After a few days with this group Hart and his friend decided to renew their ill fated escape attempt and this time they made it, finding a US Infantry outfit that sent them back to Paris and then Camp Lucky Strike.  "All of our effort was probably not worth the risks or the effort," Hart recounts, "because we were on a ship in the harbor at Le Havre when the end of the war came."

      "I feel strongly about this picture," Hart recently stated about the photograph shown above. "I feel as though it was taken yesterday. It was taken by a Belgian patriot for use on my false papers and I hadn't seen it since January 1944 until 1994 when we were visting in Belgium. The Belgian patriot's wife gave it to me. You can see the burns across my face from the parachute shroud lines, but to me most important is the expresion on my face. I was one very pi**ed-off pilot when AA got me. They never wasted ammo on fighters at high altitude. This photo, taken two days after I was shot down, still shows my mental attitude. That anger stayed with me from 24 Jan '44 till the day in Sept.'94 when I visted the U.S. Cemetary of Ardennes and found there were seventeen pilots from the 20th. Fighter Group buried there. All of a sudden my role in the scheme of things in this life had dealt my unwarranted anger a death blow."

Lt. Hart at King's Cliffe, 1943

      Hart was awarded the Air Medal during his stint in the 20th.FG. He currently resides in California with his wife Irene.

"This is a cartoon that was drawn in my war-time diary by an English flyer. I never knew him by anything other than his nickname of "Mr. Chips"; which I am sure was given to him by his English buddies. It seems that Mr Chips was on routine North Sea patrol in a Royal Navy seaplane. They checked out a German patrol boat that promptly shot them down and inquired if they were not aware that Germany and England had declared war that morning."