Dad was one of those airmen. He's in the standing row, last one on the right, in this picture.
Tom knows a bit more of the story than I do, but in 1944 and 1945, Dad flew in the B-17 over Europe, based out of England. I seem to remember that he was a belly gunner and a navigator or bombardier; Tom probably knows something closer to the truth. While Dad was a relatively small man at the time (he was 23 then), the Memphis Belle movie indicates that one had to be almost elfish to fit in the small bubble of the "ball turret."
In watching the movie for the first time in many years, I was struck again by the parallels to today's Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. In all these cases, we have taken kids off the farm, away from their families, and forced them to grow up in severely important ways in a severely restricted time frame. I think about what Dad must have felt at 30,000 feet in what was far from today's modern airliner - a literal rattletrap that wasn't pressurized and kept its men alive only via cranky oxygen masks that could freeze up in an instant. Then, of course, there was the flak, and the German Luftwaffe determined to b
low him from the sky.As far as I know, Dad survived with no battle wounds and little damage to the planes he flew. (Commando Chief seems to have been his primary plane, though we also have pictures of Dingleberry and Our Baby.) Indeed, he told one story of a return to England that was diverted because of weather over his base - to Ireland - and how he convinced his crew to fake a problem with the plane to keep the gang on "instant leave" in Ireland for a week!
With Dad dying in 1970, we never got the chance to hear more of his "war stories" - and as many know, WWII combat vets are generally reticent to relate their stories, even to their families. The closest I've been able to come to any of Dad's youthful experiences in that unbelievable, almost mythic time has been movies like Memphis Belle. I'm glad the movie was made.
Indeed, the real Memphis Belle still exists and is undergoing restoration in Dayton, Ohio. I hope to visit her someday and get a bit more of the sense of the life of my father.
