Veterans Blog

The ASMBA STAR Foundation: How do we rate as a military charity?

During its first three-and-half years of service, the ASMBA STAR Foundation has provided grant awards totaling almost one-half million dollars to 57 charities in 21 states and to one overseas location (Fisher House at Landstuhl, Germany). The foundation’s parent organization is the Armed Services Mutual Benefit Association located near Nashville, Tennessee, which provides in-kind support by covering personnel costs along with administrative/overhead expenses, so 100% of all public contributions raised goes directly toward supporting the Foundation’s core purpose, which is to improve the quality of life of our active duty military, wounded warriors, veterans and their families.

To ensure transparency, the ASMBA STAR Foundation is listed with Guidestar, the Better Business Bureau - Wise Giving Alliance, and the DoD America Supports You Homefront. In addition, our Foundation is licensed to solicit contributions in all 50 states and the District of Columbia demonstrating our continued commitment to our active duty military, wounded warriors, veterans and the military community. The Foundation is an active participant in the Combined Federal Campaign (CFC) which has strict admission requirements supervised by the Office of Personnel Management in Washington DC.

Even more impressive is the fact that of the more than 1,000,000 charities listed with the IRS; 50,000 (5%) meet or exceed key standards highlighted for the Annual Combined Federal Campaign; and only 2,500 (.25%) are allowed to display the “Independent Charities of America” (ICA) seal. The ASMBA STAR Foundation is proud to be one of those charities that can display the ICA Seal!

Our Core Values

We measure our mission effectiveness based on our core values:

• We are dedicated to providing excellent customer service.

• We pledge to always use our resources in an effective and efficient manner.

• We seek to improve the “quality of life” of our disabled veterans and military dependents.

• We maintain transparency in conducting our charitable activities while complying with federal and state statutes governing charitable operations.

• We select and maintain a diverse group of Board members hosting an array of military, business, public sector and charitable acumens.

Our Strategic Goals:

• Remain good stewards of resources through the responsible use of the Foundation’s funding and investments by remaining performance and outcome/results oriented.

• Serve the military community by partnering with veteran, military, and outside organizations to promote quality of life programs and services.

• Assist combat wounded members of the U.S. Armed Forces and their families.

• Assist disabled and needy veterans and their families, and support the military and veteran communities with charitable good works.

• Remain flexible and responsive to the evolving needs of our members and key stakeholders by continually seeking their feedback.

Enabling Goals:

• Maximize the benefits of information technology, a dedicated staff, and a sound business strategy to build our organizational capacity. Leverage our strong culture of service to the military and solid financial/investment practices to assist those who defend us.

Key Strategies:

• Provide funding to organizations that provided entertainment, care, and assistance to disabled/hospitalized veterans and members of the Armed Forces, as well as their families.

• Collaborate with members of the “military coalition” on issues directly impacting veteran health care concerns and programs.

• Develop an ongoing dialogue with veterans’ organizations and key stakeholders interested in supporting ASMBASF charitable giving.

• Promote organizational excellence by creating a culture that fosters a common identity with other veteran organizations, and encourages mutual respect and teamwork within the military community.

• Develop a veterans’ network capable of expanding and meeting the future needs of the military member and his/her family.

• Remain performance outcome/results-oriented in managing our financial, marketing, network membership, and real property asset programs.

Why Are We Different?

The ASMBA STAR Foundation places special emphasis in evaluating our grant recipients by using a tool called “performance outcome measurement.” We continue to be interested in assessing an applicant’s resource base, programmed activities and projected outputs, but now we are equally interested in how their program or project proceeds toward accomplishing a social value added benefit for the greater good of the military community. We encourage candidates (those seeking grants from the ASMBA STAR Foundation) to track the success rate of their programs as they relate to their participants, identifying and measuring their desired outcomes and outcome indicators.

Our outcome performance model helps us track our own pursuit of desired outcomes and key outcome indicators. This in-turn helps us focus our charitable fundraising efforts in advocating for veteran issues/programs; promoting community engagement; efforts at improving the “quality of life” of disabled veterans; and by leveraging our knowledge base on veteran’s issues in order to expand our network capacity in responding to veteran needs.

However, we have found that the most important reason for implementing outcome performance measurement is that it helps us increase accountability to all stakeholders, guides us in allocating resources, and it helps our Board members make better funding decisions by supporting veterans’ organizations who focus on achieving desired outcomes.

The ASMBA STAR Foundation believes that if military charities can expand their interests more broadly to include the well-being of their clientele (the military community), volunteers/employees, and contributors this will undoubtedly create a realistic sense of value creation for all stakeholders, thus causing the resource pie to expand, creating opportunity while minimizing costs … resulting in a win-win situation for all stakeholders.

Please remember our service members stationed around the world and their families who endure so much! To all of them …thank you for your service!

The ASMBA STAR Foundation is making an impact by building bridges…filling gaps…changing lives!

Fourth Stalag Luft III Tunnel Found

The classic Steve McQueen movie immortalized three tunnels at Stalag Luft III POW camp, now astonished archaeologists have discovered a fourth called George.   Claudia Joseph relays the events surrounding the mystique of Stalag Luft III in the following amazing article.

It has lain hidden for nearly 70 years and looks, to the untrained eye, like a building site. But this insignificant tunnel opening in the soft sand of western Poland represents one of the greatest examples of British wartime heroism. And the sensational story became the Hollywood classic, The Great Escape, starring Steve McQueen.

We are standing in the notorious PoW camp Stalag Luft III, built at the height of the Third Reich, 100 miles east of Berlin. Ten thousand prisoners were kept under German guns here on a 60-acre site ringed with a double barbed-wire fence and watchtowers.

They slept in barrack huts raised off the ground so guards could spot potential tunnelers, but the Germans did not count on the audacity of British Spitfire pilot Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, played by Sir Richard Attenborough in the 1963 film. He was interned at the camp in March 1943. With him were about 2,000 other RAF officers, many of whom were seasoned escapers from other camps, with skills in tunneling, forgery and manufacturing.

Three tunnels nicknamed Tom, Dick and Harry were constructed 30ft underground using homemade tools. While Tom was discovered and destroyed by the Germans, Dick was used for storage.

The third tunnel, Harry, became the stuff of folklore on the night of March 24, 1944, when Allied prisoners gathered in hut 104 before crawling along the 100ft tunnel to a brief taste of freedom. Only three escaped; 73 were rounded up by the Germans and 50 were summarily executed.

Few could have blamed their devastated comrades for sitting out the remainder of the war. Yet far from being dispirited, a few men began work on a fourth tunnel nicknamed ‘George’, which was kept so secret that only a handful of prisoners knew about it.

Incredibly, George has just been uncovered after a team of engineers, archaeologists and historians excavated the site, a project filmed for a Channel 4 documentary Digging The Great Escape.

‘You have to admire these men,’ said chief archaeologist Dr Tony Pollard. ‘The Germans believed that the deaths of those 50 men would have acted as a deterrent for future escapees. But these men were even more determined.’

With us at the site are two of them: Gordie King, 91, an RAF pilot who operated the pump providing the tunnel with fresh air on the night of the Great Escape, and Frank Stone, 89, a gunner who shared a room with the ‘tunnel king’ Wally Floody, an ex-miner in charge of the digging. They stand, heads bowed, reminiscing about their former colleagues. It is the first time Gordie, who was shot down on his first mission to Bremen in 1942, has returned to the camp since he and the remaining prisoners of war were marched out on January 27, 1945, as Russian forces approached.

‘It has been very emotional,’ he said. ‘It brings back such bittersweet memories. I am amazed by everything they have found.’
A widower with six children, he has vivid memories of working on tunnel Harry, performing guard duty and acting as a ‘penguin’ to disperse the sand excavated from the tunnels, whose entrances were hidden by the huts’ stoves.

They were called penguins because they waddled when they walked.

‘We would put bags around our neck and down our trousers, fill them with excavated sand, then pull a string to release it on to the field where we played soccer, all in a very nonchalant way,’ Gordie said.

‘One of my jobs was to look out of the window at the main gate 24 hours a day and write down how many guards went in and out,’ he recalled. ‘Another was warning watch. If the Germans came into the compound, we would pull the laundry line down and everyone would stop what they were doing and resume normal duties. The guards were not exactly brilliant. They were taken from what we called 4F – not fit for frontline fighting.

‘I’m thrilled by it all,’ added Frank, who was shot down on his second mission: a bombing raid on Ludwigshafen oil refinery. ‘It’s like a war memorial for me. I don’t want people ever to forget the 50 men who died. The escape was thrilling and exciting but those men paid the price for it.’

Inevitably security tightened after the Great Escape and an inventory was taken by the Germans to gauge the extent of the operation. The roll- call of hidden items is astounding: 4,000 bedboards, 90 double bunk beds, 635 mattresses, 62 tables, 34 chairs, 76 benches, 3,424 towels, 2,000 knives and forks, 1,400 cans of Klim powdered milk, 300 meters of electric wire and 180 meters of rope.

To prevent further escape attempts, the Germans filled in Harry with sand. So effective was the cover-up that when the remaining prisoners wanted to build a memorial for the 50 men who died, the exact site of the tunnel could not be agreed on.
Now, for the first time in 66 years, the archaeologists have pinpointed the entrance shaft to Harry after compiling a map of the camp using aerial photography.

What was most surprising for the team was the structure within the shaft. The bedboards were interlocked to line the tunnel but the sand was so soft that plaster and sandbags were used to prevent it engulfing the tunnel. Amazingly, the ventilation shaft, which was made out of discarded powdered milk tins, was still intact.

Dr Pollard, 46, who co-founded Glasgow University’s Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, said: ‘I was surprised at just how emotional I became when we found Harry. We were the first people to see the tunnel in decades. But it came to a point when we realised we couldn’t progress with the excavation. As soon as you drive a shaft into the sand, it is so soft it starts to collapse. It shows just how skilled those prisoners were.’

After abandoning Harry, the team set their sights on finding the secret fourth tunnel rumored to have been dug underneath the floorboards in the camp theatre.

Using ground-scanning radar equipment, they found – beneath what would have been seat 13 – the trap door to a space that gave real insight into how the earlier tunnels would have been built.

To the left, between the floor joists, was a storage area for equipment – Klim tins, tools, a trolley and the ventilation pump – and abandoned sand. A few feet away was the entrance to the tunnel shaft, and at its bottom a separate chamber, which archaeologists believe was the radio room.

After abandoning Harry, the team set their sights on finding the secret fourth tunnel rumored to have been dug underneath the floorboards in the camp theatre.

Down a single step lay the tunnel itself, intricately shored with bed boards, wired for light and equipped with the trademark trolley system used to shift both sand and men quickly and silently through the tunnels. It looked like a miniature railway with trolleys running on tracks linked by rope and pulled along by men at either end.

‘George turned out to be an absolute gem,’ explained Dr Pollard. ‘We found the shaft and excavated the tunnel which ran the entire length of the theatre. It was incredibly well preserved, with timber-lined walls, electrical wiring and homemade junction boxes, and was tall enough to walk through at a stoop. The craftsmanship is phenomenal. You can even see the groove on the top of the manhole cover, where it would swivel and slot into the floorboard above.

‘It was built at a time of heightened security at the camp. It is a fighting tunnel, not an escape tunnel. It was heading for the German compound from where the prisoners hoped to steal weapons and fight their way out.

The men knew the end of the war was nigh and they were playing a dangerous game. To see what most of the prisoners never saw was a real thrill. The Germans obviously discovered Harry but they never had a clue about George.’

The massive collection of artifacts found inside the tunnel included trenching tools; a fat-burning lamp crafted from a Klim tin; solder made from the silver foil of cigarette packets for the wiring system; a belt buckle and briefcase handle from the escapers’ fake uniforms as well as a German gun near hut 104.  They also uncovered the axle and wheels from one of the tunnel trolleys, identical to the one used in Harry, and the remains of an air pump; a kind of hand-operated bellows which drew fresh air from the surface down a duct to the tunnel.

But the piece de resistance was a clandestine POW radio crafted from a biscuit box and cannibalized from two radios smuggled into the camp.

Frank was instrumental in making the coil for the radio, which he molded from an old 78 record. ‘I helped with the work on the construction of the radio, doing the soldering and things like that,’ he recalled, ‘cutting out bits of tins and whatever we needed for the equipment.’

Gordie added: ‘I remember one day walking around the camp with a friend when we saw this huge coil of wire. We grabbed it, covered it up with our coats and took it back to the hut. The Germans could not understand where the wire went. Until then we had had to rely on old tins of margarine with a wick in them, made from pajama cord, to light the tunnel, but they were smoky, used up oxygen and were continually getting knocked out.’

On the night of the Great Escape, 200 prisoners, allocated consecutive numbers, gathered in hut 104 to make their escape, each a few minutes apart. The leaders were dressed in German uniforms or specially tailored civvies and kitted out with maps, compasses and forged documents.

Gordie, who was slot 140, remembers sharing final words with many of the escapers, wishing them luck and complimenting them on ‘their impressive disguises’.

‘It was quite exciting,’ he said. ‘Only the key German-speaking officers, who had a good chance of bluffing their way through, were given documents and civilian uniforms. The rest of us were so-called hard-a**ers, who were expected to get out and run.’

According to Roger Bushell’s plan, thousands of German soldiers and police would be deployed to hunt the escapers, preventing them from fighting the Allies. But after 76 men had escaped, the remainder were caught leaving the tunnel by German guards. Seventy-three of the men who got away were rounded up over the next few weeks and 23 were returned to the camp. The other 50 were shot in the back of the head by the guards at the side of the road. Only three escapees, Norwegians Per Bergsland and Jens Muller, and Dutch fighter pilot Bram van der Stok, succeeded in reaching safety. Bergsland and Muller got to neutral Sweden and Van der Stok made it to Gibraltar via Holland and France.

‘Afterwards the morale in the camp was very depressed,’ said Frank, tears in his eyes. ‘It was eerie. We had a period of mourning and held a memorial service. People just wandered around the camp quietly.’

‘A mass of doom enveloped the whole camp as so many of us had friends who were shot,’ added Gordie. ‘My close friend Jimmy Wernham, who came from the same town as me, was one of those who didn’t come back.

‘Before he went out, he took his ring off and gave it to his roommate Hap Geddes, who wasn’t going out, and said, “If anything happens to me, I want you to take this ring and give it to my fiancée.” After the war, Hap took the ring back to Dorothy and struck up a relationship with her. He ended up marrying her. He is still alive and living in Canada.’

Frank added: ‘I hope that what has been revealed will remind everybody what we went through and how we met the challenges. It was a privilege to be involved.’

Amazing! Frank, Gordie and to all of those brave soldiers held at Stalag III, some of whom never came back home after the war…Thank you for your service!

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Merry Christmas and have a Happy Holiday Season!