CANTON — Former waist gunner Colby Davis, who spent his war time aboard a B-24 bomber, proudly talked Tuesday about the Greatest Generation Award he received last month from the University of Maine.

Davis said that in 2005, the class of 1950 formed a committee to find all the 1950 veterans and determine what they did during the war. Six members of that class were given awards on June 4. Davis was one of the four airmen to receive the award along with two infantry men.

Davis enlisted in 1942 when he was 18 shortly after World War II began. He went to several states for his boot camp, radio school, gunnery school and then to flight training in Boise, Idaho. Davis said after more training in New Mexico, he was sent to Topeka, Kan., where the crew was put together and trained.

Davis said in Topeka they picked up a brand new B-24, four-engine bomber and spent eight days checking it out before leaving for San Giovanni, Italy.

“The main targets,” Davis said, “were oil fields and refineries near Ploiesti, Romania.” He said they had super strategists who had the intel to know where the bombs should fall.

Davis said that on July 21, 1944, the crew was flying their 41st mission when the plane took a direct hit. Seven of the men were able to parachute out and landed in a potato field near one of Hitler’s youth camps in Czechoslovakia.

“The youths were as young as 5-years-old and were firing at us at we came down,” Davis said. “After we landed, they didn’t kill us but put us in a dungeon where we were afraid we would be shot.”

“Three times soldiers came in and lined us up against the wall and we knew that would be the end, but they didn’t fire the guns,” Davis said.

“We were in a cell with granite walls and floors and a thick iron door. We were there for three nights before being taken to Frankfort for interrogation,” Davis said.

“We then spent 11 months in prison where we stayed until the end of the war.”

The worst part of the ordeal was not easy for him to relate as he kept shaking his head over how he had even survived. “From February until May, we were forced to march every day along the Poland border. There were thousands of us who started out on the march, but many froze to death or starved.”

Davis said he learned how to sleep on frozen ground so he could march the next day. He said that once a day, a dirty field truck would dump steamed potatoes on the ground, and if he was lucky, he could get one. That was all they had to eat.

His liberation came from the British in May when V Day was declared. When asked how he managed to survive, Davis replied, “You have to have faith in someone taking care of you and you have to have a will to live.”

Davis said the biggest mystery he has encountered after the war came from Czechoslovakia. A teacher and his students decided to dig around the area where the plane crashed and somehow were able to find an engine serial number.

For five years, the teacher worked on who made that plane and who was flying it the day it crashed. Finally, he was able to contact the rear gunner. He then prepared a small plaque with a fragment of the plane and a slug found near the area and presented it at an annual reunion of the airmen in Seattle.

After his discharge, Davis attended the University of Maine and did what jobs he could find. He has since served as a selectman in Canton and Hartford and continues to serve his community on committees.