By Dewey Roussel
A PEACE THAT TRULY PASSES UNDERSTANDING SOMETIMES COMES TO US IN WONDERFUL AND MYSTERIOUS WAYS.
From his first day at school, our son Hubert – we called him Bubs – had shown a keen and protective interest in birds. “St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds” was one of the pictures in his room. He joined the National Audubon Society, read the literature and lore of ornithology, and trapped wild birds to band them for study, then set them free.
In spring and summer, Bubs would lie under the trees watching, through the lacing of leaves, the silent and majestic poetry of vast cumulus ranges shaping and merging and reshaping themselves in a drama of color and movement. He spent hours admiring the birds’ effortless flights, amused by their comic or petulant antics.
As Bubs grew older, he was drawn to flying. Pictures of aircraft went up next to the one of St. Francis. He became fascinated with what men had learned from the anatomy and habits of birdlife in the evolution of mechanical flight.
He was 17 on that gloomy Sunday afternoon when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Bubs greeted his father and me with the shocking news. I do not remember his words; I remember only the look in his eyes. When the Army call came, he let us know that somehow he would serve in the air.
The Army put him in a clerical job, but he volunteered for flight training. Schooled for a tedious year as a radio operator on the newly developed B-29s, then undergoing secret tests, Bubs finally arrived at a Kansas air base, where his dream was realized.
During the months that followed, his letters reflected an almost mystic exhilaration. “It seems so pure and clean in the air,” he wrote. “Like giant birds, we glide circling above the clouds, completely free and detached from the confusion and detail of earth.”
When his letters were interrupted, we understood. It was December 1944. The war had reached what everyone felt must be its decisive phase. In Europe, the Allies were threatening Germany; in the Pacific, the bombing of Japan had revealed that the B-29s were making runs from the Mariana Islands.
His next letter let us know that his base was Saipan – a tiny island in the western Pacific. It was in that distant, strange and desolate theater of terror that boys turned into men. Bubs was the youngest in his crew.
Exactly how, when or where Bub’s plane went down is still a mystery. The official report gave only the usual meager details: four of the planes that soared out over the Pacific in the early morning of December 13, 1944, to make a bomb run on factories at Nagoya, were never heard from again.
Families of the crewmen of “our” plane clung desperately to hope. We wrote encouraging letters to one another. But we were the only family to receive a letter from the missing after the loss. Bubs had placed it on his pillow:
Dear Folks: I have left this with instructions to send it on to you if anything happens to me. I send you my love and blessings. My life has been a full one. I have been loved like very few persons ever. I love you all with the best that is in me. It hasn’t been hard for me, knowing you believe in me, trust me and stand behind me in fair or foul. Knowing this has made me strong...
I typed copies for the relatives of the other lost crewmen. Bub’s letter brought us close together in the bonds of a mutual sorrow.
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