One of the things I choose not to bring up with my mother is how she missed my father’s fiftieth birthday. He came home from work and, as it became more and more obvious that nothing special was planned for dinner or dessert, he finally blew up. My father’s anger was explosive but never violent. He scared the crap out of people without actually doing anything. He’d hit a level ten, so to speak, after bypassing levels one through nine and it was hard not to wonder if there wasn’t a level fifteen or even twenty that his last shred of self-control was holding back.
What made his moments of anger most devastating was that he lived the rest of his life so calmly, intellectually and humorously if somewhat separated from others. He was a man who often lived in his own cave. I do not recall him having friends of his own. If anything, he kept in his shell except when there was something "intellectual" on television; Masterpiece Theater, Jeopardy and historical movies sparked discussions and frantic appeals to the Encyclopedia Britannica. Family holiday dinners were his opportunity to sit at the head of the table and listen to his wife and children talk. He would periodically grumble out an idea or a question but for the most part he just listened. I am sure he found it a pleasure; at his retirement party, he said his greatest pride was that all four of his children were college graduates.
In the end, my dad got his revenge on my mom. For her fiftieth birthday, he sent a birthday cake and balloons to her classroom. He had this written on the cake: "Happy 50th Birthday, Mrs. ***." The 50 was underlined.
I wonder, though, if his anger had something to do with what happened to him before 1945.
My dad grew up in the Pacific Northwest except for one year in Long Beach, California. That one year involved a busted business opportunity for my grandfather but it affected my father in a surprising way. Since my father was the only student in the first grade who could read, the decision was made to jump him up to the second grade. This meant he would finish school a little quicker, which was not a bad thing for the eldest son. In the pre-Depression world, it was still a novel idea that sons of the working class should go to school through the eighth grade before going to work. High school was meant for families with a little money (this was my dad; it was understood that he would get through high school before working for his father in the family laundry business). College, well, that was for the sons of a much more successful boss.
That jump of one grade meant that my dad graduated from high school in 1939 instead of 1940. He graduated from Jefferson High School in Seattle and his parents came up from Portland, Oregon, to be in attendance. My dad had been living apart from them for more than a year. The Depression made family finances pretty shaky and it was tough for my grandfather to feed his whole family. Since my dad was fifteen, the oldest and a boy, the decision was made to send him to live with his first-generation Swedish grandmother and his Norwegian/Swedish uncles in "the family house" in Seattle. Two of his uncles worked only sporadically but received relief checks. Another did work steadily but lived elsewhere. Nevertheless, he would show up a couple of times a week with full grocery bags.
My father would wake up each morning and bring one uncle a bromo-seltzer to start the hangover healing process. Despite hard times, there always seemed to be money for beer and additions to the prodigious pornography collection under the bed. Then my dad would make his own breakfast, sometimes having to push his other uncle’s whiskey bottle to another spot in the icebox in order to get at the milk. His uncle preferred his whiskey chilled but without ice cubes. All in all, living with minimal adult observation let my dad become quite self-reliant. He learned to cook and took care of his own laundry until he entered active military service. He took every opportunity to go downtown and see the bands traveling through Seattle. On one night, torrential rains caused cancellation of a Tommy Dorsey concert. Nevertheless, my dad sneaked into the club and hung out with the band (Dorsey had left) while they improvised for hours. A few years later, my dad went to see the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra play in Portland. He hung out after the show and was recognized, "Hey, it’s the kid from Seattle."
Since my dad was only seventeen when he graduated from high school, he didn’t qualify for government relief and jobs were scarce. The decision was made to send him to college, the first college-attendee from either side of his family. He entered the University of Washington as a History major; there was a lot of thought that he would become a teacher. One of my dad’s aunts would check on him almost daily to make sure he was going to class and doing his work. As the "bright star" of the family, nobody wanted him to slide.
My dad heard about Pearl Harbor while drinking a chocolate milkshake with college friends. Some of the guys he’d gone to school with had already left for Canada to join the Canadian military. As sons of Norwegians, they wanted to get their licks in after Germany had conquered Norway. My dad was not in such a hurry and, since he already had more than a year’s worth of college and was therefore a "college man," the Army told him to keep going to school. Under the War Mobilization Plan, many men were told to just wait. They’d be needed later.
My dad was "called up" in 1943. Family stories from World War I convinced him that he didn’t want to fight on the ground so he chose the Army Air Corps (there was no "Air Force" until after the war). He had never been in an airplane. After many physical and mental tests, he was deemed worthy of officer-level training and was sent to Ellington Field near Houston, Texas, with a bunch of other guys from the Pacific Northwest. Ellington was a huge base at the time and men were placed according to what the Army needed into fighter training, pilot training, bombardier training or navigator training. My dad became a navigator, probably because he understood trigonometry, though he had to do two training sessions at Ellington. He had a severe reaction to his typhus inoculation and missed his last couple of weeks of his first training. All of his friends were able to ship out and, for about a week, he was the only fellow in his barracks. Then the Texans came in. They were all eighteen, fresh out of high school and many freshly married. Some already had children. They were all trying to be fighter pilots while my dad was going to be in a bomber. For a few weeks, he felt completely alone in a crowd.
Eventually, my dad was sent to Pueblo, Colorado, where he met with his first B-24 bomber crew. Because of his typhus reaction, my dad didn’t arrive in England until July, 1944, after crossing the Atlantic aboard the Queen Elizabeth with the Glenn Miller Orchestra (without Glenn Miller). My dad angled his way to where the band was so that he could be around whenever they decided to improvise. He also figured out that he should always go to meals early so that he could get back in line for another meal. Six meals a day was a great thing for a poor boy from Seattle. My dad became friendly with the other guys who figured this out and they visited each other’s bases while overseas.
My dad missed D-Day. He also missed being part of the bomber missions that dropped bombs on American troops near St. Lo, France. He missed being killed in Norway due to a coin flip; one crew was going to deliver mail to occupied countries while the other flew combat missions. My dad’s pilot lost the coin flip. The other crew flew into a mountain. Both of the crews my dad flew with completed their tours and survived.
What my dad didn’t miss was the luck of having a co-pilot from a "moneyed" Mainline (Pennsylvania) family who had some contacts with upper class Englishmen. One of these, a "notoriously" gay earl or duke, took a shine to the crew (my dad said he was "heartbroken" when nothing came of his interest but was good-natured about it). This allowed my dad’s crew access to "rest" activities and facilities not available to other crews. After the very first mission, during which the plane lost two engines and barely was able to make it home, there was an unspoken understanding within the crew that they were already dead men. It didn’t help that their first night on base was interrupted by a pilot repeatedly shining a flashlight in their faces because he was looking for his own crew. A cold had grounding him so his crew went on a mission with another pilot and didn’t return. Within my dad’s crew, they understood there was no need to restrain themselves. "Guys offered to pay us to take them on leave," my dad used to say. He also said, "Except for the possibility of being killed, the war was great."
Compared to other Bomb Groups in the Eighth Air Force, casualties in my dad’s Group were not high. Only about one in four air crews were shot down, almost always by anti-aircraft fire because the Luftwaffe had been essentially defeated by the fall of 1944. My dad wrote his mom that he understood the Germans defending their country; he just wished they wouldn’t throw parts of it at him. Part of the lower casualty rate can also be traced to being shifted from combat missions to ferrying gasoline to Patton’s Third Army for about a month. Nevertheless, casualties did happen. My dad remembered a mom crying and clutching men before they shipped out overseas, "You watch over my boy. You watch over my boy." My dad would remember watching his plane head for the ground without one wing. My dad’s squadron was the only one of the Group to suffer a loss during the Christmas Eve mission. A neighboring plane took an anti-aircraft round in its bomb bay and split in two on the return flight; there is some question whether it was German or Allied gunnery.
My dad flew more than thirty combat missions, second only to one other fellow in the Group and, as my Dad said, "Everyone knew he was crazy." As a lead navigator, sometimes my dad had to fly with other crews and this made him eligible to go home about a month before the end of the war in Europe. Nevertheless, my dad made the decision that he was going to fly until all the guys of his two crews were eligible to stop flying.
Every Christmas Eve, my father would remember the Christmas Eve mission of 1944. Every airplane and crew available was sent out after days of bad weather had repeatedly canceled missions. This was during the Battle of the Bulge and my dad’s Group was sent to bomb the small town of Schonecken. Schonecken had the misfortune of being where two roads from the east met a major north/south road, after which another road went west towards Bastogne, Luxembourg. Thus Schonecken was the primary target on the supply road leading to one of the German armies in the Bulge.
By reputation, the winter of 1944 was the worst in a generation. Massive snowfall obscured most of what air crews could see and the Group had tremendous difficulty finding its IP (initial point) near Liege, Belgium. Most of the Group ended up bombing secondary targets. My dad’s squadron was one of two that still had bombs and was looking for a target of opportunity. My dad saw the town of Schonecken, which he didn’t know yet was Schonecken, and on his sighting the two squadrons banked away from the Group and flew east when everybody else was flying north. The lead squadron bombed too soon and plowed up some fields; the bombardier of my dad’s plane (the lead plane) held back and after-combat photographs showed over 90% bomb placement within a thousand feet of the target, which was remarkable success in World War II. It was during the bomb run that my dad was able to establish through a Gee fix (a form of electronic pulse navigation) that they were truly bombing the primary target.
I have been in contact with someone who is trying to help some people in Belgium figure out why the town of Malmedy was bombed on Christmas Eve. Through Google, I can see a similarity between Malmedy and Schonecken at the time; both had east/west roads that linked with a major north/south road. I am glad to write that the after-combat evidence showed that my dad’s squadron did not bomb Malmedy; it actually helped that the one squadron bombed too soon thus leaving evidence to the west of Schonecken.
The lead bombardier was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his leading the successful run; "processing delays" (based upon letters from my father to my grandmother, my dad was a major player in recriminations following the many navigation failures during the Christmas Eve mission; sometimes it doesn’t pay to be right) denied my dad his award until he was finished in England and stationed in Arizona.
In closing, this may be part one of a longer story. I have a photograph of my dad, his two uncles, my granddad and me at about age eight. One uncle has his glass of whiskey, the other has a beer, my granddad is smoking one of his filterless cigarettes and my dad has a glass of milk. I have just finished dealing poker hands to all of the men except my dad, who preferred to just watch.