The Wedding Dress                           På dansk                                                      Updated:  03 JUN 2019

  From Memoirs of Robert B. Clay.  A parachute from B17 42-38005 Stormy Weather. Photo from Gunnar Hounsgaard

If there is such a notion that any romance could result from that fateful day in May of 1944, it is in the discovery that one of the local girls on the island salvaged one of the crew´s parachutes, and, as wartime shortages bred ingenuity, fashioned a wedding dress from the nylon chute. The bride who wore the dress on her wedding day, still living, sent Clay a photograph of her in the dress on her wedding day and a sample of yellow-faded material.

A romantic appendage to Captain Clay´s Memoirs is the endearing story of the fate of one of the crew´s parachutes. The following letter was received from Ilse Witzke on August 10, 1999, recounting this enchanting tale:

"About my wedding dress, I can tell the following story. After the plane had crashed my fiancé found one parachute on his land, the farmhands found another, they were hidden in the barn until the Germans had stopped searching. Ours was then divided into four parts: One for me, one for for mother in law, one for my sister in law, one for my brother in law. I know it came to good use, all of it. Since all sorts of material were scarce at that time it was an obvious idea to use our part for my wedding dress.

I remember there were letters and figures printed in blue all around the edge, which it took me hours to wash off with brown soap. The wedding was on the 5th of November 1944.

The origins of the dress seemed to be the talk of our little town, somebody even said that it was dangerous to wear that dress; surely the Gestapo would turn up at the church and arrest me. Perhaps the Germans had more important things on their minds at that time, so nothing happened. I was not afraid - only happy that the wedding really came off. Because my fiancé shortly before then (5/11) had been arrested by the Germans suspected of being in the resistance movement - which he was - but got free - mainly it was thought because he ran a big farm and the Germans needed all the food they could exploit. His mates were sent to a KZ camp, thank God they all survived.

After the wedding the train was cut off and I dyed the dress in a nice yellow color and wore it quite a lot.

The cords that ran in the strong seams were wound up an used for mending clothes. We were out of everything in those days. My mother in law even used it for knitting into socks to make them stronger because the wool was home spun from her own sheep."

Mrs. Ilse Witzke, 87 in 2008, liked that the story of her wedding dress was told on AirmenDK. Born in 1921, died in 2018. See photo of her wedding dress in 2019. Article.