Dear Mom: Letters from the War, 1942-1945 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781502437075)

On March 11, 1944, two months before I was born, my father was killed when his crippled B-17 bomber was shot down over the Adriatic Sea. He was 23 years old. Eleven months later, when I was nine months old, his younger brother and only sibling was killed when his P-51 Mustang fighter crashed in a cow pasture in Holland. He was 22 years old. We had met and played together while he was home on leave. I grew up hearing that my father was "such a nice person" from my mother and hearing little anecdotes about both boys from my grandmother. That sufficed until I was 36 years old. In 1980 the navigator on my father's plane and one of the two survivors contacted me. He lived near Boston. I worked in Boston. We began meeting regularly for coffee, and suddenly my father came alive. I heard about the back of his leather flight jacket soaked through with sweat after a mission in spite of the frigid temperatures at 20,000 feet in an unheated airplane; about his annoyance at the green "punk major" who tried to "correct" experienced combat pilots; about the time when returning with their plane shot full of holes, my father asked Stan (the navigator) where they were. Stan replied, "I don't know Bobby. As near as I can figure we should be over Filene's Basement." I wanted more. I became interested in WWII aircraft and studied Stan's diary of all their missions. My family travelled to a Confederate Air Force show and excitedly watched B-17s and P-51s and many other planes from WWII roaring around us. But I felt frustrated that I couldn't learn more about my father and uncle on a personal level. Then I discovered a treasure chest. In 1985 I came across a stack of neatly bundled letters in a drawer at my grandmother's house. Still in their original envelopes were over 200 letters that my father and uncle had written to her from the time they first left home until their lives tragically ended. Here was the insight to them as people that I so desperately wanted. As I read the letters their personalities jumped off the page. They became real. And even today, many years later, I get so caught up in their world when I read the letters that I momentarily forget that they aren't coming home. And that is always followed by a sense of the horror my grandmother felt when the letters abruptly stopped. I want people, especially my children and their children, to get to know these two young men who lost their lives nearly 70 years ago. I do not want them to be forgotten.