Interview by Daniel Jackson, 27 February 2016

Would you mind talking to me about your experience looking for your father?

What do you want to know? It’s a rather long story.

I read what you wrote in Up Sun! and was totally amazed by how little you knew and what you were able to discover through that process of talking to veterans your father served with.

 Right, let me give you a brief background. Wives of 14th Air Force vets, they told me that when a husband was killed and the widow remarried, she didn’t talk about her husband to her new family, even though she might have had a child. So I’ve told this then and I’ll tell you, my mother was just as much a casualty of the war as my father was. Because it led her to a real bad alcoholism and, you know, she lost her husband and was strapped with a one-year-old kid. And so she would not talk about it at all. And I tried to find out about it. Per force, I became passionate about World War II history in general and the air war in particular. And from a very young age, from the early ‘50s, I grabbed every book I could get and read about it. God is My Copilot, and the closest thing, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, you know, B-25s. But those were all early in the war, 1941 and 42 and parenthetically, I’ve met all those guys. Bob Scott and all the Tokyo Raiders. As a matter of fact, I have a fighter ace autograph collection that’s about ten thousand items. My passion runs deep. Anyway, there was hardly anything on China. It was a backwater, both logistically and as far as – you know, the 8th Air Force is what everybody talked about. So there wasn’t anything out there talking about B-25s in China and what was going on. I got the Craven and Cate book, you know the multi-volume book. It cuts off in January of ’45 and of course he was shot down and killed six weeks before the war was over. In fact, a friend of mine, a Marine in I Corps, pulled duty on that bridge at Quang Tri, so I know that bridge better than I know any bridge in the world. So anyways, wouldn’t talk about it, wouldn’t talk about it. You know, World War II was in the atmosphere. As a kid growing up, the barber that I went to was on the Missouri, in the famous photograph of the kamikaze hitting the side of the ship. That’s what everybody’s dad did, or uncle. They were all World War II vets. That was just the elephant in the room, but nobody really talked about it because they were getting on with their lives. I saw a picture of, it looked like, a low-level bombing run with an explosion by a bridge or something. We didn’t have much of anything. We had a couple of moves and pretty much lost anything that may have shed any light. As a matter of fact, the only things that survived are a picture of him and his Air Medal and Purple Heart that he got, obviously, posthumously. Anyways, long story short, you pick it up about where I start talking about it. A friend of mine went to Washington in the late-eighties and went to – sorry, I break up when I talk about it – went to the Vietnam wall and that’s where I broke down and started crying. Because I never cried over the loss of my father because I obviously didn’t know him. So anyways, there was a 60 Minutes about kids whose dads were killed in Vietnam. And I said, well hell, I need to know about this stuff. So anyways, my mother, she was dying of cancer and I finally said, look mom, because my son was older than my father [was when he died] and I couldn’t tell him anything about his grandfather. So I said, “Mom, time to let me know.” Well, she was very confused. She hadn’t thought about it. I knew the four squadrons, you know, the 11th, the 22nd, the 490th, 491st, that were in the 341st. I assumed their experiences were sort of like what they were in Europe and other theaters. Which isn’t true. A maximum effort mission in China was four B-25s and four fighter escorts. Usually it was two aircraft to go out, stooge about, look for sampans or whatever. Anyway, she thought the name of the airplane was “Jean” because that was her name and the name of the wife of one of the other pilots. I found out later that these guys all worked for Pratt and Whitney in Hartford. My father, the pilot, and copilot were killed with them. It just so happens I took my daughter to school, which I hardly ever did. And literally within blocks of my house there’s a school bus yard and pulling into that school bus yard… In the meantime, backup a minute, I go to all the airshows and all that sort of stuff. I was at an airshow in Titusville for the Flying Tigers and so I met Ed Rickets and some other guys. And of course they were all there, like I said, in ’41 and ’42. But they tried to help me out anyway they could. You know, I met “Tex” Hill, Ed Rector, Jim Howard. What used to freak me out was, “Tex” Hill knew who I was. He would walk up to me and say, “Hey Bruce, how are you doing?” So they sort of adopted me. Anyways, so I sort of knew what the 14th Air Force Flying Tigers Association stuff looked like and here was a decal on the back window of this car that pulled in and of course breathlessly I ran up to the guy and tried to find out what he knew. And he really couldn’t say because he was in a logistical outfit, but come back in a day or so and he’d have some stuff. And he brought directories for the 14th Air Force Association. So, going on the assumption that my father was in the 491st, I looked and underlined all the names and started calling them. And they had never of Doyle, had never heard of him. And I began to wonder if this was some sort of sick fantasy. So, there happened to be one Doyle in the directory, a guy named Buck Doyle who lived in Washington, actually in Arlington, Virginia. And I called him, got his answering machine, left a message. And about three hours later, I get this call. My wife says, “You better come answer this! This guy sounds pretty excited.” And he told me the whole story: “Hell yeah, I knew your father! He served with me in the 11th. What’s this nonsense about the 491st?” It was in the spring. He said, “We read the names of all the recently deceased members of the association over Chennault’s grave. Come up and be my guest in Washington.” Which I did. He started calling me George, which is pretty freaky, because I helped him out in the hospitality room. Another friend of mine is an aviation artist named Ray Waddy. One of my best friends. I don’t know if you’ve ever gone to Maxwell, to Air Command and Staff College. Ray would come, Colonel McFarland would invite us to come up there, and Ray would display his artwork. He had original signed paintings, you name it: Adolph Galland, Erich Hartman, Joe Foss, Jimmy Doolittle. Anyways, we go up there – and this is freaky – I walk into the archives on the second floor and here comes Hub Zemke walking out. And I’m going, “I’m not worthy!” And I’m freaking out. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid, I read about Foss, Gabreski, and Yeager, and all these guys that might as well have lived on the planet Mars for ever thinking I could meet them. And like I said, Tex Hill knew who I was. So I was absolutely blown away. So I asked for the records for the 11th Bomb Squadron and the guy pulls out a big archival folio. And I swear to God, the very first thing I pick up is mission 648 – the mission he was shot down on. This has got to be some sort of sign from God, if you’re religious, or, you know, an amazing coincidence – however you want to spin it. There was a guy who was in my dad’s squadron who lived in Montgomery and he invited me to come over. He had a stack of photographs, which he said, “Take them home and look through them.” I get home on Sunday night, I look through the stack, and there’s the bridge at Quang Tri with a smoke plume where my father’s plane had gone in. That’s the first time I had ever seen it. My sister calls me the next morning and tells me my mother died that night. Anyway, back up a little bit, before I went up to Washington, I wrote – oh hell, I must have sent out three hundred letters to guys in the 11th and the 491st on a Tuesday. On Thursday Leroy Marsh calls me from Orlando. He was the crew chief of the Carolyn K. He put my father on the plane that morning. And I got to talk to him. I got to talk to a lot of the guys. You know, it was pretty amazing. I actually put out a newsletter – a couple of issues. I think I’ve got one around here. I might send you one if you want. So yeah, that’s the cliff notes version of what happened. I got to meet a lot of the guys in his squadron, went to a couple of 14th Air Force reunions. They have these things, like the Southwest Florida chapter of the 14th Air Force would meet at MacDill and I went there a couple times. It’s amazing, out of respect for my father, they sort of adopted me. And the guys told me, “I’m telling you things I never told my family.” It was a bittersweet experience because you can’t miss something you don’t know anything about. The more you learn about somebody – I went on NPR; he interviewed me Memorial Day when I was up there for one of the Memorial Day things at Chennault’s grave. He gob smacked me by saying, “Do you miss your father?” And I hadn’t really thought about it. And I said, “Yeah, now that I know something about him, for the first time in my life, I actually miss the guy.” Would I have liked to have met my father? Hell yeah! I wish he was around, but, you know, it’s Hobson’s choice. I wouldn’t have my wife and my two children and my three grandkids. Life would have been a lot different. It’s affected me all my life. I’m sitting in my model room. I’m a member of IPMS Modelling. In fact, I founded the club here in Gainesville. And I’ve got a three archives. I’ve got more 8th Air Force unit histories than the library at Maxwell. I’ve probably got about five thousand volumes of different things about World War II. So yeah, it’s dominated my life to a large degree. That’s pretty much set me on the course of learning about the war, about the air campaigns. And then since I went to Maxwell and met these guys – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Frank Olynyk and the American Fighter Aces Association? Well I’ve been a member starting in ’88 because – I love going to libraries. I did that as a kid. Looking through, it’s the old computer-style spreadsheet type thing. But he’s got it in a binder of every single mission of, say, well the one I found was the 14th Air Force Flying Tigers in China. Day-by-day, unit-by-unit, pilot-by-pilot, every kill, probable, and damaged. In the front was a form to fill out to join the Fighter Aces Association, which I did. So I’ve been going to their reunions since 1990. I’ve sat in a staff car with Gabby Gabreski on my left and Marion Carl on my right going to watch Chuck Yeager and Bud Anderson fly the Glamorous Glen – it was not the Glamorous Glennis, that was the X-1 – but Glamorous Glen and Old Crow, the two P-51s. They hadn’t flown together since World War II. And Gabreski is going, “That god-damned Yeager! That showoff son of a bitch!” And I’m sitting there!

So it’s been very rewarding. I’ve been a member of the Fighter Aces Association. The guys in the 14th are pretty much all gone. I was a member of the CBI group here in town. There were a lot of guys over there in that theater – it was a real backwater.

It seems to me the war really followed people long after it ended.

Well when my father didn’t make it home, actually he’s buried with the pilot and copilot, the Carey brothers. Until 1949, they couldn’t figure out who was who. The navigator right behind my father’s ships said the Japanese – well, by this time. I’m not sure if you if you knew it or not, but the French manned the anti-aircraft positions for most of the war. The 308th, which was the B-24 group, did a mission over Hanoi – or Haiphong, actually – and the guy was telling me, he said they got it through the underground to cut the fuses at twelve thousand – they were coming in at thirteen. Which they did. And the Japanese caught wind of it and after that, they took over the anti-aircraft defenses. But what this guy told me, what they’d do, these B-25s would go on a glip run – they’d glide and skip. They’d glide down from a couple thousand feet. Because if you hit a bridge, it would just put a hole in the bridge. So you wanted to knock the bridge down, so you tried to hit the bank abutment. So they come in hauling ass. And of course, there were four P-51s and they were supposed to be flak suppression, but obviously it didn’t work. And what this guy told me was that the Japanese would shoot straight up. They figured you would fly through it sometime. And that’s what happened. It must have hit one of the pilots, because it did a split-s and then it was a fireball. It had thousand pounders in it. Are you familiar with the book The Aluminum Trail? Because if you’re doing missing aircrew reports, that will save you some hassle from finding them all.

I do have the MACR from your father’s crash here. It includes Lt Erwin’s report of what he saw. I was able to cross-reference it and find a record of the grave on Long Island.

Farmingdale, yes.

I’m trying to put together the full-spectrum picture of the veterans, the families, and the Chinese.

Well I’ll tell you what, the Chinese absolutely love the Flying Tigers and the 14th Air Force, still to this day.

Getting back to your story specifically, I have a few follow-up questions after reading your article. First of all, thanks for writing that. It was very powerful.

Well, whenever I tell people that story, to this day, they can’t believe all the coincidences. I forgot to tell you, Buck Doyle had a stroke and died that July. So within a matter of four weeks, my mother and Buck, who got me on the right path – you could ask the question that has no answer: did he live long enough for me to figure this stuff out? I think about it. I get pretty amazed by it.

There are a lot of coincidences, but there were multiple little things that you didn’t have to follow up with. You didn’t have to follow the guy with the 14th Air Force Association decal on the back of his van. Your determination remained steadfast through many decades of not knowing.

Yeah, I wrote the Air Force Museum, the National Archives. I had no idea how to access all of this. It was frustrating as hell not knowing. It just ate at me for years and years and years.

Did your mother remarry?

The Marine Corps sent him to Dartmouth, and that’s where he met my mother. My sister is sixty-seven, so they got married in about 1949. I can’t remember the exact date off the top of my head. So yeah, she remarried. They moved to Florida in 1960 because she was sick and tired of the cold-ass winters up there in New Hampshire. I don’t blame her. I thank her every time I see blizzard conditions. Anyways, he was another lower-class individual which did not make my other grandparents very happy. He was a brilliant man, an artist. He sang like Bing Crosby, he painted like Andrew Wyatt. But he had his issues and she had her issues, because she was stuck with a kid and no husband. It dogged her the rest of her whole life. He was a great guy. He was my step dad. But he didn’t really feel like it was his place to be my father to a certain degree. But I sort of knew how to be a kid. How to be a son, just because of the group of people we lived with. Like I said, all these guys were World War II vets. You know, it was pretty much a good old New England background; solid stock folks. You know, cub scouts and boy scouts, baseball, getting good grades in school, playing hockey in the winter. But he never really took to discipline me. Because I guess I really didn’t need it. I was a pretty good kid. He went to work for Northeast Airlines in Lebanon, New Hampshire. So it was great going to work with him on Saturdays and hanging out. And that’s when the Navy Reserve guys all flew Avengers. As a matter of fact, one of them landed at the airport and went into the coffee shack and saw me looking around. He didn’t invite me to come in the cockpit that I remember, but he saw this kid, probably ten-year-old kid, really wide-eyed. So he went down to the end of the runway, took off after what looked like a hundred-foot run, tucked the gear up and made a torpedo run on the shack I was standing on. And he pulled up right before and the whip antennae went wham! Wham! I was like, “alright! Do it again!” I was obsessed with anything aviation. I got to fly around in a Capitol Airlines Vickers Viscount and have a F-94C Starfire from, I guess the Pensacola Air Guard do an interception run. Now that guy would be court-martialed and wind up at Eglin in the prison. So aviation dominated my whole life. I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy, but my eyesight wasn’t good enough, so I said screw it. But anyway, yeah, she remarried. And never talked about it. Hardly at all.

Was there a time as a child where the impact that your father died in the war hit you, or did you always know?

I always knew it. I always knew it. Because Al was not my father. He was her new husband. He was my step-father. So it wasn’t like any kind of traumatic event. That was a given. I always knew it. That was just life, you know? I didn’t know any different. As a matter of fact, there was a gal in my class, it was a leap year, she was born on February 29 in ‘44, and her father was killed flying B-29s. There were two or three of us in town. But we didn’t talk about it all that much. We were kids. I was telling somebody the other day, we would get out of school at three o’clock. At three-thirty it was getting dark. So I built models and I got books by William Green. I don’t know if you know who he is, the British aviation author, Famous Fighters of World War II. Anyways, as far as I knew, World War II was in black and white – as a kid growing up in the fifties, ‘cause you know, Victory at Sea and Airpower and all that nonsense. And so to build models, Revel out of the box scale, that’s what I did when it was too cold to go outside. And we didn’t get a TV until I was ten years old and the internet was something my mom put on when she took a shower, so there was none of that. And living in a college town with a library, I’d go and, like I did at Maxwell, I’d go and read the stacks and they had all the Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft lying in there and I’m going “Oh my god, this is neat stuff.” You know, they had the Marine Corps monographs. They had the green book series of the US Army. So I was a library worm. I played a lot of sports, but when it was inclement, or whatever, I had access to all of that stuff. So I was very much a product of that war. To this day, if I had to define myself, I am the person I am today because of that, because of his death. You know it’s pointless speculation to wonder where you might be. I might have been a CEO of a Fortune 500 company and died of a heart attack at age fifty. But who the hell knows.

A lot of people mention that their father or their husband came back from the war and didn’t talk about it. I’m sure part of it was because of the traumatic experience of losing friends, but it also seems like it was so ubiquitous to serve in World War II that no one felt like they had a unique story to tell.

Well here’s why; I’ll tell you why: I’ve been told this by more than one guy. He said he didn’t want to worry his wife. He didn’t want to tell her how many close calls he had of almost getting killed. It’s over with, he survived, why the hell put her through that? The kids didn’t give a shit. That’s the old man telling war stories. So they didn’t talk to anybody except if they found another World War II vet. And it wasn’t until the eighties when these guys started retiring and they’d get into these associations – whether it was Army, you know, 101st Airborne, or the 14th Air Force, or the fighter aces, that they’d meet the guys and they’d start to open up and talk about it. But I can’t tell you how many guys, because out of respect for my father – and I’ve mentioned this before – have said “I’ve told you more than I’ve ever told my wife or my kids or anybody because out of respect for your dad’s memory.” And because I was pretty knowledgeable, not even talking about my father, when I’d meet some guy that was an Eighth Air Force B-17 guy, I’d say, “Well, did you fly the F or the G model? Did you have Cheyenne tail turret?” And they’d go, “How the hell do you know about that stuff?” I’d say, “Because I’ve studied this all my life. I know exactly all about it.” You know, “Did you fly the B model or D Mustang? Did you have problems with the fuel tank behind the cockpit? Did you ever lose control because it was full?” They’d go, “How the hell do you know this stuff?” I’d have P-47 guys that find out from me stuff about how their fuel tanks were pressurized and that sort of stuff.

It was beyond hero worship it was you wanted to know stuff. Like what was your most incredible mission? Were you scared?

You can’t read that kind of stuff in books unless you go talk to these guys.

This B-25 guy in my dad’s outfit was shot down over Hankou. Or Hengyang. I forget which. And he was in his parachute coming down. And here comes three trucks of Japanese following him down. And he knows what’s going to happen. He’s going to be dead meat. All of the sudden here comes this Mustang hauling ass up to him. And he says the Mustang pilot threw back the canopy and gave him a thumbs up and went down and strafed the shit out of the Japanese. Well it happened to be Tex Hill. And so I got those two together so he could say thank you to Tex for saving his life. And so that’s the kind of neat stuff that I got to do years later – found guys and put them together – fighter pilots with bomber crew. You know, pretty rewarding for all the effort I put in for all these to be able to do something like that.

It must have been emotionally difficult, but at the same time cathartic to reclaim your father’s memory.

Right, because like I said, when Bob said, “Do you miss your father?” It’s a slap in the face, “Well hell, of course I didn’t. Intellectually I missed him, but I never knew him, so what’s there to miss?” Once I got ahold of these guys I found out he was the coach of the basketball team that won the China championship. I found out all kinds of stuff. But there were still holes. Was he a hot dog or a hamburger guy? Was he a Red Sox or a Yankees fan? They knew him, but they couldn’t tell me, “I was sitting outside the barracks with your dad one dad and he said x, y, and z.” That never really happened. So there’s still a pretty good hole in the story. So it’s not complete by any means. But at least I found out exactly what happened.

Looking back, now that many of these guys have passed, how has this whole process changed how you look at the world and look at yourself?

I don’t know. I’m glad it’s finally resolved successfully. To have that gnawing unknown hanging over my soul. I hate the word closure. Don’t use that. I hate it. It’s stupid. People don’t have closure. It doesn’t end. I mean, there’s still a giant hole in my life. But at least there’s a focus of what his life was. He’s unknowable to a large degree, but at least bits and pieces of it. I figured out the ones that really suffered were his parents, my grandparents. I’ve read some of the letters that they wrote to the War Department: “Where’s our son? How come we can’t bury him? We want a body!” And it just broke my heart. And they fixated over me while my mother and step-father and my new sister had their lives, I basically hung out at my grandparents if I wasn’t playing ball somewhere. You know, after church on Sunday that’s where I stayed. We’d watch Liberace, and then Victory at Sea, and then the football game, and then Airpower and all that stuff in the afternoon.

The NPR guy, Bob Edwards, in May of 1990, he interviewed me for his NPR show and he asked me that question. Yeah, I’m at peace with it. I guess that’s the way to phrase it. There’s a tangible image of my father that I can share with my son and not just a picture. So in that way, it’s been very rewarding. And all this obsession with World War II aviation panned out. Because once I got into it, the whole just opened up like, I don’t know what. Like a rose or this flower. And then once I had it all figured out, it’s a shame that there’s not more written on the 14th Air Force. Like I said, it was a backwater. But if you read stuff on the Tigers, the Salween Gorge, I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. If they hadn’t stopped the Japanese at the Salween Gorge, Kunming would have fallen, China would have fallen, the Japanese would have had probably a million more troops to spread out in the Pacific, you know the Philippines and the islands. And who knows? So those guys – and they don’t get the credit. But to me, the Salween River Gorge battle is probably the most important unheralded battles of World War II. Unknown, under-appreciated – not even under-appreciated, it’s completely unknown to the general public! Battle of the Bulge, the Ploesti mission, D Day, Stalingrad. Yeah, they’re all important, but the Salween River Gorge, if it hadn’t happened, if those guys hadn’t been there, the war would have been very much different in the Pacific. Very much different.

You never get over it. It doesn’t happen. That’s some sort of sop to somebody. It’s a stupid way, “Our hearts and prayers go out to you.” Bullshit. You haven’t thought about praying and saying you’re sorry, but you feel obligatory to say something like that which is meaningless. It’s just empty. I’ll tell you another aspect because of the whole thing, I came up to Gainesville after graduating from junior college in Fort Meyers as a chemistry major and sort of took a history class on a whim because I was obviously very interested in history and wound up dropping out of chemistry and becoming a military history major. So I’ve got a master’s degree ABD “all but degree” because it burned up. I was going to do a master’s degree on war movies. You know, how the lone wolf has to become a team player? That’s the basic theme of all World War II movies. But unfortunately we had a house fire and my research burnt up.