The Daily Brief

Thirty years ago this weekend, Mom and I were in the supermarket, and in the aisle with the flour and sugar and baking supplies and spices, I took a bottle off the shelf of Schilling brand spices, a cylindrical glass bottle with the light green plastic cap and green and gold label.
“I wonder how much longer we are going to see this?” I showed it to Mom. The label said ‘Cinnamon’ and in smaller letters “Saigon.”Mom looked at it thoughtfully, and said,
“Get three. We’d better stock up.”
Cinnamon was the only consumer good that we knew of that came out of South Vietnam, and as of the cruel month of April, 1975, there would probably be no more of it.

The North Vietnamese had overrun and taken all of the South. The last helicopter had taken off from the room of the American Embassy, and the newspaper was full of pictures, pictures of frantic people mobbing the gates, crammed into boats, thousands, hundreds of thousands of desperate people, pleading for rescue, for shelter, for succor. Their city was gone, their country was gone. There would be no more jars of “Cinnamon-Saigon” on the grocery store shelves. The war was over, but not the responsibility that seemed to hang- for some people – like an albatross around our necks.

We owed them, and for two years, I got used to taking off my shoes upon entering a home and the arrhythmical sound of English as spoken by Vietnamese, with no ‘f’ or ‘th’ sound and a ‘p’ roughly inserted instead, and a dash of pungent fish sauce on rice and into practically everything else, and small children forgetting that I did not understand Vietnamese and jabbering away at me anyway, and the crackly-crisp texture of spring rolls – a crust like deep-fried tissue paper, but not a drop of oil in the inside, vegetables and bean threads and little bits of pork sausage, and Grandmothers’ vegetable pickles – oh, yes, I may not know Vietnam, but I know the Vietnamese Diaspora. That Diaspora that somehow barely merits a mention on NPR on the occasion of this anniversary; some news reports have mentioned the fact that 2 million Vietnamese decamped in 1975 and the years following, but in all the stories on this solemn occasion I do not hear any of the stories I heard thirty years ago, or any hint of the terror that impelled people like my parent’s foster-son, or my friends Xuan-an and Hai Tran to leave everything – and run.

I am not hearing retellings of the account of the last commercial flight out of Danang, a flight which was mobbed by Vietnamese so desperate that they clawed and trampled each other for a chance to climb onto the rear air-stair of an airliner that didn’t even dare stop, but taxied up and down the ramp with a mob stampeding after it… I am not hearing any accounts of the USS Hancock, where helicopters were landing so thick and fast it was all they could do to empty out refugees and shove the helicopter overboard because there were two – three – four more helicopters hovering and desperate to land, each crammed full of desperate people. What of the USS Pioneer Contender, where Hai and Xuan-An, and her brother and all their families, and the families of the crew of a coastal patrol launch found brief refuge, at the edge of international waters? What of Hau, the Vietnamese AF mechanic- on a cargo plane which took refuge in Thailand, crammed with Viet Air Force personnel, or Bien, the youngest son of a well-to-do family, who somehow wrangled a visa and way out for him and him alone, so at least one of their blood could be safe, somewhere in the world?

Why are there no stories on NPR about how there was hardly a Vietnamese-American community before 1975, only a scattering of Vietnamese women who had married American men? At a community resettlement committee picnic, to which all the local committees had brought together all the refugees they had taken on responsibility for – and any other resident Vietnamese, as advertised in the local paper – the wife of an American contractor confessed to Xuan-an that she had been reticent to get in touch with any of the refugees until then. She was afraid she would be stigmatized as a former b-girl, or a whore; in fact, she had been a perfectly respectable secretary of a contracting firm in Saigon, and had married her husband with the blessings of her family. Xuan-an teared up and hugged her and said that there was no more any of that, they were now all the same; hopeful refugees in a new land.

I think it was this woman’s husband, who was legendary in the refugee community, who had gone back to Saigon in that cruel April, to bring out her mother and father. If they had a sponsor, they could get a visa, they could leave, so he went personally to fetch them away. He did get the parents out, but he also pledged to sponsor all of her sisters and brothers – and their families – and the families of his in-laws – immediate neighbors – and six or seven strangers whom he took on in passing, to the tune of eighty-plus individuals, brands spared from the expected holocaust. The only individual to equal that was the Baptist Vietnamese minister, proprietor of the only Vietnamese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, and possibly the whole Los Angeles area at that time. It was in a bare-bones and otherwise undistinguishable strip-mall, but it was a restaurant six days of the week, and on the seventh, a church – the cash register perched awkwardly on top of the piano, but Xuan-An’s mother, Grandmother respected him enormously, because he was truly a good and devout man— he was sponsoring other refugees right and left, giving them jobs in the restaurant and setting up dorms in the rooms above. Grandmother was herself a devout Buddhist, and a highly respected arbiter of such matters; as an elder whose immediate family had all managed to escape, she was rather envied by the other elders� most of whom had been carried away because their adult children insisted on it.

Yes, the Vietnamese community in Los Angeles — and a good few other places — sprung into existence almost instantly as these things go, after 1975. This is the story I am not hearing on NPR or in other mainstream news venues, a story I know happened because I was there. I wonder why? The thought occurs to me that it may be that the exodus of all those thousands might be seen as a reproach. All those people on crowded boats and helicopters, all those people mobbing the Embassy, passing their children over the bars, or getting them onto the orphan flights. It is a reproach, a criticism – even a condemnation of all of those who urged the abandonment of a bad war in a bad place. Every Chablis-and-Brie anti-war intellectual, every campus protestor, every Chomsky-fellow-traveler, every fading movie star or rising politician glomming on to the trendy political position, every bureaucrat with second thoughts about actions they had themselves urged on – they had a hand in pulling the plug on South Vietnam. They have no interest in the stories of people like Xuan-an, and Hai, and Kiet and Bien, and Grandmother, the guy who went to get his in-laws and returned with eighty other people, and those thousands of other Vietnamese in the great Diaspora? Oh, no, taking account of the stories would mean accepting the responsibility for putting them into the boats, and sending them into exile. We can’t have that, can we?

To: NPR
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Flogging a Dead Horse

1. I have been listening to the broadcast series, visiting Vietnam on the occasion of the 30-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon to the North, which has been airing this week on Morning Edition: a very interesting and evocative series, touching on many aspects and lives and experiences.

2. However… and this is the big however, it looks like tomorrow you plan to take a break from vigorously flogging the dead horse of Abu Graib, to take a couple of manly thwacks at the even more defunct equine corpse of My Lai. Well, fair enough, it did happen, it’s a part of the very sad history of the wars in South-East Asia, but I was rather grimly amused at how your reporter, in visiting the old Imperial City of Hue expended only a sentence or two on the massacre of civilians committed by the Viet Cong during their brief occupation of the city in 1968.

3. In other words, a systematic, purposeful selection, execution and secret burial of at least 2,300 civilians is just one of those embarrassing little things that it would be best not to mention very much, not if you want to keep your news access, old boy. How nice to know that NPR is following where Eason Jordan led editorially and selectively, in keeping a CNN bureau in Baghdad. Must not say anything rude about executions, enemies’ lists, and mass graves, old chap… it’s just their way of doing things.

4. Well, at this point, it’s all very much ancient history, but it is quite charming how NPR is managing to avoid much reminiscence about the tidal-wave of South Vietnamese refugees, fleeing their country on anything that would fly, roll or float, or even giving an audience born after 1975 any idea of the fear that those refugees had of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. They were fairly sure that they would be treated like those civilians in Hue, served out with a bullet and a muddy mass grave, and so preferred to take their chances. I am sure you will mention something about mobs surrounding the American Embassy, and the baby lifts, and how desperate South Vietnamese citizens were to escape the long knives of the North, sometime before the week 1s out.

5. Funny how many Vietnamese ended up in America, isn’t it… you’d think after My Lai, they’d have figured out who their friends really were.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

(More Vietnam materiel, from the archives, here and here)

Some time later, this picture was smuggled out of Occupied France, and circulated among the families, the picture that hung for years in Granny Jessie’s house: four graves piled lavishly with expensive chrysanthemums, the names of Menaul and Dodge clear, if mis-spelled, Butterfield partially visible on the far left, and ‘un-known American’ — Buonarobo, whose body was not identified for certain until after the war. According to Army records, the German authorities brought the bodies to Toul after the crash, for burial in the military quarter of the cemetery. It was a bitter comfort to the families: one mother wrote to Granny Jessie, “At least it is good to know that our boys had a decent burial. I had often wondered. I have had three close friends lately hit by this wicked war— two killed and one missing. I think that our boys and maybe ourselves are better off than a lot of people, as we know that nothing can hurt our boys again, and we can have what peace we can and not worry any more, but I would give my soul to have my boy come walking in.”

The notations in the Army Mortuary records gave me a clue to the riddle of who had taken the picture of the grave: Granny Jessie had vaguely alluded to the Red Cross, but James Festa had told me it had been smuggled out of France through the Resistance, and that it had been shown to the internees, that it was the first they had heard of what happened to Lt. Dodge. The four crewmen buried in Toul were the only Americans recovered from there by mortuary affairs personnel after the war. Two of the survivors were hidden there. I thought it very likely that somewhere in a medium to small-sized town which had been a node on an escape line, there was someone who whom the crash of an American bomber nearby was a significant and memorable event. Since the picture was smuggled out through a Resistance escape line, and I knew such a line operated in Toul, it seemed a logical assumption that someone involved in the Resistance in Toul must therefore have taken the picture. In the spirit of someone throwing a bottle with a note in it into the sea, I wrote to the Mayor of Toul, enclosing a copy of the picture, and asking if the Mayor’s office knew anything about the burials in 1943.

Astonishingly enough, they sent me the address of a Pierre Mathy, the same Pierre Mathy who had hidden McClendon and Chandler fifty years before! “My name is Pierre Mathy,” he wrote to me, “and I’m the one who took the picture in Toul Cemetery to show that (we) took care of the American graves, against the will of the Germans. I did not assist in the burial – German soldiers kept people apart while they gathered corpses. I was there at that moment and I started to look for survivors . . . I had established channel to Switzerland with Ms. Suzanne Kriek (called Regina, her Resistance name). She was murdered by the Germans the day before Liberation – she was a Resistance lieutenant; she owned false papers for the Red Cross so she was able to go everywhere. She went to Switzerland about three times a month. An acquaintance of mine was in the Resistance, so I decided to join it . . . I rescued 19 aviators, amongst them 9 Americans, 4 Australians, 4 English and 2 Canadians. . .”

So there it was, out of a pile of old records and letters, a couple of amazing coincidences, the answer to some niggling little questions, and a window into the past, and some reassurance about the qualities of ordinary people in extraordinary times and circumstances. It is gratifying to know that against the odds, in war and occupation, someone would see to the graves of four young strangers, piled with flowers, and take a snapshot to reassure four unknown families, far away. It is reassuring also to discover the courage and fortitude of ordinary people— no headline heroes, no Hollywood spectacle, just people who did what they felt was right and their duty, unflinchingly in the face of odds: Jimmy-Junior and Louis Buonarobo refusing to leave their gun stations, Sherman Dodge and John Chandler staying to the last, conscientious Frank Francis scrounging another set of charts and seeing to the destruction of the classified “G” box, Pierre Mathy and his friends, feeding, hiding and guiding the survivors to safety, and those families at home, whose concern for each other helped them endure separation and grief. Ordinary people all, best remembered by the ordinary rest of us.

I did all this tracking down of survivors and witnesses nearly twelve years ago, and wrote the original account shortly afterwards. I worked together sources as various as the collection of letters written by my uncle in 1943, the letters written to my grandmother by relatives of the other crewmen and friends, various official Army Air Corps reports on the loss of the aircraft, the set of questionnaires completed by Lt. Chandler on the circumstances under which he last saw each of the dead or missing crewmen, another set of files from Army Mortuary Affairs, a collection of rips from the Escape and Evasion Society, interviews with James Festa and James Becker, and picking the brains of such varied experts as Colonel (Ret.) Frank Halm of the 94th BG Memorial Association, and a USAF crash investigator who thoroughly briefed me on exactly how a damaged and abandoned B-17 would impact the ground. Each set of facts, names, and actions fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, and quite often, a tentative supposition that I had made, would be later confirmed by a witness, or by the record. I was never able to contact any other relatives of the Lonesome Polecat crew; there were, for example, no telephone listings for Butterfield in the entire state of Idaho by 1993. Sgt. Thomas, SSgt. McClendon and Lt. Chandler all survived the war, but their Veterans’ Administration files went into inactive status by the late 1970ies. Chandler and his family made a return trip to Toul, and a reunion with Pierre Mathy sometime in the 1960ies. His return was noted by the local newspaper, and Pierre Mathy’s grandson sent me copies of clippings after Mathy himself died in 1995. I transferred to Korea in 1993, loosing touch with James Festa and James Becker at about that time. Neither of them were in good health, and have since dropped from the rolls of the 94th BG association.
My uncle, Lt. Dodge, Sgt. Buonarobo and Sgt. Butterfield are buried in the American cemetery at St. Avold. Lt. Francis’ family had him brought back after the war, and interred in the VA cemetery at Ft. Bliss, since the military wouldn’t let his remains stay in Flirey. Even the original letters and pictures are gone;Jimmy-junior’s woolen uniform jacket and the Purple Heart all burned in the fire two years ago, although I had meticulously transcribed all the letters and rephotographed the pictures.

“..And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.” (Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald)

(Sgt. James Menaul, taken while on leave before going overseas)

My first letter to the 94th Bomb Group memorial association included a telephone number and address for James Becker. Later I located James Festa simply by calling the information operator for Brooklyn and asking of there were a listing for that name. From those gentlemen, the only then-living survivors of Crew #30, and a stack several inches thick of reports from various government archives, contemporary letters, and interviews with an assortment of special experts , I was able to trace what had happened to the Lonesome Polecat II.

In the second wave of bombers over the ball-bearing factories, they made the target, dropping incendiaries onto the wreckage, when they were hit by anti-aircraft fire. With an engine on fire, they dropped out of the protective formation heading west, and were attacked by German fighters. They were last seen by those who returned to Bury St. Edmunds about sixty miles southwest of Schweinfurt, still heading west under power, still fighting. But in a very short space— about fifteen or twenty minutes, they ran out of luck, ammunition and time.

Sgt. Buonarobo ran out of ammunition first, but refused an order to leave the now-useless ball turret, swinging empty guns to bear on attacking fighters. Lt. Dodge took the “Lonesome Polecat” down to the minimum altitude for a safe parachute dump, trying to discourage fighter attacks from below. Sgt Butterfield was killed at his position at the waist gun, and Jimmy-Junior disabled by a stomach wound, crawled back into the tail compartment and returned fire until struck again, probably mortally. Sgt McLendon and Lt. Dodge were also wounded, to a lesser degree. Flight engineer James Festa, in the top turret with an excellent view all the way around, would only tell me that the aircraft was terribly damaged: the tail section was in shreds and a wing well on fire. Sgt. Thomas, the surviving waist gunner, and SSgt. Mclendon then reported taking Sgt. Buonarobo out of the ball turret, also dead.

The intercom knocked out as well, James Festa never heard an order to jump until Lt. Chandler came back and told him directly to bale out of the crippled aircraft. Lt. Francis went to destroy the “G” box, a receiver which allowed a target to be identified when two beams intersected over it. James Festa, going towards the bomb bay to jump out, was blown out through it by an explosion on or near the craft. To the day I spoke to him he still didn’t know why he wasn’t killed by it. The other survivors jumped, the two pilots Dodge and Chandler together at the last, Dodge saying tersely “So long,” leaving the aircraft to crash two kilometers south of the village of Essey-et-Maiserais, near a country road at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Part of it caught fire. The Germans came at once and kept the curious away, while they gathered up the remaining ammunition and guns, and the bodies of the three gunners.

Lt. Dodge’s body was found later, probably a short distance away. His parachute had not opened. Lt. Chandler himself hit the ground hard, and broke three toes. Lt. Francis’ parachute also failed; he fell into woodlands near Flirey, and his body was not found until six months later. The villagers of Flirey, led by their mayor, defiantly held a funeral mass and buried him in their little cemetery. (After the war, the family wished that he could remain there, where people had been so kind and brave, but the War Department insisted on removal to a military cemetery.)

The survivors were scattered far across Alsace-Lorraine. Sgt. Thomas was captured immediately by the German authorities, but the others were luckier, thanks to Pierre Mathy, the restaurateur and innkeeper of Toul. A week after the crash of the “Lonesome Polecat”, Pierre Mathy received a cryptic message from a local farmer, who had a ‘bag of carrots’ for him. In actuality, Mathy was a Resistant, running an escape line into Switzerland, the farmer was one of his contacts, and the ‘bag of carrots’ was actually SSgt. McClendon, complete with two bullets in his leg. Two doctors in Toul secretly operated to remove them and McClendon was sent down the line to safety. Lt. Chandler crawled westward for three days, finally sheltering in a haystack near a farmhouse. He watched the farmhouse for three days more, waiting to see of Germans or French lived there. Desperation drove him to approach it: again, lucky— the farmer was another of Pierre Mathy’s contacts. Given clothes and false papers, he later wrote his wife that the hardest thing he had to do was cram his broken toes into civilian shoes and not limp as he walked by German soldiers in a small town. James Festa was picked up in the little village of Void, near Nancy, by the local policeman, who gave him clothes and food, and passed him from friend to trustworthy friend, hiding him in the house of a wealthy soap-manufacturer in Verdun, and a houseboat on the river before being smuggled over the border and reunited with the others in Swiss internment.

For months afterwards, stunned and grieving families wrote back and forth, first with dignified condolences, then sharing grief and what information they were able to find out. Mrs. Butterfield wrote stoically, “We can be thankful that they didn’t have to suffer long . . . we have our oldest boy in New Guinea and another boy in England with the 341st Engineers. So you can see we must carry on and be brave as we know not when we will have to face this sorrow again.” Mrs. Chandler, who had given birth to a daughter, two weeks before the “Lonesome Polecats'” first mission, and Mildred Dodge, Lt. Dodge’s mother, coordinated the letter-writing. First, all the ‘boys’ were reported missing. Weeks later, Lt. Dodge, Sgt. Butterfield and Jimmy-junior were reported killed, and Sgt. Thomas a POW. Lt. Francis and Sgt. Buonarobo remained missing until almost the end of the war, a matter of distress among the letter-writers. The four in Switzerland wrote to their families, who promptly wrote to Mrs. Chandler or Mrs. Dodge, who copied extracts and sent them to other families. A picture of the four internees, showing them safe and well, was circulated. Mrs. Dodge, whose grief in fifty-year-old letters was raw and lacerating, sent Granny Jessie a snapshot of her son and herself, taken on his last leave, and Granny Jessie sent one of Jimmy-Junior. They corresponded for years afterwards.

(Sgt. James Menaul, taken while on leave before going overseas)

(Standing:Butterfield, Festa, Thomas, Menaul, Buonarobo, McClendon.
Kneeling: Francis, Dodge, Chandler, Becker)

The ten men in this picture assembled in May of 1943 at Ephrata Army Air Base, Washington, a place of which Jimmy-Junior wrote in disgust, “They have me living in a tent, out in somebody’s cow pasture. When we get into a crew, we move into hutments that are bigger than a doghouse, but smaller than a garage. I am the official ‘sound-the-alarm-er’ in case of rain. There is a rip in the canvas over my head, so I will be the first to know – it’s getting dark now and somebody forgot to put electric lights in this tent so I guess this is all I can write.” Two weeks later, he wrote, “As of this morning I am head armorer-gunner of crew #30. Crew #30 isn’t much to get excited about though, as all we have besides myself are the second armorer-gunner and the bombardier. I’m going to insist on a pilot before I do much.” A week later: “Our crew is changed around considerable. We lost everyone we had, but now we have a pilot, copilot and myself, which is much more practical than before . . . We fly today for the first time. Didn’t do much of anything but land and take off. After the third time I lost interest and slept most of the time.”

An observant young man with an unexpectedly sardonic sense of humor, born and raised in Pasadena, he had gone to trade school and left a job in the lithography department of the Los Angeles Times. Firmly convinced of all the then-forty-eight states there was only one good one, he was pleased that two other Californians were assigned to Crew #30: Lt. John Chandler, the co-pilot, was from Vallejo, and waist-gunner Sgt. Robert Thomas from Burbank. Both were married, and Mrs. Chandler was expecting a baby. True to the movie cliche, though, the rest of the crew was from all over: pilot and A/C commander, Lt. Sherman Dodge— also newly married— from Boston; bombardier Lt. James Becker from Kennet Square, Pennsylvania; flight engineer SSgt. James Festa, from Brooklyn; Sgt Louis Buonarobo, the ball-turret gunner (notably shorter than the other crewmembers) from the Bronx; navigator Lt. Frank Francis of El Paso, Texas; radioman SSgt Douglas McLendon from Greenville Mississippi, and waist-gunner Sgt. Warren Butterfield from Salmon, Idaho.

By mid-June they had accumulated fifteen flying hours. “Yesterday we made what they call ‘dry runs’—that is, going thru the motions of bombing something and don’t: that way, we bombed the city of Wenatchee, blew up the school in Quincy, a couple of dams, bridges and just about everything else in sight . . . got a letter from George— he had his first airplane ride and wished now he was flying. He could have had my place the other day when we went up to 30,000 feet, It got down to 40 below and I had to forget my flying boots! We just got up there and then an oil line broke so we had to come down, which couldn’t have happened at a better time. My nose was running under my oxygen mask and freezing on my lip. Very annoying. We had a gunnery mission today; I had the tail guns. I think they are mine permanently. At least I hope so, as I like it . . . we shot at targets on the ground. . .”

In July they moved to Geiger Field, near Spokane, for continuing training and a series of long flights all over the northwest; “We are supposed to be very observing of everything we see in the way of military objectives, especially trains and railway yards. Then we get questioned all about it, just as if we were over Germany or some place. I guess I will have to give up sleeping on future flights . . the navigator is getting me a set of maps so I can be able to tell where we are at. He claims in the tail I have the best view— not that anyone is depending on me, but he wants two of us . . “
In late fall, they were assigned a new B-17F, promptly christened the “Lonesome Polecat” by Lt. Dodge. Following another month of training flights, they ferried it to England, where the aircraft went to the replacement depot, and the crew to Rougham airfield, near Bury St. Edmunds, where they were assigned to an aircraft there. They promptly re-christened it “Lonesome Polecat II” but James Festa lamented during one of our conversations, they didn’t have it long enough to paint an emblem on the nose. Jimmy-Junior sent a telegram on arrival to let the family know they had arrived safely. Four V-mail letters followed, the last dated the day before his first combat mission: He couldn’t make sense of the coinage, there wasn’t much to buy that wasn’t rationed, he was making money faster than he could spend it. He hoped to visit London, and he had bought a bicycle to get around the field.

(Next: Part 3— Schweinfurt)

The first picture hung in a black frame, in the back bedroom of Granny Jessie’s house in Pasadena for many years, a black and white photo of four graves piled high with flowers. Only recently did my mother realize, upon looking closely at it, that the flowers were carefully tended hot-house chrysanthemums, and even more fabulously expensive in 1943 as they are now. The grave markers are plain wooden crosses, painted white and the names just barely visible, for the picture was taken in haste and surreptitiously, smuggled out of Occupied France.

“James Menaud” is one of two names which can be clearly read; a misspelling of James Menaul who was my mother’s older brother, Jimmy Junior who was a tail gunner on a B-17 and died in the war. There was a badly-tinted portrait-photo in Granny Jessie’s living room, a young man awkward in a hastily fitted set of woolen class-As, smirking uncomfortably at the camera, frozen forever at 19. Our curiosity about him was never rewarded. Mom had been only thirteen at the time. Ten years ago, when my father found a picture of Jimmy Juniors’ crew— ten young men on the tarmac in front of a B-17, awkwardly solemn or cocky and smiling— everything had faded from memory except for the name of the aircraft commander, Lt. Sherman Dodge. We knew that only because his grave was next to Jimmy-Juniors’ in an unknown cemetery somewhere in France. The rest of what we knew fitted into one sentence: Sgt. James Menaul, Jr. was killed in action in the fall of 1943 on one of the raids on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing factories, and some of the other crewmen had survived and escaped into Switzerland. Dad finally asked me, as a persistent and inventive snoop, if I could find out their names and whereabouts, and what had happened to them.

I started with my uncle’s service number and unit of assignment, the 331st Squadron, 94th Bomb Group, Bury St. Edmunds. It was one of the units that had formed an association (since dissolved due to the age and infirmity of many of the members), and they replied promptly to my first letter of inquiry, confirming that Jimmy-Junior’s B-17, the Lonesome Polecat II was one of those lost on Black Thursday, October 14th, 1943.

60 8th Air Force B-17s, each with a crew of ten were lost in a single day, attacking the ball-bearing factories in two waves at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, running a gauntlet of German air defenses to and from the target. A report on the status of various missing crewman, sent from the Army Mortuary Affairs Office contained some riveting extracts: Flights of enemy aircraft stood of at 1,500 yards on both sides and tail of the formation to ‘lob’ rockets or heavy cannon projectiles into the formation, while others attacked from the nose and top and bottom . . . Several enemy aircraft would dive through the formation from all angles, at times coming within four to six hundred yards . . . many that went down were hit by rockets or heavy cannon . . . whenever a Fortress was hit – it either exploded or fell apart. . . This aircraft was last heard on the ‘command channel’ and there were no eyewitnesses . . . This report showed no further information; the plane was simply missing from the formation . . .A total of 80 parachutes were seen in the vicinity of the target . . .the survivors were so busy avoiding enemy aircraft they were unable to observe what happened . . . Of the eighteen planes from this particular group which went on this mission, three aborted, thirteen failed to return and two completed the mission . . .Last seen at 1400 hours, just before it reached the target . . .Lost as a result of enemy aircraft.

(Next: Part 2: Crew Pictures and Old Letters)

(A version of this article was published in “Friends’ Journal”, the quarterly publication of the US Air Force Museum Foundation, Wright Patterson AFB, and accepted by a historical publication which shall remain nameless since they never actually scheduled it for publication or paid me a dime for it… and didn’t look likely to within the lifetime of anyone involved. William tells me that that particular magazine usually fobs off writers with a couple of subscriptions in lieu of cash anyway. I blow a large raspberry in their direction and publish it here anyway!)

There was one redeeming factor to James Cameron’s “Titanic” movie, to my eyes; and that lay in how rich, realistic and convincing the set of the “unsinkable” liner looked. How very solid, luxurious and sheltering it all appeared, such perfectly recreated spaces… and I could see how people would have been reluctant to leave it, at first. Who wanted to bounce around in a tiny open boat on the cold, on the open water? Surely, a ship as big as the Titanic, with every possible comfort, and modern advantage couldn’t be mortally wounded. Surely rescue was on the way, the situation couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that… Well, it was, and after seeing the movie, I could understand why the first couple of boats went away half-empty.

But there is a tenuous family connection to the loss of the Titanic, through the person of Granny Dodie’s older brother, Great Uncle Fred.
Great-Uncle Fred had a lady in a frilly skirt tattooed on each forearm, who did a kind of shimmy when he flexed his muscles, and he had been a sailor. He had been, in fact, a real sailor, on a real sailing ship, and had been around the Horn no less than four times, and thrilled us children with the tale of how he had fallen out of the topmost bit of rigging, once… but had managed to catch hold of a lower bit of canvas and rope before his Captain had been able to do much more than recollect the page number of the burial service in his Book of Common Prayer. (Well, we thought it was thrilling, everybody else had been listening to the same old story for forty years and were bored rigid.)

By 1912, the allure of a seafaring life had lost its charms for Great Uncle Fred and he was working on land, in Wanamakers’ Department Store in New York. (I have no idea in what capacity!) Wanamaker’s had a powerful Marconi wireless station on it’s roof. David Sarnoff, who would eventually be the president of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, was the station manager and one of the operators. This Marconi station was one of the most powerful on the east coast, and was one of the first to receive news that the Titanic had struck an iceberg and might be sinking. It seemed barely credible, perhaps exaggerated, at first. According to Great Uncle Fred, one of the managers who knew he had been a sailor asked him if it were possible that a great ship like that might actually be so damaged that it would in fact, sink.

His moment of faint glory, being asked for his professional expertise in such weighty and tragic matters; his answer was a masterpiece of noncommittal caution;
“Could very well be,” Great Uncle Fred said.
I wish, now, that we had been able to make him tell us some other stories, but those are the only two I remember.