Aces High Bulletin Board
General Forums => The O' Club => Topic started by: GrimCO on May 10, 2006, 06:00:42 PM
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I have three Uncles who were veterans. One, Uncle "Carl" was a waist gunner on B-17's based in North Africa. He flew 50 missions (before the mission gauntlet was lowered to 25 in the European Theatre) and is still alive today. Another Uncle "Heinrich", aka Henry as I knew him by, was a B-17 bombardier based in England.
Many of you have probably noticed that Heinrich sounds an aweful lot like a German name. Correct you are. He was born in Germany and moved to the United States at age 12 with his older sister (my Grandmother). He became a citizen and joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at age 19, and eventually became a crewmember on B-17's. He survived the war after being shot down on the way back from Bastogne, and died of cancer about 10 years ago. What is so ironic about my Uncle Henry's tour of duty is that he flew missions over the town in which he was born and raised and looked through the bombsight at the streets and buildings he knew as a child and physically dropped the bombs. When I talked to him about it, he said he never really thought about it too much as it was happening. He just knew he was doing what was necessary to stop a "crazy man" as he put it.
My Uncle Carl (the waist gunner in North Africa) had a younger brother Johnny who was in the Army's 7th Division who were occupying Japan after the war had ended. He later fought in the Korean War and was killed on the 28th of November, 1950 at the Chosin Reservior. My family received a telegram telling them that he was Missing in Action with no further details, and never knew what had happened to him. Two years ago, I decided to try to find out what happened, and got about the luckiest break a man could have.
I researched his division, company, all the way down to the platoon he was in. I found out that nearly his entire company of 143 men were wiped out during an ambush by the Chinese who poured across the border that night by the thousands. All were killed except for three. Within an hour of doing my research, I found the name of one of the survivors who lived in Lubbock, Texas at the time of the Korean War according to his army records. On a long shot, I looked up the white pages for Lubbock on the internet and found a fellow there with the same name "Cecil" as one of the survivors. I called him and mentioned my Uncle's name and asked if he knew him. After a quite a long silence, he told me that Johnny was his best buddy and asked me who I was. I told him that I was his nephew and was trying to find out what happened to him, and if he knew any details. He said "I know the details alright, I carried his body down from the hill where he was killed".
What are the odds of that????? To make a long story short, I called my Uncle Carl and told him of the events that had transpired and we both met my Uncle Johnny's buddy Cecil at a Korean War Chosin Reservoir Survivor's Reunion in South Dakota. There was a Colonel there from the Air Force who's job it was to try to pinpoint locations of soldiers killed and try to find their remains. Cecil showed this Air Force Colonel where my Uncle was killed on a map that the Colonel had hanging on the wall at the Hotel. A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from Cecil telling me that this Colonel had contacted him and told him that they found my Uncle's dog tags in a mass grave at the location where he was killed. All that is left to accomplish is the DNA identification of the remains, and my Uncle is coming home after 56 years!
Unbelievable... I'm still beside myself and tear up a little bit about it all. It's pretty amazing stuff...
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Now that is a very cool story. WTG.
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Very very cool. I've been trying to track down the remains of 5 MIAs from a WW2 bomber crew for over ten years now. I need a break like that. Glad he's coming home.
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Guppy, is that ETO? Have you worked with Uwe Benkel or Danny Keay?
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:aok
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Grimco,
Way to go on your search there. Thank you for sharing the story of your family and the service they provided.
A very big to your Uncles.
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Yeah, I'm pretty damned proud of all my uncles... Two of the three were born in other countries and have showed me what it really is to be an American. It's an ideal, which I don't really think you fully appreciate unless you come from another place with less opportunity. They thought enough of it to fight for it and risk paying the ultimate sacrifice. Every time I get the urge to whine about having a bad day, I reflect on what they did and that urge goes away pretty damned quickly.
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Yup. We all stand in the shadows of hero's.
Thanks for sharing, Grim.. damn fine work! :aok
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Every once in a while this board produces a thread that really stands out from anything else. This is one of those.
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Originally posted by Hangtime
Yup. We all stand in the shadows of hero's.
...or on the shoulders of giants. It's humbling. Great story Grim, and congrats.
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Originally posted by Scherf
Guppy, is that ETO? Have you worked with Uwe Benkel or Danny Keay?
Don't know those two.
The crew were shot down over Vienna in February 45. The brother of the pilot who was killed was an Army major and was getting info from Graves Registration that has positively identified a grave of 5 co-mingled remains in the Weiner Neustadt Cemetary. The official records, individual deceased personnel files don't mention this but it's clear that it was true. They'd even photographed the gravesite. The problem is they thought there should be six in the grave but based on what I've found, there would have been only 5 and I can name them.
It was in the Russian zone and the 5 remains along with 26 others sets were finally removed in late 1947, but the trail goes cold from there. No one seems to know where a set of 5 co-mingled remains from that cemetary would have gone after this.
If I could figure that one out, I've got contact with enough of the families of the guys who would have been in the grave to do the DNA bit.
I keep working on it though.
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Lordy, that one sounds like a challenge.
Uwe Benkel is a German civil servant (in NW Germany, I think) who has spent pretty much every weekend for the past umpteen years on recovering and identifying wrecks. Danny Keay is a serving US Army fellow who does the same thing, though I believe he does not do it as part of his normal duties.
Sorry I don't have any info on groups / individuals in Austria, nor any links to Russian experts.
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Thanks fellas... <
> to all of you. I of course never met my Uncle Johnny, but it sure was neat seeing pictures of him during the war that Cecil brought with him to the reunion to show us. It was an odd feeling hearing Cecil describe the places, and what they were doing together when those pictures were taken. Cecil, btw, lost both of his legs due to gunshot wounds which happened after he was captured by the Chinese and escaped. He was rescued by a few straggler Marines trying to find their units, but it was too late to save his legs.
To show you the kind of guy Cecil is, he didn't feel sorry for himself after the war. He started a very successful business designing and manufacturing state of the art prosthetic limbs, because as he put to me... "I couldn't find any that worked worth a damn at the time, so I made my own". He donates many of them to migrant workers in Texas who were mamed by farm machinery and can't afford a prosthesis. He also made me feel a bit uncomfortable with his sense of humor... He told me that he takes his legs off every night before bed, and once in a while his wife says to him "come to bed shorty" as he's making his way around the room on his "nubs"... Man I didn't know whether to die laughing or just sit there looking stupid. I chose to laugh, because he obviously wasn't offended by it himself, nor did he feel sorry himself at all. It was odd, but again another Hero comes through with a life lesson for me via a little humor...
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