REMEMBRANCE OF THING PAST: 1944

It is hard to believe it has been sixty-five years since D-Day. I remember I had just returned home to Ohio from my junior year at prep school in Pennsylvania and listening to some of the live reports from war correspondents as that traumatic day enfolded. This anniversary triggers more memories of one of the most vividly dramatic periods of my life, World War II.

My family was deeply involved in the war with my two older brothers both serving in the military. The middle brother. Alfred, I described in my blog of May 25, 2009, was killed in the Phillippines later in January of 1945. My oldest brother, Henry, had gone overseas in the spring of 1944, assigned as a Navigator on a B-24 Liberator in Foggia, Italy in the 15th Air Force of the Army Air Corps. (Remember, in those days, the Air Force was still part of the Army.) He and his crew flew thirty-five missions and, thank God, lived to tell the tale. Their crew had several, to use an old Air Force expression. "hairy" experiences.

The most memorable reads likes an implausible hollywood script for some B movie with Ronald Reagan.

On their 13th mission, on Friday, October 13, 1944 at about 1300 hours, their B-24 was hit by flak while bombing Vienna. A black pilot in a P-47 Thunderbolt, trying to protect them, was also hit. The two planes tried to limp home to their bases in Italy but could not make it, and they all bailed out over the mountainous terrain of what was then Yugoslavia. They all made it safely to the ground. My brother, Hank, just like the Hollywood script would dictate, landed in a haystack! As he gathered himself together, running toward him was a peasant woman with a rifle and cartridge belt slung over her body. Oh shit, thought my brother, I'm in deep trouble. He put up his hands and said, "Americanski". The peasant women smiled and rushed up to embrace him. She was one of the Partisans of Marshall Tito, the Yugoslav patriot who fought against the Nazis.

The Partisans assembles the whole crew of nine plus the P-47 pilot who had tried to protect the B-24 and took them in. They stayed with the Partisans for almost two weeks. At one point, Hank , who had often spent summers on a ranch in Montana and loved to ride, rode out with the Partisans as they reconnoitered for German troops fighting the Partisans in these mountains. Hank laughingly recalls dancing one night with a pretty Partisan girl who also had ammunition belts strung over her shoulders!

The Partisans then hid the whole group in hay wagons and sneaked through the German lines, posing as farmers, and took them to Sofia, Bulgaria where Russian transport planes used to land to refuel on their way to pick up supplies from Allied forces in Italy. The American boys persuaded the Russian pilots to let them hitch a ride---and they all got back to Italy, safe and sound.

Then they flew twenty-two more missions. They were then sent home and were sent for "R&R" in southern California. My brother had a brief leave at home before going to rest camp, and he was obviously suffering from "combat fatigue", as they euphimistically called it in those days, and needed the rest camp. He was offered the opportunity to be a lead squadron Navigator on B-29s in the Pacific, but he respectfully declined, having done more than his share and having accumulated enough combat points to be honorably discharged in June of 1945 as the war was beginning to wind down, the European phase ending in May of 1945 and the Pacific part terminating after the atomic bombs in August 1945.

It was a real war. Those memories don't seem like 65 years ago.