Wickkiser came through again. He wrote to say that he had bored deeper into his files and had come up with several original documents given to him as commander of his B-17. One, dated Nov. 11, 1944, contained a long list of rookie air crews arriving in England from training bases in the United States and identified the bomb groups to which they`d been assigned. By chance, my father`s name was on the same sheet of paper-listed not with Wickkiser`s crew but with a crew led by Second Lt. Cassius B. Kennedy. The two crews had arrived in England the very same day.
I looked quickly for Kennedy`s name in the 390th history book. He was reported killed in action. There was also a Gentile in the crew, just as Whitney had thought there would be. Gentile was reported missing in action. I went down the list of five other names in Kennedy`s crew besides my father`s. All but one were KIA or MIA.
Why did my father miss the mission? Why? All I could think of was the English Channel, gray, deep and cold. Skeletons under water. No wonder my father drank. I had seen the Channel once, from the beaches of Normandy. Under a drab sky, it was, indeed, dark and forbidding.
I looked up the hometowns of Kennedy and crew. Kennedy himself was from Brownville, Neb. I called directory assistance and found only one Kennedy in Brownville. The next day, I spoke to Barbara Kennedy, wife of Clay Kennedy, the dead flier`s brother.
Three or four parachutes had been seen, she said. There was one only survivor, picked up off the Belgian coast. The airplane had burst into flames and had sunk in the North Sea, not the Channel, on Feb. 17, 1945. Kennedy, known to his family as Bond, was 24 years old. His body was never found. After a year, the Army declared him dead and sent his mother, Ruth, a Purple Heart, together with a brief, printed message on a card: ”It is an honor for me to forward this decoration-Robert P. Patterson, secretary of war.”
Barbara Kennedy had gone to her files now. Bond`s mother, she said, had written and published ”A Brief Life History” of her son. ”Every spring, she would go up and clean the trunk that she kept all of Bond`s things in. She had all his uniforms and things in the trunk. That was always a bad day when she would go up to clean the trunk.”
Bond`s father, Cassius, died in 1971; his mother, in 1976. They never knew, Barbara Kennedy said, the real story of Bond`s death.
”They were returning from a mission to Frankfurt. . . . When planes came in from a mission, the gunners would always get rid of their ammunition. They would clear their guns. One of the gunners (on another plane) apparently was careless and shot them down. As I understand it, that fellow had a complete nervous breakdown. . . . It was one of those things that makes you become a fatalist. It just happened. Either he didn`t realize the plane was there, or he didn`t look.”
About a month after speaking to Barbara Kennedy, I talked to Quinn again, who had completed his list of my father`s missions. I learned now that my father had flown seven missions with Kennedy, including a famous Christmas Eve 1944 attack on the German divisions isolating the American troops at the Battle of the Bulge.
Quinn also had a stunning bit of information: My father had not missed the Feb. 17, 1945, mission. He had flown it, after all-with Wickkiser. Hadn`t Whitney said, ”We saw them go. . .”? My father evidently had witnessed Kennedy and the others die.
The Army has never said Kennedy was killed by his own men. The 390th group history reports only: ”Although there was but moderate flak, one plane was winged sufficiently to encounter trouble at Ostend, Belgium. There was one survivor who bailed out and was picked up from the North Sea. The plane crashed and sank.”
Barbara Kennedy said she could guess how my father felt not going down with the crew. ”That happened to my brother,” she said. ”The plane with his crew crashed taking off. My brother always felt it was his fault; he should have been on the plane. He had very strong guilt.”
Come summer, my family and I were planning a drive to Idaho to see my sister. We decided to visit the Kennedys in Nebraska on our way home across the Plains. On a hot August night, we sat with them under the Tiffany-style lamp in the rambling kitchen of their 108-year-old farmhouse, cooled by old shade trees, and talked about the kinship we shared. Clay Kennedy had lost a brother he knew too little. ”Bond was in high school when I was still in elementary school,” he said. I had lost a father I hardly knew at all.
A bowl of plums and a pitcher of iced tea sat on the table after a dinner of ham and new potatoes, tomatoes and beans-all of which, but the ham, had been produced on the Kennedy farm, located in the hilly terrain above the Missouri River. Barbara Kennedy, in a cottony dress, fluttered about the kitchen, then went to get Bond`s ”things.”
There were letters-beautiful, poetic letters, mostly about the little events of military life that would pass the censor`s eye. They were set down in ink on official stationery and then reduced by photocopying by the Army before being sent home as V-Mail.
On Christmas, he wrote: ”I dreamed last night I was home. It was so clear, I actually started to get up and go down the stairs. I`ve never been more disappointed in my life. I could taste the bacon, eggs and milk. I`d give my arm for a big glass of milk.”
On Feb. 13, four days before his death, Bond advised his family: ”Don`t get your hopes up of me finishing here in any short time. . . . I don`t think you need to look for me any sooner than the end of the war in this theater. I have a long way to go.”
The night was late when we rose from the table. As I went to bed, I climbed the stairs that Bond had written about. The next morning, as we made ready to move east, I drove to a nearby college library and made photocopies of Bond`s letters. I have no letters from my father.
Two more days on the road found us on Interstate 70 in southern Ohio, bound for Zanesville. I took my children to see the house I lived in as a kid and the school where I was a 2nd grader. I had never seen my father`s grave, at least not since the funeral. My great-aunt Eloise Archer promised to help find it in Greenwood Cemetery.
”I`ll never get his face out of my mind; it was quite bruised,” Aunt Eloise said, recalling how my father had looked at the funeral. Alone and penniless, my father had hit his head and died in a fall in his hotel room. They found him later on the threadbare carpet. ”He was such a beautiful boy, delicate-looking almost. He never was the kind that roughhoused a lot-before he got to drinking. After he got to drinking, I don`t know.”
Nowadays, I suspect, doctors would say my father was a victim of post-traumatic stress disorder. The man who went to war in 1944 was not the one who came back in 1945. He enrolled in college but had to drop out because his father, a retired doctor, had gone into a nursing home and the family was strapped for money. He worked at Sears and at a plastics factory and kicked around as a house painter but could never hold a job for long because of his drinking.
On the drive back to my aunt`s house, I asked if she recalled my father ever talking about the war.
”He was so sensitive and softhearted, it just broke his heart that he did what he had to do,” she replied.
”You mean, the bombing?”
”All the people he had to kill.”
”Did he talk about this-I mean, to you?”
”I think he did. I don`t remember if he told me or if he told mother or he told somebody in the family. He said he couldn`t take all the missions, having to kill all those people. He just didn`t feel he should have to do that, even though it was his job. It just killed him. It was too much for him to take.”
So Aunt Eloise said. Yet I can sense that my father`s feelings were, at the least, complex. I vaguely remember hearing him boast of a role in shooting down a German fighter. He said that he and the tail gunner had flipped a coin to see who would get the credit, and the tail gunner had won. Was it true? The records don`t say.
And I have a picture of him at war`s end, datelined ”London, 1945.” It shows him on one knee beside his ball turret, his right arm slung over a machine gun. He fairly beams with pride.
By the time we got home to Philadelphia, I had made up my mind: I wanted to go to England. I wanted to see Framlingham.
Quinn, my Arizona correspondent, had told me the airfield was still there, mostly derelict. It had been too much bother and expense for the British government to raze it. The control tower, he said, had been turned into a museum dedicated to the memory of the World War II bombing effort of both the American Eighth Air Force and the Royal Air Force.
And so, on Sept. 25, I found myself riding northeast from London aboard a British Rail train to the town of Stowmarket and from there, by car, to the village of Bacton. I had been invited to stay with Ian Hawkins, a former civil engineer who has written two books on the Mighty Eighth. He told me that, as a child of 5 or 6, he had stared skyward in wonder for hours as thousand-airplane armadas gathered from all over East Anglia and then ponderously moved due east across the North Sea to Germany. The drone of the engines had seemed to make the ground shudder.
The next morning, as we prepared to drive to Framlingham, we were joined by LeRoy O. Keeping, a 390th Bomb Group veteran. Keeping had married a British girl during the war and, though now a widower, still lived in Framlingham. We set out for the airfield in Keeping`s tiny Hillman Avenger, bouncing along a two-lane blacktop as sun radiated from holes in a gray sky. I sat bunched in the back seat and tried to listen to the men`s stories while looking at fields of sugar beets and grain. East Anglia, my hosts told me, is the least-changed part of England, still mostly rural.
Each year, hundreds of American veterans come back. The Eighth Air Force had 42 bomber groups and 19 fighter groups in England. The Ninth Air Force, flying B-26s Liberators, had 10 groups. Hawkins told of a local matron who, upon seeing a busload of 34th Bomb Group veterans, yelled out, ”Lock up your daughters, the bloody Yanks are back.”
We entered Framlingham, darted down the twisting main street, flew past Framlingham castle, sped out of town, and came upon Parham village. We turned onto a potholed country lane, running through rough grasses and brambles, and came to what had been the MP checkpoint. The runways and control tower were a little farther on.
The tower was right out of the movie ”12 O`Clock High”: a concrete cube with a shoebox on top. Around the roof ran a railing. Commanders had stood up there with their binoculars, counting bombers returning from across the sea, looking for the red flares that would indicate wounded men on board. We parked in front.
The door to the control tower was unlocked, and suddenly, with the flip of a switch, Glenn Miller was heard playing ”At Last.” ”At last you`re here,” Hawkins said, turning to me.
We broke out a lunch of buttered brown bread and shepherd`s pie from last night`s supper. Opening his penknife, Keeping cut us lumps of hard, yellow cheese. We passed around a cup of sugared, milky tea.
I asked Keeping what the Rocker Club was like. The Rocker Club was a base barroom for sergeants. A ground crewman who performed turret and gunsight maintenance, Keeping remembered ”a lot of heavy drinking. . . . I remember one time we got drunk for about eight or nine days straight. We used to drink our fill, then go outside and stick our fingers down our throat, so we could drink more. Silly buggers.”
A local landowner, Percy Kindred, appeared at the door. He had seen our car. Kindred shook hands all around. At 79, having spent a life outdoors, his face was cracked leather. I asked if the Americans were good neighbors. ”Oh, yes, damn yes. Yes. Yes,” he said. ”They were all gentlemen. I couldn`t say less than that.” Keeping interjected: ”Percy told me about a year ago that when the last plane left here, he sat down and cried.” We climbed up to the roof, and Kindred pointed, ”That`s where two German bombs landed. Oh, yes, that was quite charming.” The land in view was perfectly flat; the sky, wide and touchable like Montana`s. A car was coming down the road. Alfred Shelley, of Mitchem, Surrey, had come out of his way to see the museum. Could he look? He had been in the Royal Artillery, assigned to an ack-ack gun in the area.
”You fellows left a lot of your bloody boys lying in these fields over here,” Shelley said, looking straight at me, the obvious American. ”They were good boys. They did a lot for us, and it`s appreciated, I tell you. That`s a lot of sob stuff, I know, but it`s true.”
There was a real tear in his eye. I realized he was thanking me. Me! ”We used to admire you boys as you came in,” Shelley said. ”We`d see the flares coming down when they couldn`t make it. It`s something that must not be forgotten.”
After Shelley and Kindred were gone, Keeping closed up the control tower. We got back into the car and took a slow tour of the field. What remained of three runways now served as roadway for Kindred and another landowner. Hawkins, a font of information, reported that there was as much concrete on an Eighth Air Force field as on a highway 18 feet wide and 65 miles long.
We got out to look at the chapel and movie theater, now silent and overgrown. The ”bomb dump,” placed far off in the woods because of the risk of explosion, reeked of pigs. The combat mess hall had become a sawmill.
Keeping slowed the car as we came to a field of golden grass. ”Pistol Packin` Mama was right over there,” he said, pointing to where the bomber had stood parked. ”And Eight Ball right behind her.” A flock of partridges stuck their heads up from the grass and, spooked, fluttered away.
At length, we came to a small village of Quonset-type huts, set in the tall grass like black whales on a beach. ”This was the 571st Squadron area-your father`s,” Hawkins said. ”Take a walk through.”
Which one? Which hut had my father lived in? So many. The ground was soft and spongy. I looked in windows. The huts were made of corrugated steel, covered with tattered tar paper. Some were stuffed with hay; others with tools. Somewhere nearby, a cow bellowed. My sinuses filled up with the dank, cheesy smell of the farm.
Keeping looked into the window of what he said was the orderly room, cupping his hand over his eyes like a visor to see better into the dark.
”That`s where you got your passes,” he said. Mail and pay too. Surely, my father had been there many times.
I walked away to be with my thoughts and ducked into an open hut. The door had fallen off. Tractor tires leaned against an inside wall. A faded sign, thrown against the wall, announced that Crabbes Farm would be open June 21. I listened for the drone of B-17s and heard a jet fly overhead. I wept. I hadn`t recaptured my father. I could not relive his life. I couldn`t then-and I can`t now-understand what it was like in the war, and no veteran can tell me. Yet I had spent a year thinking of my father, treasuring that I am, still, his son, basking in the reflected glow of his heroism. That was a lot. It had to be enough.
