HONORING THOSE LOST IS ALL WE CAN DO ON MEMORIAL DAY
In May 1944, my uncle, John Matthews, was 16 years old and a junior in high school. His older brother, Robert, was in the Army Air Forces as a navigator in a C-47 transport plane whose unit just arrived in England.
It was unseasonably warm for Buffalo, and he and a high school buddy were walking to the friend’s house after school. “When I got to his house, I started to worry,” Matthews recalled. He had a premonition that to this day he can't explain. “I felt something wasn’t right.”
John’s mother had a wartime job at a defense plant, but he called home. The cleaning lady answered and told him to get home right away.
He threw open the door of his friend’s house and started running. “I don’t recall what I thought as I was running,” he said.
He burst through the door of his house, out of breath.
The telegram sat in an ashtray, a copper one he had made in summer camp. He saw the words “died of injuries.”
The following days were a blur of grief as his parents dealt with the death of their eldest son. When letters from Bobby — as he was called — arrived, John spirited them away to spare his parents further anguish.
His parents rarely talked about Bobby’s death.
“In retrospect, it seems foolish to try to erase memories, but that was the only way my parents could cope,” he recalled.
It would be five decades before John became determined to find out how his brother died. He contacted Congress members, reunion organizers — even amateur historians in England.
“The few families I contacted didn’t want to deal with it,” he said.
He persisted, and over the course of years discovered official unit histories and located a military investigation.
He didn’t discover any extraor- dinary acts of heroism or uncover any mysteries. But for me, the details of Bobby’s death were a reminder of what the country asks of all young servicemen who are given enormous responsibility at a young age and who willingly risk their lives in service of the nation.
Memorial Day is about honoring the dead. We do that by remembering.
At age 22, Robert Matthews had just arrived in England with his unit, a troop carrier squadron. It was a busy time. The Allies were assembling a massive force to invade Europe, and the C-47s would carry the troops.
“There was a big write up in the paper the other day when Churchill and Ike watched us — a troop carrier tow complete with gliders, paratroopers etc.,” Bobby said in a letter to his parents, about a month before his death. “We dropped them right on the nose — our squadron is about the hottest here, so we usually lead the missions.”
Matthews had been assigned to another squadron that was readying for the invasion of Normandy and was short on navigators. On April 25, he and some other new transfers were flown from their new base at Fulbeck to their original headquarters at Membury to pick up paperwork and personal belongings. They were passengers.
On the flight back, the plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 14 men aboard, crew and passengers. It was the largest single loss of life for the 442nd Troop Carrier Group, which would go on to participate in most of the major battles as the Allies moved through Europe to crush the Nazis.
Bill Huntington, a retired Air Force master sergeant who has studied the history of the 442nd TCG, said the pilot may have been flying low over the berthing area, so the men could wave to their buddies before going to their new unit.
“The pilot put the airplane on a knife edge pass, with its wing down, so they could wave to friends,” Huntington said. “He didn’t gauge his altitude over the trees. The right wing clipped one of the trees.”
The tail section was all that was left of the aircraft. Most of the men died on impact. One died a day later.
“I don’t think at that moment in history of the group, they had much experience with loss,” Huntington said. Not that there was any time to grieve. The squadron held a memorial service, then the unit got back to preparing for war.
Today, I have many of the fading photographs, the yellowing letters and documents that John Matthews so painstakingly collected in an effort to preserve the memory of his brother.
Remembering is all we can do.