| 30 June 2006 Luck of the Draw It is the start of an extraordinary weekend. With Independence Day falling next Tuesday, an enterprising vacationer could have left work a little early yesterday, and scooped up five days off at the cost of only two vacation days. That may be why the city seems a little thin today, a little less pumped up and self-important. Or maybe that is me, I don't know. I have been spending a little time with Uncle Dick the Bomber Pilot this week. He has been gone a couple years now, but he was a powerful presence in life, and sometimes he surprises me when I walk around a corner and see him, his eyes crinkled up in sardonic good humor like he was looking at the tachometer on one of his Corvettes. It is a complicated story, involving the master cylinder on his Little Black Truck, a stainless exhaust system, and an A-2 model leather flight jacket like the ones the young men wore so long ago. I do not have the time to get into it now, and I am not going to get all gushy on you about the sacrifice of generations gone by and the real significance of the Fourth of July. Everyone does what they have to do, for better or worse, and life rolls on. That said, a piece of mail surfaced as part of a hunt for records about the truck, and he was there in the guest bedroom with me amid the stacks of files, real as life. He invited my attention to a yellowing clipping from a Pennsylvania local paper. “Veteran's remains found five decades after crash,” said the headline, and it went on to describe how the skeletal remains of an airman named Harry Furman and nine of his fellow crew members were found in the jungles of Brazil, and how the government planned to inter them together in a vault at Arlington Cemetery. The crew had been lost for over fifty years. The B-24H Liberator in which they flew was enroute England via the southern route with hundreds of others. The direct flight across the north Atlantic was considered too dangerous, and thus the Air Corps directed them to fly from their bases in the continental US to Trinidad off the coast of Venezuela, and thence over the jungle to Bellem, Brasil. From there the Atlantic was at its most narrow for the jump to Africa, and then north to England Along the way, the plane crashed into dense jungle on April 11, 1944. Furman and the others were listed as missing for six months, but then the search was abandoned. The zeal with which we have hunted for our fallen is a relatively new thing. There are over 80,000 missing from World War II, and over 8,000 from Korea. The crash site was spotted in November, 1990, and the Brazilian army visited it a year later. It was in an exceedingly remote area, and the casualty recovery teams could not get there until 1994. It took another three years to close out the case. Dick says it is the luck of the draw. He saw the article in the paper, and thought it might be from his flying days. It turned out he was right. “I dug out my log, just to be accurate,” he said, appearing to sit on my blue couch. “I didn't remember if we had just spent the night in Trinidad, or laid over for a day. I made the same flight from Trinidad to Belem on April 2, nine days before the one in the story. And my plane, Buzzin' Betsy, was the same model, a B-24H.” “Flying time was 9 hours, one of which was on instruments. As you flew over the endless jungle, the thought came to mind what it might be like to force-land in it. These guys,” he said, waving at the clipping, “they found out. There are many square miles inhabited only by animals and reptiles. Never trod by humans.” “No one will ever know. Could have been the loss of an engine, though that is unlikely. Lack of sleep and boredom on long flights could lead to inattention. A lightning strike is a possibility, but the experience on the first flight to Trinidad, a year earlier, proved to me the a B-24 could be hit numerous times with no drastic consequences. It was the infamous flight with Jack Roberts, on the way to Curacao for submarine patrol. It was in a B-24D, incidentally. No nose turret.” “The guys in the waist positions were asleep and found themselves pasted to the top of the fuselage in the first violent downdraft. For a half hour we bounced around like a cork in the pitch blackness, lightning crackling around us. When we landed in Trinidad we could see the pock-marks in the paint where the lightning had run along the fuselage.” “One experience,” he said. “ It really proves nothing.” “But I thought it was interesting enough to forward to you, Captain. It reminds me how the luck of the draw determines success or failure, survival or disaster. Pilot skill obviously mattered I turned to ask him about the nature of luck, but he was gone like the Cheshire Cat. He lives completely on his own terms, even now that he is gone. As I put the file away I thought I remembered him saying one time that all 72 crews of the 487th Bomb Group, unofficially known as the Gentlemen From Hell, had made it safely from Alamogordo, New Mexico, to Lavenham, a village in East Anglia. That is where the adventure really began, when the combat cards were dealt. Have a great Fourth, and if you are traveling, have the very best of luck. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |