Let me tell you about my father. He died, a drunk, in a cheap hotel, on the floor of a mildewed, peeling room with a dirt-blackened bathtub that I will never, ever forget. But he wasn`t always a drunk. Once, he was a ball-turret gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress. Before he was 20, he had sailed through flak and fighters on 25 bombing raids over Europe. I marvel at that now. I hold on to it.
He fell far, it is true. He was only 44 when he died in June 1970 at the Rogge Hotel in Zanesville, Ohio. I was 20, a sophomore in college. I hardly knew the man. My parents had split when I was 8. My mother, Shirley, had packed her two kids into the back seat of her brother`s Pontiac and had escaped to the safe harbor of her father`s yellow brick house in Pittsburgh. There had been fights. Bad fights. My sister and I still remember crying in bed, hearing my father curse and my mother scream, dreading the banging furniture and the hard slaps. ”Your father is not a bad man,” our mother always said later. ”It`s the drinking.”
Don`t misunderstand: There were good times too. I remember a foggy dawn on the Muskingum River when my father taught me to tie a hook. I remember driving home for breakfast and learning from him how to fry scrambled eggs in a black iron skillet. I remember watching in disbelief as my father and my sister, Trish, swallowed hot Mexican peppers from the jar, holding them like wiggling goldfish and dropping them into their mouths.
My father`s experience with alcohol had begun during the war, my mother said. ”They`d come back from a bombing mission, and they`d give the crew a shot of whiskey to calm them down,” she said. I was proud my dad had been in the war, just like other kids` dads in the 1950s. I`d wear his leather helmet, oxygen mask and jade goggles to the war games in the neighborhood. But combat clearly had damaged my father. My mother recalled that early in their marriage, he would lurch upright in bed, drenched in sweat, eyes wide open, shouting the locations of German fighter planes.
After my parents separated, I saw my father twice. Once, while taking out the trash in Pittsburgh, I found him skulking in the breezeway beside the house. He ran. Even then, I think, I recognized his guilt. The second time, I drove to see him in Zanesville. My grandmother came to the screen door. She didn`t know me at first. I said my name a second time, and in the living room behind her, lighted by a TV screen, I could see my father as he jumped up from one of those old, overstuffed sofas and ran up the stairs. It took him 10 minutes to come down. He was afraid of me.
He was gaunt and hollow-eyed and wore a white T-shirt and baggy brown pants and slippers. We shook hands. He looked away. So did I. Grandmother prattled on and on, nervously. We had coffee in blue cups, with Carnation condensed milk, and sat on the back steps under a withered grape arbor. I remember only a fragment of what was said. I think he said, ”I`m sorry,” and I think I said-well, I remember boasting about how well I was doing in this and that. I wanted him to be proud of me.
Two years later, when we buried him at Greenwood Cemetery in Zanesville, a local VFW post-or maybe it was the American Legion-sent an honor guard to perform the simple rites to which any honorably discharged American veteran is entitled. The casket lay over the grave, draped in a United States flag. We heard three sharp cracks of a rifle. A trumpeter blew taps, and my heart could barely stand it.
My mother, my sister and I-we told ourselves it was appropriate for him to be buried with military honors. The war, we said, marked the peak of his life. It probably ruined him also. But flying in combat was one thing he did with distinction. It was a difficult thing, noble and maybe even heroic.
For a long time afterward, I thought about what we had said that day at the grave. I came to realize that to understand my father, even a little, I had to learn something about his wartime experience. Finally, early in 1988, having passed my 38th birthday and with two children of my own, I was ready to set out to try.
To be sure, I had a leg up-a copy of my father`s Army Air Corps discharge. My sister and I had found the paper in a trunk after our mother died in 1978. We also found the bronze wings my father had worn, his staff-sergeant stripes and a frayed Eighth Air Force shoulder patch. I was sure that I remembered seeing some ribbons as a kid, but they were gone. Hocked, maybe.
I called the Department of Defense, which said: Write to the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. The center wrote back: Many of its personnel records-including my father`s-had been destroyed in a fire.
The U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, recommended I contact Thomas L. Thomas of Wheaton, Ill., a leader of the Eighth Air Force Historical Society. ”What bomb group was your father in?” Thomas asked when I called. I looked in my papers-the 390th Bomb Group, I said. ”I`ll give you the name of our contact in that group,” he replied.
The thrill I felt go up my spine turned into an electrical jolt when I called John F. Quinn in Scottsdale, Ariz., and heard him say: ”Thomas H. Infield? Yes, I remember your dad. He was in my squadron. I`ve been looking for him.” It turned out that Quinn, a retired civil-service worker from New York, keeps the records for the 390th Bomb Group Veterans Association. My father`s name was on a list of 571st Squadron members he could not account for.
My questions tumbled out. Where was the bomb group based? In Framlingham, in Suffolk, East Anglia, 12 miles from the English coast on the North Sea. What I most wanted to know was this: Would it be possible to contact men my father had flown with? Quinn said, ”Yes, it would.” The association had acquired microfiches of 90,000 pages of wartime reports on the bomb group`s 301 missions. Quinn said he would scan the records. Wherever my father`s name showed up, those of his crewmates would be likely to appear also.
A week later, Quinn`s baritone voice was back on the line. He had come across a batch of 10 likely names. Two men on the list, he knew, were dead. He had no information on four others. But he had found four names with addresses and phone numbers. I was shocked and told him so. He laughed. ”We try,” he said. ”You`re the son of a 390th veteran, aren`t you?” That made me family, he said. A volunteer would go over the mission reports, one by one, he said, and document which ones my father flew.
That was on a Friday. On Monday I started calling names on the list. The first guy I called, in Milwaukee, had never heard of my father, nor anyone else on the list. Another guy I couldn`t reach. Then I called Bellingham, Wash., up near British Columbia, and asked for Eugene M. Wickkiser.
I told Wickkiser who I was and what I was up to and apologized for calling out of the blue. It took him a second to start to push away 43 years. ”Oh, yes,” he said, ”I remember Tom.” I got another electric jolt. Wickkiser, now 67, a retired commercial airline pilot who runs an airport shuttle service, had been commander of a B-17 aircraft he had nicknamed Satan`s Second Sister. My father, he said, was not among his original 10-man crew. ”Tom came to us after our regular ball-turret gunner was killed,” he said, ”run over by a truck as we went out to fly a mission. Tom was sent out to replace him.”
Wickkiser remembered the dead gunner`s name: Al Seaquist-”a little guy, from Iowa, I think.” My father was small too-5-foot-7, if that. The little guys always ended up in the ball turret, which hung on the belly of a B-17 like an egg sac. The Army looked for boys who had grown up with a shotgun in their hands and knew how to lead a target. That, too, was my father. The Army had trained him in the Arizona desert to lead with twin .50-caliber machine guns. ”Tom, as I remember, was rather withdrawn, or maybe an introvert to some extent,” Wickkiser said. ”Well, I mean he wasn`t the outgoing person that some of the other crew members were. . . . Perhaps he didn`t feel he fit in because he was a Johnny-come-lately.”
I craved to know: What was it like to fly into combat? Wickkiser, who was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross as a B-17 pilot in World War II and who signed up again for the Berlin Airlift and then flew during the Korean War, struggled to put war into words.
”I think, basically, the worst was over by the time we got over there,” he said. ”We saw very few enemy fighter aircraft. Our biggest enemy was flak- the antiaircraft fire. That`s kind of like a ghost. You don`t even know it`s there until you see a puff of smoke. And we saw a great deal of that. . . . We did have one emergency landing in Belgium. . . . The bombing was all high-altitude stuff. In the cockpit, we never saw much of the ground or the target. I guess, in the ball turret, your father did.”
I mentioned his alcoholism and asked Wickkiser if he had seen any sign of it. The line went silent. Wickkiser cleared his throat noisily. ”Well, I wasn`t going to mention that. He did, I know, have a little drinking problem when he was with us. It did not affect his performance as far as anyone could tell. We just figured he needed it to calm him down.”
But then, all soldiers drank, Wickkiser quickly added, taking my father`s defense. ”We all did it over there, I guess. It was, `Eat, drink and be merry because you don`t know if you`re going to be here tomorrow.` ”
The following night, another crew member gave me yet another jolt-and a reason to suspect why my father may have hit the bottle. ”Wasn`t his original crew shot down?” asked Francis E. Whitney, speaking on the phone from his home in Rockville Centre, N.Y.
Whitney, the owner of a chain of seven grocery stores in the Fire Island resort area, had been Wickkiser`s ”togglier”-the man who toggled the switch to drop the bombs. He rode in the nose of the B-17 and let the bombs go when he saw the group`s lead bombardier let go. When he wasn`t doing that, his job was to man a Browning machine gun.
”I seem to remember the way your father came to us was that his original crew was shot down when he wasn`t on the mission,” Whitney said. ”That whole crew perished. I think that was your father`s original crew. I`m sure of it. If he wasn`t a drunk, that would have started him off pretty good. . . . That whole crew is gone. They went down in the Channel. We saw them go. . . . They got hit somewhere over Germany and tried to make it home.”
Whitney remembered other things. He remembered my father`s high forehead and dark, deep-set eyes. He remembered him as ”a quiet guy, off by himself, drinking.” Not a ladies` man. ”I can remember,” he said, ”we started shooting at planes on one mission, thinking they were Messerschmitts. I can recall your father yelling over the intercom, `They`re ours, they`re ours, stop shooting!` They were P-51s. Your father was a settling influence. He was kind of slow-talking, a guy that settled everybody down.”
Whitney gave me a clue to help track down proof that my father had had another crew, a lost crew. ”Ask Quinn,” he said, ”to look in his records for a guy named Gentile. I remember there was a Gentile in that crew because he was from Amityville, N.Y.” The next night, I called Quinn. He put down the phone, then came back. ”I`ve got a Richard J. Gentile, Lindenhurst, N.Y., but no information he was killed.” Quinn said he`d check further. Most likely, he said, my father had been a pool gunner, an extra man who flew with any number of crews.
While waiting, I decided to visit another combat veteran. And so, in February 1988, I drove down to Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Del., to see a B-17 named Shoo-Shoo Baby, which mechanics from the 512th Military Airlift Wing were restoring to mint condition. I would go back to see the plane several times before it flew to the Air Force Museum the following October.
A steady rain drummed the steel hangar as I walked around the aircraft. Fliers, I`m told, tend to think of their ships in pet terms. An airplane doesn`t have a front end, it has a nose. It has a tail, ribs, a belly, even a chin, and the sheet steel that encases it is called a ”skin.” Shoo-Shoo Baby struck me as a great winged horse with high withers. I had read how tough B-17s were in combat, how hard they were to knock down. I was surprised, then, to find that the skin was about as thick as the side of a file cabinet-a mere 1/50th to 1/20th of an inch. ”Oh, yeah,” said Ray McCloskey, the work crew leader. ”Bullets went right through that.” The ball-turret gunner sat curled in a Plexiglas ball, his legs wide apart. The position had a tendency to make a gunner feel very vulnerable. ”They used to sit on their flak vests,” McCloskey said with a grin.
In the hangar, mounted on a display board, were photos of B-17s on which amateur artists had painted seminudes and other pictures to go with the devil- be-damned names. I couldn`t find Satan`s Second Sister, but there was a Satan`s Daughter, along with Laden Maiden, Fertile Myrtle and Sleeptime Gal, the last of which depicted a girl in her nightie, arms raised above her head. The Germans did not encourage this kind of thing. Neither did the British. It was typically American.
I was captivated by a photo of two fliers in front of a plane. On the right stood a young lieutenant with a pointed cap cocked down to his eyebrow. He had a skinny neck, big ears and a wide, leering grin. His collar was open, and his jacket pockets were stuffed like chipmunk cheeks. He wore a look of almost lustful insouciance.
Beside him stood an officer in a police-style cap. He wore a fur-collared jacket. His head was tilted to the left; his hat, to the right. His hands were in his pockets, and he bore a look of casual self-confidence. He was probably a bomber pilot, while the other guy was probably a fighter jockey. There was, I thought, something unmistakably American about these men-cocky, free-spirited, more than a little skeptical and irreverent.
I suddenly felt very patriotic, standing there in the hangar. I had graduated from high school in the spring of 1968-the spring of Martin Luther King Jr.`s assassination and of Robert Kennedy`s assassination. I was in college during the spring of 1970-Kent State spring, the spring of Nixon`s Cambodia invasion. I had weathered the Vietnam War draft as a deferred student. I was not disposed to think of warfare in romantic terms. Yet I felt romance come over me there, and again elsewhere in my search, as I wondered at great deeds done in a great, though terrible, time.
One morning the mail carrier propped a book against my front door. Wickkiser had trusted me with his copy of the official 390th Bomb Group history, compiled as the war was ending in 1945. I got a paring knife and worked it through the strapping tape, sat down at the dining room table in my bathrobe and began to thumb through pictures of air crews posed with their planes. Where was my father? There! With Wickkiser and crew. Down on his right knee, his wrist dangling over the other knee. Huge black boots, thick and padded. Built, no doubt, for the sub-zero temperature of 30,000 feet. He looked tired to me. Maybe a little wasted. A hangover? Or my imagination?
I paged through the list of cities the group had bombed: Hanover, Kassel, Frankfurt, Koblenz, Leipzig, Berlin . . . and Dresden. Oh, my, Dresden. Was that the raid on Dresden? The raid that, paired with a British attack by night, killed tens of thousands of people? The raid that caused so much destruction that it led to the coining of the word ”firestorm”?
Some time later, I called Whitney, asking if he had any information to help Quinn document the missions my father flew. I asked him, ”Were you involved in the raid on Dresden?”
There was a long silence. ”We went to Dresden, unfortunately.”
The famous raid?
”Yeah. The one Kurt Vonnegut wrote about. Yeah, I`m afraid I was on that one. . . . There was absolutely no military purpose.”
Whitney sounded forlorn, resigned. All I could think to do was commiserate.
My father, too, had been on that mission, I said.
Vonnegut had been an American POW in Dresden. His novelized account of the raid, ”Slaughter-House Five,” was a touchstone for my generation in college. Oddly, I had not read it. I did so now:
Later, when Quinn`s investigation produced a full list of my father`s missions, a Dresden raid was on it. By then, though, I had discovered that Whitney was mistaken, that the Dresden mission flown by the 390th on March 2, 1945, was not the notorious raid, which had occurred about two weeks earlier, on Valentine`s Day.
”The Destruction of Dresden,” a 1963 book by Englishman David John Cawdell Irving, says this of the March 2 raid: ”In spite of the anxiety of the American secretary of war about public opinion on the Dresden tragedy, a further American daylight attack was launched. . . . Over 1,200 bombers, escorted by all 15 fighter groups, took off soon after 6:30 a.m. to attack oil refineries at Magdeburg, Ruhland and Bohlen and a tank plant at Magdeburg. . . . The marshaling yards at Dresden and Chemnitz were reported as having been attacked as secondary targets. . . . The reports of the individual bombardment groups suggest, however, that as before, the marshaling yards were just a euphemism for the city area.”
When I told Quinn I was brooding over all of this, he almost chewed my head off. ”It was a job that had to be done, and, damn it, it was done. You have no idea what was in Dresden. Don`t feel bad. I have no compunction about it at all, believe me, believe me. I`m telling you the way we felt. I`m pretty sure your father felt the same way.”
How must a soldier feel when he stays behind while his buddies get killed? He must feel guilty for surviving. Whitney thought he remembered that my father was such a man. I had to know for sure.
