Germany, headed for the concentration camp at Buchenwald.
Conditions in the cars were horrendous. The prisoners baked in the August sun with no water or food, and a bucket for a latrine.
Along the way, an American airman and some French civilians managed to tear away some floorboards and escape when the train slowed down. Most were recaptured. Hilding watched as German soldiers shot a young boy who got too close to the window.
The train crossed the Rhine into Germany Aug. 19 and arrived at the Weimar station soon after.
Women were sent to the Ravensbrück camp, an all-female camp in northern Germany. Hilding and the other men were herded into a local train. The convoy stopped in a forest near Buchenwald. From there, the prisoners staggered to the concentration camp, kicked and beaten as they went. They were stripped down, shaved all over and sprayed with a caustic lice killer.
Naked, bald, jumping up and down as if stung by wasps, their situation was so awful they had no choice but to laugh at one another.
For two weeks, Hilding and 168 other airmen languished in the open-air “Kleine Lager,” a rocky outcrop outside the camp. With one thin blanket for every three men, they huddled together, watched black smoke issue from a low chimney inside the camp, and smelled the sickening odor of burnt flesh.
On Aug. 24, an Allied bombing raid damaged an arms factory in neighboring Weimar. The airmen were forced to put out the fire and clear the ruins without shoes and with their bare hands.
The airmen chose Squadron Leader Phillip Lamason of New Zealand, the ranking officer, as their leader. Lamason protested that forced labor was against Geneva Convention rules. The SS told Lamason that his airmen were all “terrorfliegers” (terrorist flyers) outside the protection of the Geneva Convention and would be shot.
Nevertheless, Lamason bravely kept reminding the German command that he and his fellow airmen belonged in a “stalag,” a prisoner of war camp, not a concentration camp.
Conditions at Buchenwald were beyond horrific. When there were worms in the cabbage soup, the prisoners welcomed the protein. Later in life, Hilding recalled playing with Gypsy children there, only to find that they had disappeared the next day.
The proud, trans-border confraternity of flyers came to their rescue. In October 1944, German fighter ace Johannes Trautloft, now a member of the Luftwaffe High Command, was upset by rumors that Allied airmen were being held at Buchenwald. He visited the camp under the pretext of checking on damage from Allied bombing raids.
Camp officials only showed Trautloft the parts of the camp they wanted him to see, and assured him that only political prisoners were being detained. Satisfied with the inquiry, Trautloft and his group were about to leave when an American officer — whom Lynn Orta identified as a German-speaking airman from Westphalia, Michigan — called to him from behind the barbed wire. The SS tried to stop him, but Trautloft ordered them to stand down.
Trautloft confirmed that over 160 Allied airmen were being held in the camp and told them he would do what he could to get them out.
In the nick of time, on Oct. 19, orders arrived from Marshal Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, to transfer the airmen to Stalag/Luft III, a prisoner of war camp in near what is now Zagan, Poland. The Gestapo sentenced all the airmen to be executed Oct. 24 or 26.
Hilding and his fellow airmen were leaving a pit of misery and death. Two of the airmen died of illness that October. The vast majority of civilians held at Buchenwald were murdered soon after, either there or at the Dora and Ellrich labor camps.
Conditions were much better at Stalag/Luft III, famous as the scene of a mass escape made famous in the book and movie “The Great Escape.” The food was nutritious and regular. Prisoners were allowed to receive packages from the Red Cross. Although the airmen’s uniforms and insignia were confiscated long ago, they were issued military clothes and managed to make new wing insignia by melting tinfoil wrappers from packs of cigarettes and gum.
They poured the molten foil into a sand mold made from a real set of wings.
Preserved in a glass case in Hilding’s study, the wings have the heft of a lead sinker and look almost exactly like the real thing, but only from the front. From the back, lumps belie the crude tools used to make them.
Hilding later said the sand around Stalag Luft III was just like the sand at his father’s farm, a former logging camp near Edmore in Montcalm County — fine enough to preserve every detail of the wings.
Keep ‘em flying
In mid-January 1945, news spread that Soviet troops were approaching Stalag Luft III.
Amid the fiercest blizzard in decades, the prisoners were marched to another camp, Stalag 7A in Moosburg. Hilding, Wojnicz and the others were liberated there by Patton’s Third Army on April 29, 1945.
Hilding celebrated his 23rd birthday in June 1945 by sailing past the Statue of Liberty.
For a few months, he continued to fly B-17s to domestic “boneyards” around the country, where they were taken apart. After leaving the Air Force, he returned to Lansing to work with his dad at Hilding Office Supply and used his G.I. Bill benefits to attend business school.
He met an MSU student named Marie Reeves at The Dells, a restaurant and nightclub along Lake Lansing. He invited her for an airplane ride at Lansing Airport and she went for it.
“She never liked flying all that well, but they fell in love,” Orta said.
Russell and Marie moved to a Delta Township farm in 1946, but Hilding wasn’t much for farming. They put in high bush cranberries, hawthorns and other trees and shrubs to re-wild the former farmland. They planted a row of pine seedlings that now tower over the homestead, walling off the house and gardens from the encroaching urban sprawl.
As a young girl, Lynn Orta loved to ramble through the woods and trails surrounding the house. Hilding sold most of the surrounding land to developers in the early 1960s, but the two-acre farmstead is still an oasis of trees and flowers.
Hilding didn’t stop flying. He flew light planes in the Michigan National Guard, camping in Camp Grayling many summers. In the mid-1960s, he bought a Piper Cub and built a landing strip near the house.
After I-69 was built, State Police told him he couldn’t land a plane so near to the freeway.
Hilding Office Supply remained a downtown Lansing fixture until it closed in 1981. When he wasn’t at work or on Guard duty, Hilding tended the grounds, mowing the trails and tinkering with the gardens.
He was also a car buff, with a 1953 Ford Convertible and a 1970 Olds Regency, still parked in the garage, and was one of the founding members of the R.E. Olds Museum.
He was devastated when Marie died in a car accident in 2014. They were together 67 years.
“Everyone knew it would be harder for him if she went first rather than the other way around,” Orta said.
Orta moved into the old homestead several years ago to help care for her dad. He loved watching the hummingbirds zero in on a flower, dart in for the pollen and disappear into the sky, outperforming any Flying Fortress that ever flew.
“He opened up a bit more as he got older,” Orta said. “Toward the end, I heard him say something like, ‘war is no good.’”
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