Coming Full Circle

The bright silver B-29 Superfortress was named “Dina Might” and featured on its fuselage a buxom girl in a swimsuit, sitting on a lit explosive. It shook and roared as it powered down the Tinian runway, its four big Wright R-3350 engines surging, as the biggest bomber in the world lifted off on its way to attack the Empire of Japan. In its bomb bay it carried more than a 14,000-pound bomb load, a destructive payload unthinkable even a few years before that.  This day’s target would be the Aichi aircraft plant at Eitoku , near the city of Nagoya on Japan’s largest island of Honshu. Fourteen other sites were on the list as alternates.  It was June 26, 1945 and the end of the war was less than 45 days away.

(Just four miles away on the Island of Saipan, a young Army PFC from the 77th Division, recovering from his wounds incurred in the Okinawa campaign, was indulging in his favorite new pastime.  PFC Marty Hawkins was from Chicago, and had also fought on Guam and Leyte, where he helped to take those islands from the Japanese Army. Now that his shrapnel wounds were healing, and lacking any military duties as a patient, he and a few buddies would find a shady spot, maybe grab a Coke, and watch the giant planes take off and land over on Tinian.  The two islands were part of the Marianas Chain and the seasonal, dry sunny weather made for a tropical paradise. That was one of the reasons for building both the airstrips and the hospitals.)

“Dina Might” was lead bomber on this mission and was soon joined by 64 other Super Fortresses as it flew toward its target. Its captain was a young West Point graduate (and eventually a three star General) who had grown impatient with the bombing skills of his previous bombardier, and who had used his “West Point status” to get a new lead bombardier.  Lead bombardiers were important: when they dropped their ordnance, everyone else followed. Success or failure of the whole mission hinged on this one man’s skills.

In the nose of the big plane was the new lead bombardier, 1st Lt Gilbert J. Finn, on his second mission with this crew. His previous 23 missions over Japan were with another crew, that one flying in a plane called “Big Boots” and captained by a big man, its namesake, Captain Art Tomes.  Gil was a young husband and father, though he had yet to see his infant son. He had been flattered when the Group Commander recommended him for the lead bomber position, but was reluctant to leave his crew. He and Art talked it over and, largely because Gil had some ambitions to stay in the air service after the war, he moved to the new job.

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Nose Art for “Dina Might”

As the Japanese coastline loomed the Flight Engineer was digging out the flak suits to distribute to the crew.  All hell broke loose as the big plane crossed the coast. A Japanese fighter burst from a cloud, setting two of the four engines on fire with its cannon fire. Riding in the exposed Perspex nose, Lt. Finn was killed instantly on its first pass. Captain and crew struggled to gain control as other enemy fighters saw smoke and oil pouring from the plane and closed in for a kill. The crew got four fighters before the plane’s luck ran out and the electrical power was lost.

At 9,000 feet it was time for the ten survivors to bail out. The left gunner, crew chief, and other officers went from the bomb bay.  The tail gunner made it through his hatch, pulled his ripcord and watched as his chute failed to open. He began to pull it out with his hands, only to find it riddled with bullets. It opened, but he hit the water with a tremendous impact, and somehow survived.  The radar operator and the right gunner went from the rear escape hatch: their chutes were spotted and later reported by the others, but neither was ever seen again.

One other officer, a Major Carr, along for the ride to get his flight pay, moved Gil’s body, beyond help, to an area where he might be aided. He was last seen sitting on his parachute near Gil’s body. He never jumped. Thirty seconds after the crew got out, the big plane exploded.  Within a few hours, submarines on picket duty had them safely on board. (Author’s note: This account was from a letter written by 1st LT Burton Coit, Flight Engineer on that doomed flight.)

Two months and two atomic bombs later, the war ended.  Art Tomes and his remaining crew, PFC Marty Hawkins, and millions of other GI’s, airmen, marines, and sailors found their ways back home. Back to Chicago for Marty, where I would later become his son-in-law and friend; back to Minnesota and a career in commercial aviation for Art.  They knew they were lucky to have made it, and they carried the fierce pride of having done their job, and done it well.

They were finished with their war, but the war wasn’t quite finished with them. Most spent years trying to make some sense out of it, to get answers that would never come, to wait for the nightmares to fade. Many tried to reconnect with the families of the lost to express their sorrow, and perhaps seek at least temporary release from the curious guilt one feels to have survived when the man next to you did not.

Gil’s widow, Rita Finn, shattered by the loss of her husband, went back to work as the crack secretary she was. Like so many other young war widows, she found love again after a few years. She married a young fireman named Tom, himself a widower with a child, and both forged a new life out of the ashes of the old. Her infant son, Gil, Jr., and Tom’s young daughter Maureen would become the start of a new family.

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Gilbert J. Finn, Jr., the infant son now 55 years old, picked up the phone to hear Art Tomes’ voice. Art had been trying for years to locate Gil’s mother, Rita Finn (now Wogan), but was having no luck.  In those “pre-internet” days, simply remarrying and changing your name could create a pretty big dead end for anyone trying to find you, particularly in a city the size of Chicago.  Art had found Gil’s name, spelled exactly as his fathers’, in an Aurora, Illinois phone directory and gave it a try. And so a few weeks later, I found myself driving my mother and Gil to a house in Merrillville, Indiana, owned by Art’s daughter.

It was an uneasy ride for my mother and, I think, for Gil. We were about to reconnect with one of the last living persons his father had known, a man who had flown 23 missions with his dad. What would we learn, what would we say? How to begin?

As I pulled into the driveway, the big man, now old and a bit stooped but looking every inch the command pilot he once was, came out to greet us. He looked at me a bit confused. My brother and I look nothing alike; Gil has his father’s slight build and my genetic award was my father’s square one.   He must have been wondering how Gil’s son could look so different than he expected. Once he saw Gil emerge from the other side of car, he smiled and went to him, draping him in a huge bear hug. I could see the tears forming at the ends of his closed eyes and I wondered if he was making good on a 55 year-old promise to hug Gil’s child if the worst happened.  Then he saw my mother, whom he had met those many years ago when the crews trained together across Florida, Nebraska and Texas as they moved toward combat. They knew each other immediately, and both reached out their hands to each other.  They didn’t say anything for a few moments, but both of their eyes were glistening.  The silent flood of emotions was almost palpable.

They talked at the kitchen table for hours, Gil and I mostly listening. There were details and subtext to the story that we had never heard.  Names of crewmen, the nature of that final mission, did this person survive, where does he live now? And then both Art and my mother did something extraordinary. They each produced a letter and gave it to each other. My mother’s letter was from Art, expressing his sorrow and relating the circumstances of that final deadly flight, as he knew them, and what the wartime censors would allow. It was written in 1945 in his classic cursive style. The letter Art produced was from my mother, dated a few weeks later, thanking him for letting her know the circumstances of Gil’s death. I could see the familiar feminine cursive style of her writing and the fragile paper and envelope. Both letters had the word “free” where a stamp should have been. The postal service didn’t charge for letters to servicemen during the war.

We began to wrap things up when Art made one final comment that still haunted him and in a way maybe haunted all of us. His gaze shifted to some unknown point in the distance and he said” I’ll never understand how a fine young man like Gil lost his life so many years ago, and I got to live out the rest of mine.”

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Handwritten letters are rare now, at least as a common means of communicating. If I see one in my mail, I tend to open it first, I am that curious. We exist in a transient trivial world of texts, emails, Twitter feeds, and Facebook postings. Our written communications seldom outlive a single day.

The careful crafting of sentences and paragraphs and the framing of a message has fallen into disuse, as has the Palmer Method of cursive writing. Keyboarding, not handwriting is taught today in schools. But I still marvel at the enduring power of those two letters, the emotional commitment it must have taken to write them, and how, once written, they attained great value, something to be kept throughout the years.

Those letters that were exchanged that day somehow closed the circle surrounding this tragedy. More than 50 years they had both kept those letters, and neither could have foreseen a day such as this. Somehow, when they made their way back to their original authors, it was as if we could finally lay 1LT Gilbert J. Finn to rest.  During the ride home I don’t think anyone said a word; we were each in a private, personal place. A place of remembrance, a place of solemn pride, maybe, at last, a place of peace.

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1LT Gilbert J. Finn

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Tattoos

We are one inked up nation, over these last few generations. What was once the exclusive province of bikers, over-served sailors on shore leave, and carnival “carnies” has now become the norm for almost everyone in their late teens or early twenties. Years ago, tattoo parlors were only located in the same part of town as the “bucket of blood” bar, the local whorehouse and the pawn shop. Now they can be found in almost every neighborhood.

Our skin has become our canvas and what a canvas it is! You can express your love for another person, your lingering memory of the departed, your favorite team, a unit in the military in which you served, what a badass you wish you were, or what an incredible and unusual lover you must be. Location of the tattoo can be public, private, or extremely private; in the case of the ubiquitous “tramp stamp”, it can serve as an “open for business” sign over the doorway.

It’s painful and unsanitary, and mostly permanent, and for sure I don’t get it, but hey, it’s not my generation’s problem.  At least I won’t have to sit around some rest home someday watching barbed wired biceps when the wire goes slack or when the heart with your old boyfriend’s name starts to wrinkle.  There are other drawbacks, too, especially when you exit the world of youth and take your inked-up self into the workplace.

I see bridesmaids trying to camouflage that heart with Johnny’s name inside it just above the right breast. She can see his name every morning in the shower, but Johnny is a distant memory and her husband is Eddie and how does he feel about it?  Or professional women in their 30’s, trying hard to come off as cold steel and all business, but betrayed a bit by the winding vine on their lower left leg, reaching up for, well, somewhere. Young businessmen suffer from having older people question their maturity and judgment when they spy the tip of a lightning bolt or a Celtic cross peeking up from that necktied collar. Ah, youth.

I have an unproven theory that the smaller the town you come from, the more inked up you are likely to be by age twenty. Body piercings follow roughly the same curve. I base this theory on too many years of observation in towns like Blaire, NE (Pop. 8,000), Fremont, NE (Pop. 25,000) and North Sioux City, SD (pop. 2,500). All nice towns, but your younger employees will make your office look like a circus train overturned nearby.

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My wife and I were 22, newly married and teaching school for a living. I taught in a Catholic girl’s high school in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Maureen taught in a Catholic elementary school in the heart of a Mexican and Polish neighborhood in the near downtown area (North and California) known as Humboldt Park. For whatever reasons, those two groups seem to coexist easily in Chicago. Maybe it’s their shared Catholic faith and their propensity for hard work, but there are several Mexican-Polish neighborhoods around town.

Maureen had made friends with another teacher in her school, St. Fidelis.  Helen was in her forties or early fifties, an attractive middle-aged woman of Polish descent with accent to go with it. Maureen admired her skills in the classroom and I think Helen served as a sort of mentor for her. Helen also served as moral support for her, as Maureen looked way too young to be in charge of a classroom and the principal who hired her was a nun who was very skeptical at first. By the end of the first semester, Maureen had won the principal over and she and Helen had become fast friends.

A few months later, Helen invited us to dinner at her house and the chance to meet her husband Bishof, which translates into “Bill”. In those days of lean paychecks, we didn’t turn down too many free meals.  Bishof was a distinguished looking man, about Helens’ age, and an old country Polish tailor, who made all the clothing for both he and Helen. These were the terrible days of polyester, the photos of which no one really wants to recall or see again, so he was decked out in his blue polyester jacket and slacks. I don’t know what I wore, but I am sure it was equally hideous.

It was a wonderful dinner with ham and a number of Polish delicacies, Zywiec Polish Beer and some wine. We chatted about al lot of things and they showed us around their home, so proud of every room and every detail. After dessert, we drifted into some contemporary topics, one of which was a newly-surfaced theory that the holocaust in World War II was a myth, that nothing like six million people died. It was a ruse being used by the Israelis to get support for their cause.  I’m not sure who floated the idea or why, but it was getting lots of ink in the papers.

Bishof and Helen grew quiet and then, seeming to nod to each other, Bishof took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve. Helen did the same. There, on their left forearms, were the tattoos, six numbers each, the unmistakable and permanent marks of concentration camp survivors. I could not have been more stunned had they undressed and stood naked before us.

You can read about it, see movies about it, and see the newsreels of corpses piled high, but it’s not the same.  My uncle was with the 82nd Airborne and had overrun a few of these camps at war’s end, and had talked a bit about it, but it sounded like just stories from long ago.  My mother lectured us at lunch about it and felt very passionate about the holocaust.  But here standing before us was living proof of this word holocaust. Here were two normal, likeable people who somehow survived the most lethal killing machine ever seen on earth.  That machine was built under the blatant lies and half -truths of a ruthless political party selling nationalism and racial purity. And a misguided nation bought into it and in so doing brought the world into a global struggle to end the murders and punish the authors of Nazism.

That ended that discussion, and we drifted on to other topics that night, but I never forgot it. Our new friends had honored us with their tattoos, as if to say “It really happened…it happened to us, and we were the lucky ones. Six million others were not.”

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Nationalism is being sold again, both here and abroad. The British people are now dumbfounded to learn that they have been hoodwinked by the loud voices of separatism, the suspicion, hatred and banning of immigrants, and a return to the “glory days” of Britain, which were never that glorious to begin with. The final tally was barely announced before members of the U.K. announced their own plans for referendums to leave Great Britain. The leaders of the “Brexit” movement within days had renounced most of their pre-election claims and had removed themselves for consideration for higher office. They sold their “big lie” and have now left it for others to resolve.

Here at home, we have, of course, Mr.Trump. Plenty of people would rather vote for anyone but him, but there he stands. His supporters demand only that he continue to boast, insult, and demean. His deficiencies, and they are many and deep, matter not at all. He plays to our basest, most unlikeable self, the absolute worst angels of our nature. His base is mostly white, more male than female, not very bright, angry about almost everything, racist, and plyable.  They are buying into the myth of “Make America Great Again’, which is a transparent lie they refuse to see through.  Watching their behavior makes me think that the only difference between them and the “Brownshirts” of 1938, breaking the windows of shops in Berlin’s Jewish quarter, is the uniforms.

I believe we are a better country than this and I believe he will implode and his frantic supporters will cry foul, but then go back to their fear and loathing on a local level, polluting their own towns and cities with their misplaced hatred.

The great British Parliamentarian Edmund Burke once said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Do the right thing, Americans. I have seen enough tattoos.