World War II veterans are quickly passing from our midst
When my cousin Bob Holley died at age 96 a few weeks ago, I lost a good friend. All of us who knew him lost a good man. Beyond the personal loss, his passing was a reminder that we’re all saying goodbye to those rapidly dwindling few whose lives were shaped by World War II. For Bob, those four years out of a long life were the most intense. He and millions of others were forever affected.
On a Veterans Day in the not-too-distant future every last man or woman who was fortunate enough to return home from the horrors of war in Europe or the South Pacific will have passed from our midst.
Like those aged Civil War veterans in ’50s-era Life Magazine photos, they’ll soon join the ranks of comrades-in-arms who went before. According to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, 362 die each day.
I knew Bob my whole life. I’m named for his dad, my Uncle Joe. Easygoing, not bothered by much, as best as I could tell, Bob was quite a bit older than my brothers and me, but we liked being around him nonetheless.
We saw him mainly at annual family reunions on our grandfather’s Hill County farm when he and wife Mary Ellen would drive over from Tyler and in later years up from Houston. They were the first people — indeed, the only people — we knew who had a movie camera, so thanks to them we have home movies in now-faded colors of aunts and uncles milling about trying to ignore the camera, of Papa self-consciously shaking hands with birthday well-wishers, of kitchen tables groaning with pies and cakes and of little boys running around playing the fool for the camera. (That would be my brothers and me.) The movies go back to the late 1940s, not long after Bob came home from the war.
As I kid, I knew he’d been a Navy pilot in the Pacific, but I didn’t know much beyond that. Like most members of the Greatest Generation, he was reluctant to talk about what he had lived through.
A story Mary Ellen shared not long ago — one I recounted in an earlier column — is revealing. She said that when she and
Bob moved to Houston from Tyler, they got to know Al and Marge Leiser. The couples became fast friends. Al, a noted endocrinologist who helped build the KelseySeybold Clinic, had been a flight surgeon during the Korean War. For his bravery, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the only flight surgeon so honored.
Bob and Mary Ellen found out about their friend’s wartime heroics from his Chronicle obituary. He had never told them. And they had never told Al and Marge about Bob being shot down over the Pacific.
‘I knew heroes’
On Sept. 22, 1944, Bob was piloting a Grumman TBF Avenger off the aircraft carrier Altamaha near the Philippines.
“There were two planes in formation,” Bob explained. “The plane right next to me got blown to kingdom come, and that plane got blown into me.”
Bob’s heavily damaged plane was within seconds of spiraling out of control. After giving the order to bail out and then clambering out of the cockpit himself, he hit his head and shoulder on the wing as he jumped, knocking himself unconscious. He didn’t remember pulling the rip cord or detaching himself from his parachute. He remembered coming to when he swallowed sea water.
He was in the water for about an hour. Although Japanese planes and ships were in the area, an American destroyer escort got to him first. An old salt on board cured his seawater nausea with a swig of Australian rye.
Bob’s turret gunner didn’t make it.
“Villanueva Calderon was his name,” he told me. “I’ve thought about him a million times. I wrote his family, but I never heard back.”
I asked Bob one morning why he was reluctant to talk about the war. He hesitated so long I almost wished I hadn’t asked.
“I wouldn’t want anybody to ever think I was a hero,” he said, a slight tremor in his voice. “I knew heroes over there. They didn’t come home.”
Another time he told me: “As soon as we’re gone, not one person’s gonna care what we experienced.”
Living history
I cared, and in the last decade of his life, after I moved back to Texas and saw Bob and Mary Ellen regularly, he realized that I was sincere about wanting to know.
After Sunday-morning forays to IHOP to indulge Mary Ellen’s sweet tooth (and mine), we’d go back to their fashionable north Houston home and visit. While Mary Ellen recounted for my New Mexico-reared wife her Santa Fe adventures with the late Terry Hershey or shared gardening tips or investment advice from her decades as a stockbroker, Bob and I would sit on a long, leather couch and I’d ask questions. He dreaded repeating himself, but when it happened occasionally, I didn’t mind. I’d pick up some tidbit I had missed the first time, or the second. To me, he represented living history.
Unsnapping a small leather case he stored under the coffee table, he’d pull out war-related books he had just read — he devoured a book a week, all types, until recently — or brittle photos or maps with lines he had carefully traced showing his carrier’s South Pacific locations. He’d show me the coordinates where he got shot down or the location of a small island where he recuperated off the coast of New Guinea. He always wondered about the mysterious, black seaplanes the Navy hid on that island, behind lush vegetation that spilled over a cliff down to the water.
He loved laughing over his cache of funny experiences: Flying crosscountry, he was preparing to land in El Paso for refueling when he noticed three bombers circling the field waiting for landing instructions. Instead of waiting his turn, the hot-shot Navy pilot zipped in beneath them and was standing at a counter recording his flight plan when the three young female pilots ferrying the brand-new bombers walked in grumbling about the smart aleck. The dashing young pilot ended up escorting the three of them to dinner and a night on the town in old Juarez.
Together 67 years
Mainly, Bob and Mary Ellen liked to relive their lives together — he an executive with Peden Iron and Steel, she a pioneering broker with RauscherPierce. They traveled the world, they entertained, they loved Houston. For 67 years, they had each other.
Mary Ellen died on Memorial Day. Bob had to leave the spacious house they shared for nearly 50 years and move into an assisted-living apartment in Conroe. It was fine, but in its beige-walled impersonality, it reminded me — and Bob — of a mid-level hotel suite. To no one’s great surprise, he died a few months later.