Warbird Information Exchange

Oh beautiful for heroes proved
In liberating strife,
That more than self their country loved
And mercy more than life.
-America The Beautiful


It is a gorgeous summer’s day in as peaceful and pretty a countryside as I can ever hope to find. The blue sky and puffy white clouds stretch on past the Black Forest on the far distant horizon. The little, quaint Alsatian village, surrounded by vineyards, has changed only somewhat since the Second War, forty five years before.

Antoine and I are standing in the driveway of his childhood home, right where he had stood when the story he is telling me took place. A boy of eleven, he had run out the door upon hearing the rumbling of the formation returning from deep inside Germany. Looking east, in the direction of the Forest, he saw the heavy bombers fighting their way home.

As he looks into the sky now and speaks with eloquence and emotion born of the recounting of one of his life’s most moving events, I begin to see them, too. The sky is full of aircraft, some smoking, some showing flame. One explodes. Tracers. Parachutes. Luftwaffe. Death.

As the formation approaches, one of the bombers, mortally wounded and on fire, sinks rapidly and grows horrifically large. Parachutes appear. Roaring overhead, it explodes an instant later against the hillside above the village.

The crewmen who got out are brought to the town hall for interrogation by the Germans. The schoolteacher, who knows English and French, is there, as is Antoine, fluent in French and German. The words moving from language to language say that the bomber was so badly shot up that it had become nearly uncontrollable. The pilot elected to fly it into the hill rather than bail out and risk it hitting the village. On March 18, 1944, B-24H, 42-7497, ended its last mission as the funeral pyre of 1st Lt. Lynn G. Peterson.

Though he saw the whole thing happen, Antoine shakes his head as if he still can’t really believe it. I am humbled beyond words. It is a good day to carry a handkerchief, and I pull out when I think nobody is looking.