Dick Smith began his career with the U.S. Air Force in April 1941 after enlisting at Fort Wayne's Baer Field in Indiana in December 1941. He received his pilot's wings in February 1943. In September, Smith and his crew flew a new B-17 from the U.S. across the Atlantic Ocean to England. They landed at an airbase at Horham in East Anglia, England, home of the 95th Bomb Group. Smith and his crew were assigned to the 336th Bomb Squadron, and named their B-17 bomber "Destiny's Tot".

The crew of Destiny's Tot flew their first combat mission on 8 Oct 1943, during an attack on Bremen, Germany. Subsequent missions took them on raids to Germany, Poland, and Norway. The raid on Rjukan, Norway was to bomb a heavy water plant, a necessary component of nuclear fission.

On their 13th mission on 30 Dec 1943, Destiny's Tot luck ran out. The crew had just finished a bombing run over the Ludwigshafen-Mannheim area of Germany and were returning to England when the crankshaft on the No.4 outboard engine, located on the plane's right wing, seized up.

With the propellers on the broken engine serving as a brake, Destiny's Tot was soon on its own as the other B-17s from the 95th Bomb Group flew on ahead. The crippled bomber made it as far as German-occupied France when enemy fighters attacked. In all, one Messerschmitt Me-109 and six Folke-Wulf Fw-190s targeted the lone bomber.

"The German fighters started high, came down in a power dive under our tail and pulled up underneath our plane with guns blazing. They literally sawed off the back half of the airplane. My gunners were firing fast and furiously at the attacking planes," Smith recalled later in his 1995 account of his escape from German-occupied Europe.

"It wasn't long before our plane was a flying wreck with a fire in the radio room that I couldn't see but could smell. The instrument panel was completely gone, and there were holes in the wings you could drop a washtub through. The ship was a complete mess wherever you wanted to look.

"The intercom system was also blown out, so there was no chatter between crew members. There was no question we were going to have to abandon the aircraft!"

Smith and his co-pilot, Bill Booher, struggled to keep the bomber flying while the crew bailed out. Finally, after Booher abandoned the struggling plane, Smith prepared to jump.

"I was still in the cockpit with both feet on the control column trying to keep the plane as level as possible, or even nose down. It kept wanting to climb and stall out because the back was shot off.

"I can remember very vividly, to this day, getting out of my seat, reaching for my chest pack, and sitting in the escape hatch with my feet hanging out in space 15,000 feet (about 4.57 km) in the sky and pounding on the parachute buckles to latch them to my harness. It seemed kind of odd the way you do things because one slip and that parachute would have preceded me very swiftly earthward."

With his parachute clipped safely in place, Smith leapt from the hatch. He tumbled through the air as he hit the blast of air from the propellers. Once clear of the wash, Smith stopped tumbling but waited to pull the ripcord and open his parachute. He knew that the less time he spent in the air meant German soldiers had less time to find him.

"I delayed pulling my ripcord for some minutes: It seemed like an eternity! It was very, very quiet, and I could hear the plane in its death throes, but I could see no other parachutes, not even Bill's, although he had gone out the hole just before me."

Smith finally pulled the cord as he descended into a bank of clouds. The canopy opened, and Smith jerked violently against the parachute straps, which he had loosened just before takeoff earlier that morning.

The Me 109 circled Smith as he floated towards the ground. The pilot tipped a wing and waved. Smith waved back. "I figured if he wasn't mad, I wasn't mad either," wrote Smith.

As Smith neared the ground, about a mile away, Destiny’s Tot stalled and crashed into a farmer's field near the village of Campremy, France. The rest of the eight-member crew, three of whom were wounded, were spread out along a 16-km line.

German soldiers quickly captured the wounded crew—Tony Onesi, Bob Adams, and Gene O'Hearn—and transported them to a nearby hospital. The remaining five crew—Bill Booher, Jerry Eshuis, Louis Feingold, Al Mele, Kenneth Morrison, and Warren Tarkington—immediately went into hiding.

With the help of a farmer, Smith buried his parachute in the man’s field and then fled to a nearby stand of trees. From there, he crawled into a thick hedgerow alongside a road. He hid in the hedgerow until night fell with plans to head towards the railway tracks where he could hear the rumble of trains.

Before Smith could move, however, three Frenchmen approached his hiding place and told him to come out. The young men, who had seen where Smith had landed, gave him a change of clothes, and escorted him to the local sheriff, who bundled the six-foot-one-inch pilot into the trunk of a car. After a 30-minute drive, Smith was reunited with Bill Booher and Al Mele at an isolated farmhouse. Smith, Booher, and Mele were now in the Shelburne Escape Line.

Smith, Booher, and Mele stayed at the farmhouse until 31 Dec 1943. Resistance members moved them to first one and then another location where they learned the fate of Destiny’s Tot remaining crew.

Tony Onesi, Bob Adams, and Gene O'Hearn were in German-held hospitals, destined for prisoner-of-war camps. Jerry Eshuis, Louis Feingold, and Warren Tarkington, meanwhile, were also in the escape line. Kenneth Morrison, Destiny’s Tot engineer, spent eight months hiding in the cellar of a French farmer who did not know how to contact the Underground.

The Underground moved Smith, Booher, and Mele once again, this time to a small house owned by a young couple and their infant daughter near the city of St. Just. From there the trio were reunited with Jerry Eshuis at an abandoned store in Paris. Now four strong, the group was guided to the apartment of an elderly English woman.

She had been trapped in Paris after the city fell to the Germans. Smith and Mele soon received instructions to walk along what would become known as the Champs Elysees until they saw a man on a street corner with a rolled newspaper under his arm. Booher and Eshuis stayed at the apartment with the English woman.

The man with the newspaper led Smith and Mele to the Canadian Pacific Railroad Building. They were escorted to a luxurious apartment on the fifth floor; a contingent of German officers lived two floors below them. The Underground provided Smith and Mele with new clothes, and, as Smith relates, a lot of food. The two Americans feasted on meat, eggs, cheese, butter, white bread, fresh fruit, and vegetables, which were readily available in the countryside. They also had access to plenty of wine.

The Underground also provided the two men with identification papers and ration cards. While the information was fake, Smith points out that the documents were legitimate. "The picture of me that the French underground used when preparing my fake papers showed a solemn-looking young man dressed in a French suit coat with dress shirt and tie, a typical attire for a young, energetic geologist that my papers said I was," wrote Smith. His papers indicated that he had been discharged from the French army and was travelling to Germany to work.

Once their new identities had been established, Smith and Mele were occasionally allowed to go out on the town with Underground members. They took in a stage show and a movie, passed off as relatives of their Underground handlers. Most of the time, however, they stayed in the apartment playing cards.

After a couple of weeks in Paris, the Underground took Smith to the railway station near the end of January and gave him a railway ticket to the town of St. Brieuc, a town on the Brest Peninsula. At St. Brieuc, he was to transfer to a train that ran along the coast on a narrow-gauge railway.

"The trip went as planned. I got into the compartment with some rural French people. They offered food and wine and tried to be nice, but they must have thought I was a real jerk because I completely ignored them. It was a long torturous trip, and it was fortunate my companions changed two or three times during the course of the trip," wrote Smith.

After reaching St. Brieuc, Smith waited in a square outside the station for the narrow-gauge train. Five other evaders also had instructions to board the same train, but Smith’s clothing—a dark trench coat and fedora—made for a tense half-hour wait for the other evaders. Dressed as he was, they thought Smith was a member of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police.

Once on the narrow-gauge train, Smith was to wait until a young woman wearing tall rubber boots got up to disembark. When the young woman, known as Germaine (Her real name was Marie Therese LeCalvez, a hero of the Resistance), stood up and walked towards the exit, Smith and the five other evaders (all American aviators) followed.

The six evaders followed Germaine to a modest two-storey house near the village of Plouha, due west of Paris, where they had disembarked from the train. The men spent three days confined to a small bedroom while they waited for pickup by the British navy on the approaching new moon. The shades in the room were drawn during the day, and they ate what Smith described as "meager" rations; not what he experienced in Paris.

Each evening, during the three nights of the new moon, Underground leaders arrived at the house to listen to two BBC news radio broadcasts, one at 7:30 p.m. and the other at 9 p.m. They were waiting to hear a coded message — "Bonjour tout le monde a la Maison Alphonse (Hello everyone at the Alphonse house)" — provided during both broadcasts. The first message told the Underground a Royal Navy motor gunboat was on its way from Dartmouth. The second message confirmed the operation. They did not receive the go-ahead until the third and final night of the new moon on 28-29 Jan 1944.

Late that night, as a light, chilly rain fell, members of the Underground led Smith and his group of evaders into the darkness. They were bound for Sous-Keruzeau Beach, codenamed "Bonaparte Beach," eight kilometres from Plouha, to rendezvous with other evaders and meet the boat.

Smith and the other evaders were led to a cottage near Bonaparte Beach by a long, convoluted route that passed through barnyards to confuse the dogs the Germans used on their patrols. From the cottage, where Smith was reunited with Bill Booher, Jerry Eshuis, and Al Mele, their guides led the evaders down a cliff to the beach. Their crewmates Louis Feingold and Warren Tarkington undertook the same journey a month later.

Once Smith, Booher, Eshuis, Mele, and the other evaders, had made it safely down to Bonaparte Beach, they were led to a cave where they waited for the 120-foot-long British motor gunboat. After a long wait, a light blinked in the darkness. The gunboat held its position beyond the waves as three rubber boats came to shore, carrying money, weapons, medicine, and other supplies for the local resistance groups. Finally, the evaders were called down to the beach for the trip to the gunboat.

"It was around 2:00 a.m. and very cold, and we were not all that warmly dressed. I can remember helping row out to the gunboat to try to generate some body heat. I can also remember climbing the ladder up the side of the ship, and as we climbed over the deck’s edge, the first thing we looked at was the muzzle of a machine gun, sitting on a tripod and manned by a British sailor. Not the most friendly of receptions. But again, security and infiltration fears were top priority," wrote Smith.

As the ship set out for England in rough seas, the evaders—a mix of American, British, and South African aircrew—got a short briefing and were fed a hot, salty beach soup. Included in their group was a Russian-American British agent, Vladimir Bouryschkine, known as "Val Williams", who helped form the predecessor to the Shelburne escape line, which had just helped Smith and his crew. Bouryschkin had just escaped from a German prison and was returning to Britain. Little did Smith and the other evaders know, but they were the first group to be successfully evacuated via Bonaparte Beach.

Once the gunboat had reached England, members of American and British intelligence quickly interrogated Smith and his fellow evaders. The agents sought to learn as much as they could about their experience in the hopes of learning anything that would aid the war effort.

Smith wasn’t allowed to return to the 95th Bomb Group until he was positively identified; however, once he had been released, he was soon promoted from first lieutenant to captain and ordered to report to the Air Transport Command. He was on his way home to the U.S. after four-and-a-half months in Europe and four weeks in France evading capture.

Bill Booher, Al Mele, Jerry Eshuis, and Smith returned to the U.S. together. First, they flew to Morocco and then to Senegal before crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Brazil. From Brazil, they flew northeast over the Atlantic to the Azores Islands, located west of Portugal, before continuing to the U.S. They finally landed at the Billy Mitchell Field outside New York City.

Smith went home to Breckenridge, Minnesota on a 30-day leave before reporting to the Army Replacement Depot in Atlantic City, New Jersey. He was reassigned to Buckingham Field at Fort Myers, Florida, to learn how to fly B-24 bombers. Smith served at Fort Myers as a squadron commander at the Aerial Gunnery School until late 1945.

Smith flew for Eastern Airlines until the end of the war, at which point, he returned to Notre Dame University to finish his degree. He graduated in 1947 and began farming in rural western Minnesota.

With their experience as evaders in Europe, Dick Smith and Al Mele helped to found the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society (AFEES) in 1964 at the Niagara Falls Army Air Base in Buffalo, New York. Membership in the AFEES was limited to individuals whom had been shot down behind enemy lines and either escaped from a POW camp or evaded capture.

All the members happened to be from the European Theatre as aircrew shot down in the Pacific Theatre were either quickly rescued or disappeared.

The AFEES worked to help its members receive benefits, which proved difficult as records had not been kept, and successful evaders had all been barred from speaking about how they evaded capture for 50 years. The organization also arranged reunions in both the U.S. and Europe.

Smith returned to Europe four times after the war. The first was in 1969 to mark the 25th anniversary of the formation of the AFEES. Some 100 evaders and their families travelled from Canada to England where Queen Elizabeth II greeted them and invited them all to a cocktail party.

Along with a short visit to Horham where the 95th Bomb Group had been stationed, the group travelled to Holland, Belgium, and France to meet many people who helped them evade capture. Smith, and his crewmates Bill Booher and Al Mele, also returned to Bonaparte Beach where a British motor gunboat whisked them away from German-held Europe.