Bombs Away

For the past couple of months, I have been watching the series VICTORY AT SEA and then THE WORLD AT WAR on Blu-ray disks. Often, I do something for which later a reason or justification becomes clear.

I found out what that was during a visit to my sister Ann's home in Indio, CA, from 30 December 2010 to 2 January 2011. The day I arrived, she handed over a wide, spiral-bound, modestly thick booklet that she'd been given by our sister Lorri.

The cover said BOMBS AWAY, 43-11. Upon further inspection, I realized that this booklet was from my dad's WWII Bombardier training class in 1943, at Victorville Army Air Field in California.

He would eventually become a bombardier on a B-24 that was forced to ditch after a raid on the Romanian oil fields at Ploesti where the Nazis got most of their oil during that horrific war.

At Victorville they trained in much smaller, even antiquated, AT-11 twin-engine light training bombers, and then B-25's, the same planes flown off the aircraft carrier Hornet by Jimmy Doolittle's raiders over Tokyo the previous year.

The booklet was filled with B&W photos of the base, the training and administrative staff, and all of the bombardier trainees of class 43-11, including my father. Born in 1920, he was about to turn 24, while he was learning to drop bombs on an enemy far away.

Tucked inside the booklet was an ID card, as well. This was issued on July 31, 1943, and his birthday was coming up on August 5th. It says he was 5' 8", 150 pounds, with brown eyes and hair. He was a second lieutenant, the same rank I held when I was in training at missile school at Vandenberg AFB, not that many miles from Victorville, CA. That was in 1974, 31 years later. I was 24 years old, and 6' tall and 160 pounds, with brown eyes and hair.

Toward the end of his life, he and I had had a significant falling out over my being gay. In fact, we never spoke in those final years, though I would be there in the emergency room where he lay, unconscious and likely unaware of my presence, though my sister Ann told him I was there.

Neither of us could easily recognized him, so changed was his mortal form. He looked like some concentration camp victim, his skin having become translucent, his weight significantly reduced. He looked very much like a man who was about to die, as he would soon do, only five days later.

(more to come)

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