Reading one of my favorite Substacks this morning, part of the conversation was about D-Day, the day the World War II Allies stormed the French beaches to liberate Europe. It brought up fragmented memories from my father who flew in the 8th Army Air Force which suffered the highest casualty rates of any group during the war.
Aerial warfare on this scale was new, but the mission was an old one. To stop the enemy, in this case the Germans. Targets ranged from strategic manufacturing and transportation to the horrific fire bombing of Dresden. As chance would have it, my father participated in that raid. And many years later became good friends with a German man who grew up in Dresden, and lived through it all.
My father’s war stories were scarce to nonexistent. His generation didn’t talk about such events. I have so few data points to string together. Perhaps that lack of detail is part of what spurred me to ride in a B-17.
The B-17 is, by my standards, a pig of a plane*. But it’s sturdy and that sturdiness brought many an airman back to their home base in England. The chance to fly in one presented itself in Truckee, CA. which sits at just under 6,000 feet in elevation. The airport is tucked into the level land at Martis Creek.
There are two runways. Runway 29 is characterized by a steep drop-off that makes for challenging landings, and alongside the runway are a line of trees which often generate wind sheer just as you are about to settle down towards the runway. This is where the gliders land (that’s another set of stories).
The B-17 would use Runway 20/2, a longer, safer means of taking off and landing, although one still had to climb to avoid the nearby mountains.
My father was the navigator-bombardier, meaning he flew the plane through unrelenting flak to the target and released the bombs.
In Truckee, it was a beautiful spring day. The sun shone, and the wind was minimal. I climbed on board, taking note of the cold steel bulkheads and immense rivets that held the plane together. There were no amenities and at altitude, with no heat and the gunnery doors open to the air, I could only imagine how freezing cold it had to have been.
We all took turns in the different areas of the plane. When it was my turn, I crawled down into the station in the nose cone, where the bombardier would have flown the plane. The fir trees of the Sierras passed peacefully beneath the nose as the plane lumbered slowly into the air. It was a perfect, clear day, but I had a distinct sense of a warp in time, where I knew in my bones that this plexiglass nose had seen many days of flak, blood and fear. It felt like a step through time, as if all that violence were still present on this perfect spring day.
As a pilot, I could only imagine how a group of young men managed to deal with these missions. I don’t know if I could have had the courage to climb back into that plane for yet another mission.
I remember once my father made a comment about my unease in a Russian passenger plane, one that lacked the amenities westerners had come to expect. Seats were bolted to a bare metal floor. There were no individual passenger reading lights or air vents. The pilots simply opened the cockpit windows on takeoff and a breeze rushed through the plane. I distinctly remember the stewardess, a massive woman dressed in a drab uniform of some sort unceremoniously slapping a massive beer stein down before me.
It was an interesting experience, if not the most comfortable one, and I was terrified to use the rest room. I was convinced that I would somehow be ejected from the plane if I touched the wrong handle. My father simply told me to calm down, no one was shooting at us. An odd comment perhaps, but one that revealed the span of his experience and perspective, even if he did not talk about it.
My father died over 35 years ago. In many ways I never had the chance to know him as one adult might know another adult. But I know his qualities: he was gruff on the outside, but kind, giving, and I now know, oh so brave.
So this D-Day, I remember all those who fought in all the different venues of World War II. I honor their bravery. I honor their lives. I honor my father. May we never repeat the experience of a global war and all the marks it leaves on a civilization.
*My flying experiences are a bit more refined: