To Kingdom Come (39 page)

In May 1949, he received a letter from Harry Truman that temporarily lifted his spirits. The president had just signed an order retroactively making Arnold the only five-star general to have ever served in the air force.

At Christmas, Hap’s son gave him a light bar to use with his handheld movie camera. Hap was too weak to hold up the bar. A few weeks later, he sent a confused telegram to the editors of Encyclopedia Britannica, for whom he had hoped to write an article on the history of aviation.

“Help. Have been working on rewrites for Britannica and am all at sea. . . . What’s the score before I strike out and the game is called on the account of darkness?”

Hap Arnold died on January 15, 1950, at the age of sixty-four.

Ira C. Eaker

In January 1944, Ira Eaker was named commander in chief of the Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, having under his command the Twelfth and Fifteenth U.S. Air Forces and the British Desert and Balkan air forces.

Although the Mediterranean theater was soon to become the relative backwater he had feared, Ira Eaker deftly employed airpower to assist the Allied forces seeking to defeat the German forces in Italy. One of his decisions led to controversy after the war. Under pressure from Allied ground commanders in Italy who were attempting to eliminate a German garrison at the fourteen-hundred-year-old Abbey of Monte Cassino near Rome, Eaker reluctantly signed off on the decision to destroy it with fourteen hundred tons of bombs. In the wake of its total destruction, the ruins provided even better defensive positions for the German garrison.

On April 30, 1945, weeks after the war in Europe ended, General Eaker was named deputy commander of the army air forces and chief of the air staff. He retired on August 31, 1947, having logged twelve thousand hours in the air during his thirty-year military career.

In his later years, Ira Eaker remained active in the aviation field, going to work for Howard Hughes at Hughes Aircraft, and later for Douglas Aircraft. He and his wife, Ruth, settled in San Angelo, Texas, southwest of Fort Worth. Until 1982, he wrote a weekly column for the
San Angelo Standard-Times
that was syndicated to newspapers across the country.

In 1985, Congress passed legislation that awarded General Eaker with a fourth star, and the law was signed by President Ronald Reagan. It left him with one less than Hap Arnold. The two men never reconciled.

Ira Eaker died in 1987, and was buried at Arlington Cemetery. He was ninety-one.

Olen “Reb” Grant

The first of the many reconstructive surgeries on Reb’s face took place at O’ Reilly Army Hospital, where surgeons removed the last of the shrapnel that was embedded in his nose and cheek. While he was recuperating, Reb found his first postwar job washing cars at a local automobile dealership.

Moving on to Cushing Army Hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts, he received several bone grafts to rebuild his right cheek and eye socket. New eyelids were grafted from the large flap of skin his Austrian surgeon had stretched across his empty eye socket. In another procedure, mucous membranes from his mouth were used to line the inside of the eye socket, so that fluid would be secreted to allow movement of a future prosthesis. Reb asked the doctor if this meant that his new eye would be able to taste apple pie.

He went to Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania, where doctors constructed the prosthesis for his right eye socket. The new eye fit all right, but there was no muscle left around it to keep his eyelid from drooping shut. His doctor inserted a tiny shelf beneath the eyelid, but that meant the new eye always remained open. It’s the best we can do, the doctor told him. He’s worn a patch ever since.

While he was hospitalized, millions of returning veterans had begun using their GI Bill benefits to seek a college education, and few colleges had available space when he was ready to go. Olen aspired to be a journalist, and he was finally accepted at the small college of Colorado A&M in Fort Collins. He and his wife headed west.

Priscilla wasn’t happy there, and Reb attempted to enroll in college in California, only to learn there were no available openings in their state school system. Returning to New York, he worked at a number of jobs, including wrapping gifts in Macy’s basement and selling paper products.

One day he returned home from work to discover that Priscilla had moved out. She left him a note saying that she was moving back with her mother and would seek a divorce.

In the fall of 1948, Reb was accepted at the University of Arkansas, where he went on to earn a double degree in journalism and political science. Unable to find a newspaper job, he went to work for Beech Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas, writing technical catalogues. After marrying a second time, he and his new wife raised three daughters, Terry Lynn, Brenda Jo, and Janet Leigh, who was named after Reb’s favorite actress.

When a bout with tuberculosis put him back in the hospital for six months, Reb emerged to find his position gone, but eventually found a job drafting contracts and specifications for the Army Corps of Engineers at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. He remained with the corps until his retirement.

Since then, he has kept busy with a variety of activities, including building a mountainside cabin in Ruidoso, New Mexico, and imbuing his grandchildren with the importance of reading. His favorite authors include Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Larry McMurtry.

In 2008, his daughter Janet visited France to thank the people who had saved her father’s life, including Robert Artaud, who drove the local ambulance in Entrépagny and brought Reb to the local hospital after he had been removed from
Yankee Raider
. In England, Janet left a poem Reb had written near the monument to the men who served with the 384th Bomb Group at Grafton Underwood.

Always a free thinker, Reb believes that nature is the driving force behind life. The reward for human beings is how we live our lives here on earth, but nature is always the immutable power. Reb, who now lives in Hot Springs, Arkansas, once saw a tornado pick up a neighbor’s house and carry it into the next state. At eighty-seven, he recognizes power when he sees it.

Demetrios “the Greek” Karnezis

After returning from England to the United States in early 1944, Jim Karnezis became a B-17 instructor pilot at Hobbs Air Force Base in New Mexico. When the war ended, he decided to make his career in the air force, and received a regular commission as a captain in 1946.

That same year, he married Versamee Vandouris, whom he had first met while attending basic flying school in Chico, California. Back then, Versamee was attending a nearby teachers’ college, and they met at an officers’ club dance. She gave him her address and they began corresponding when he was in England with the Eighth Air Force. Their bond drew closer when Versamee’s brother was killed piloting a B-24 bomber later in the war. After marrying in 1946, the couple began their new family a year later with a son they named Ted. Three more boys were to follow, Arthur, Ivan, and Alec.

After a year of intensive study at the Army Language School in Monterey, California, he became fluent in Greek, and attended Princeton University’s School for Near Eastern Studies. Upon graduating from the program, he was assigned to the U.S. Joint Military Group in Greece, serving three years there as an adviser and instructor at the Royal Hellenic Air Force Academy, where he introduced night-flying procedures into their curriculum.

While in Europe, he returned in September 1953 to Champigny, France, where he reunited with Marcelle Andre and Suzanne Bouchy, and visited the graves of his five crewmen, who were buried in the small cemetery close to where
Slightly Dangerous II
had crashed. After the war, the people of the village had created a memorial to the crew. Each September 6, they held a somber commemoration of their loss. On his first visit, Marcelle Andre confided to Jim that her daughter Marie Therese had never married, hoping that he would someday come back for her.

Returning to the United States, the newly promoted Major Jim Karnezis spent the next three years at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, first as its operations officer, and two years later as a squadron commander training interceptor pilots.

From 1958 to 1960, he went overseas again as an exchange officer with the Royal Air Force in England, responsible for advanced jet fighter training in RAF Meteors, Vampires, and Hawker Hunters. In the early sixties, he was assigned to Lackland Air Force Base, where he led the command’s aerobatic team.

Promoted to lieutenant colonel, his last posting was at the Alaskan Air Command, where he was director of operations. He retired from the air force after thirty years of service as a full colonel. His decorations include the Legion of Merit, Order of the Purple Heart, two Air Medals, and the Air Force Commendation Medal.

In 1993, he returned once more to Champigny, France, to attend the fiftieth commemoration of his crew’s loss there. Jim was moved to see that hundreds of people had come to pay homage to them. He had memorized two French sentences that summed up his gratitude to those who had put their lives on the line for him, including Marcelle Andre and Suzanne Bouchy. “You are my second family,” he told them in French, adding tearfully,
“Je vous aime très beaucoup.”

Today, “the Greek” lives with Versamee in Sacramento, California, where he grows citrus fruit and enjoys quiet time with his children and seven grandchildren. The only physical reminders of the Stuttgart mission lie in an old footlocker out in the garage next to his house. Inside it are the cracked leather GI brogans he was wearing when he was shot down.

Wilbur “Bud” Klint

After surviving the ditching of
Old Squaw
in the English Channel on September 6, 1943, Bud returned to the 303rd’s air base at Molesworth the following day. By then, his clothing, personal effects, and bedding had been removed from the officers’ hut where he had been living along with the rest of the officers in the crew. It wasn’t easy to get it back.

Bud and the rest of his crew received a forty-eight-hour pass after the Stuttgart mission, which was his sixth. He had nineteen more to go before completing his combat tour.

The remaining missions included some of the toughest in the history of the Eighth Air Force, and he came to believe that a higher power was somehow looking out for his welfare. Over Münster, he experienced the most intense flak barrage of his tour. Thirty Fortresses went down that day.

On October 14, he went back to Schweinfurt a second time. On the first Schweinfurt mission in August, thirty-six bombers had been shot down. On the second raid, it was sixty. Both times, his plane was rocked by enemy flak and cannon fire, but it somehow got through.

In early 1944, Bud was made a pilot of his own Fortress and assigned a new crew. His twenty-fifth and final mission was to Bernberg, Germany, after which he returned to the States, where he finished out the war.

After being discharged, he returned to his hometown of Chicago. Prior to the war, he had worked as a sales clerk for a local candy company. He was offered a junior executive position with the same company. Shortly after resuming his civilian career, he met and fell in love with his future wife, Mary.

After raising three children, he and Mary moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where he became the marketing director for King Candy Company. Retiring from business life in the early 1980s, Bud focused his time and attention on his children and grandchildren, while pursuing an interest in creating a lasting memorial to the men he flew with in 1943.

In 1998, he participated in a ceremony in Schweinfurt, Germany, along with a few of the surviving German veterans of the city’s Luftwaffe antiaircraft batteries, to honor the men of both sides in the conflict. Inscribed on the stone monument are the words “Dedicated by some who witnessed the tragedy of war, now united in friendship and the hope for lasting peace among all people.”

Surrounded by his family, Bud Klint passed away in July 2009.

Warren Porter Laws

From Barcelona, Spain, Warren flew back to the United States in February 1944. After a thirty-day home leave, he was sent on a lecture tour of army air force bases. The purpose of the tour was to educate flight crews on how to escape from occupied Europe if they were shot down. It was also designed to boost morale by proving that if a man was shot down in occupied Europe, he had a good chance of evading capture.

Upon completing the lecture tour in April 1944, Warren returned to Connecticut to marry Libby Minck. Deciding to remain in the air force, he became an instructor pilot in B-17s. In March 1946, seven months after the war ended, Libby gave birth to their son, Warren, Jr. In the years afterward, they had three more children, Lisette, Laurie, and Lynn.

In the late 1940s, Warren was assigned to lead the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. After that posting, he was transferred to an Air-Sea Rescue Unit in Greenland, where he flew B-17s equipped with inflatable lifeboats that could be dropped to distressed ships and crews.

He was then ordered to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where he helped to establish the air force’s Institute of Technology. That was followed by a two-year tour at an intelligence post in Germany. While in Europe, he visited France several times with his son to visit many of the people who had helped him during his four months evading capture by the Germans.

One of his last tours of duty was as the supply squadron commander at Beale Air Force Base in California in 1962. An incident occurred there that may well have cost him further promotion.

One day a black noncommissioned officer asked to see him. In the privacy of Warren’s office, the noncom told him that his black airmen had no time to eat lunch. At lunchtime, they had to catch a bus several miles across the air base to their own mess hall. By the time they got there and sat down to eat, there was no time to catch a bus back to their workstations on the other side of the base.