Tell Mother that Daddy Is OK

I held in my hands the facts describing how he died. The question was whether to share with my mom the details of her father’s combat death.

Here’s what she knew of her dad: He was tall. He called her “Bud.” He joined the Army Air Corps when she was six. She learned he was reported missing in action on the same day she had a Halloween party at school. She was eleven when his body came home, four years after the war, in a casket covered by an American flag. She remembered hearing “Taps” at the cemetery on a cold January afternoon.

Here’s what I knew of her dad: His skull was fractured. His teeth were scorched. What remained of his flight suit was singed. It was impossible to determine the color of his hair or the complexion of his naked body. All his bones were shattered. His blue eyes were gone.

Some fifty years after my grandfather’s death in World War II, I had become fixated on learning anything I could about his sacrifice. Married with a child, he did not need to enlist. But when his younger brother died in an Army Air Corps training crash, my grandfather felt compelled to fight.

My grandmother told me she did not want him to leave, because they had a daughter to raise. But he believed it was his duty and, like his fallen brother, enlisted in the Air Corps. It was 1944. 

When her father was away in training, my mom and her mother made the best of things. My grandmother got a job. My mom played “Army” with friends on her block. The mail always brought letters from her dad, from bases in Greensboro, North Carolina; Harlingen, Texas; Westover, Massachusetts; Savannah, Georgia. He didn’t care much for military life, the drills and exams, and the mess hall food. He was sore from learning how to fire a giant gun in his airplane. He sent my mom postcards from train stops, cowboy boots from Texas, and trinkets, like an Air Corps patch and wings for the tiny military jumpsuit she wore. None of her friends had fathers in the war. 

While washing the dishes after dinner each night, my mom and her mother would sing the Air Corps song about soaring into the wild blue yonder. Together, the two of them boarded a bus in their Indiana town and traveled to the Georgia coast when my mom’s dad was training there. Wives and kids waved white handkerchiefs and towels as the men flew overhead in lumbering B-24 bombers. My mom and her parents spent a sweltering summer in ugly cinderblock housing on the Air Corps base.

But most of the time they were apart, and my mom and her mother carried on together. Even though my mom was just learning to read, her dad wrote most of his letters to her. In beautiful cursive handwriting, he asked about her pet turtles, encouraged her to clean her plate, and promised presents for good marks in first grade. He told her to save his letters, so they could sit together and read them after the war.

More than anything, he closed his letters asking that she care for her mother.

“Give Mother about ‘umpteen’ kisses and hugs for me . . . Squeeze her hard. Make her yell.”

“Be a nice girl for Mother now, give her a great big kiss and hug and tell her that’s from Daddy.”

“Well, sweetie, tell all your grand-folks hello for me and then run over to Mother, grab her by her neck, pull her down and squeeze to beat the band. Put a big smacker on her kisser, will you?”

“You be good now and tell Mother that Daddy is OK.”

And then he was gone, off to Europe and the war. He managed to write one letter from his primitive base in southern Italy before being shot down on his first mission. He was 27, and my mom was days away from her seventh birthday. She learned the terrible news from her mother.

***

“Should I show this to Mom?” I wanted my dad’s advice. The large manila envelope held the Individual Deceased Personnel File for Corporal Delbert W. Trueman that I had requested from the National Archives. It was the Air Corps’ official record of my grandfather’s death and far more graphic than its name. It was one of hundreds of thousands created by the military for every missing or dead soldier, marine, airman, and sailor.

Both my mom and grandmother knew I was researching this chapter of our family history. They answered any question I asked and shared with me their time together on the home front. Each conversation led to tears. My mom knew her father died on a bomb run over Austria in 1944 and his body came home in 1949, with few facts in between. Now, the specifics were in the thick stack of papers I handed my dad to review.

German soldiers had buried my grandfather in a grave with two other Americans, airmen who died several days before he did. A slender white cross of wood marked their grave. The bodies were among some two hundred US aviators killed in 1944 and 1945 while bombing Vienna, brought down from the sky by enemy flak and exploding aircraft. Coffins were stacked atop each other plot after plot in a municipal cemetery, alongside graves holding prisoners of war from Italy, France, Romania, and Serbia. Most of the Americans were unidentified. My grandfather’s plot carried his service number and his name, garbled in German but still recognizable.

There was more paperwork in the death file. US troops located the graves after the war while sweeping all of Europe for the bodies and graves of fallen American soldiers and airmen. Soldiers unearthed my grandfather’s body from Austria in 1946 and moved it some six hundred miles to France for formal identification. “Too badly decomposed” was the explanation for not using fingerprints to determine an identity. But the teeth matched earlier dental records, which matched the name on the dog tag found with the body. An officer noted: “All major bones recovered, badly fractured.” What remained of my grandfather weighed twenty pounds. Soldiers buried him again, this time in a temporary US military cemetery. A wooden cross again was placed atop the grave, and an Army chaplain said a prayer.

Two years later, when my mother’s family requested that the military return his body to the United States, my grandfather’s remains were again exhumed. Officers generated more records with more particulars. “Body disarticulated. Final stage of decomposition.” Bones from his right leg had disappeared, lost to the earth. An embalmer assembled and prepared the remains. Soldiers placed the casketed body on a truck to Belgium, a ship to the United States, and a mortuary train to Indiana. For a third and final time, my grandfather’s body was lowered into the ground.

My dad thumbed through the records. If nothing else, I wanted him nearby if I decided to share the documents with my mom. “It’s fine,” he said. “Go ahead.”

***

My mother went through the pages slowly. She had always known one lone detail about her dad’s death. He and his wounded bomber fell nearly five miles from the sky and slammed into a field on the outskirts of Vienna. A crew member who survived by parachuting from the plane landed near the wreckage. Alongside the burning aircraft, he reported after the war, was her father’s crumpled body. German soldiers were rummaging the corpse. It was a kernel of information that made my mom furious any time she spoke of it.

Now, silent and seated on the family room couch, she read the military’s burial reports, disinterment directives, tooth charts, cemetery sketches, government forms labeled “disposition of remains,” and orders for transporting a body across several European countries and US states.

“I don’t want to upset you,” I told her, hoping for a response.

She continued, saying nothing. She gave an occasional sigh, and I tried to guess which page she was reading. I began to regret sharing the information.

When she finished, she gathered the papers into a neat pile and handed them back to me. When she finally spoke, she was slow and deliberate.

“Don’t ever show this to Grandma,” she said.

It was her only response. I had expected more, but I also understood. The pages covered almost five years of a broken body and its long journey home. Where I had wanted to enlighten my mother, she wanted to protect hers. It was just as her dad had asked, so many years ago.

-Kim Clarke

Kim Clarke lives in Michigan, where she writes about history for the University of Michigan. She is working on a book about those who gave their lives during World War II, including her grandfather, and the unacknowledged heroes who brought them home.