It was a perfect Sunday morning for my regular tennis session, a loose congregation of people who get great pleasure out of enjoying each others company while we pretend to give a damn about winning a set. I've been joining in with this group for several years now, and the chemistry, the good feelings is something that's somewhat rare for me. And today was a special one for me, the end of the third quarter of a my life - the beginning of the last one.
Out of the quiet of the morning, broken by the cries of joy and agony over shots made or missed, there was the beginning of a distant soft roar, not a motorcycle or train, but something else. Then I saw it, only a thousand or so feet in the air, with the unique shape of the WWII heavy bomber, the B-24 (picture here)
As it slowly flew past, I stopped our set for brief time, just to allow the moment to resonate, as that plane and what it represented meant something to me. I realized that seeing the outline of this machine in the sky had a very different meaning to the millions of people around the time of my own infancy all across the world. For millions that shape and others like it meant showers of destruction, whether the insignia on the wing was that of the Allies or the Axis forces.
And those who were flying the plane, unlike today it being to commemorate something and their risk being negligible, for some crews the chance of surviving their tours of duty were miniscule, to be in a flight crew in the early years for allies, U.S., England, Russia was a death sentence, as it was in the later years for the Axis forces.
There was a sense of the feeling of patriotism, evoking my earliest memories of my country having won something that I could only feel, but that I knew was very important. My war experience was in Washington D.C. where we had air raid tests, not the real thing. But it was the center of the victory celebrations, and the parades down Pennsylvania Avenue had squadrons of planes of all types flying overhead.
That plane evoked other thoughts, those millions upon millions of children like myself who never were to experience life, whose existence ended to the sound of planes such as this one overhead. They were as innocent as I, yet they were the enemy, and forces so incomprehensible to them, and probably their parents, set a path that ended with such a catastrophe that is a fading memory to those who survived it.
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Here's a terrific diary from someone who was on one of these planes last year.