Summer is Falling: What We Know and How We Know It

Can it be? Is summer 2015 really over? You promise?

A smorgasbord of ways to know if it’s really over muddles the real answer. There’s the Unofficial end of summer, the Fashion end of summer, the Astrological end of summer, the Meteorological end of summer, the Astronomical end of summer, and the Temperature end of summer. These are probably only a short list of the possibilities.

How you know summer is here -- ripe tomatoes. . .

Right now in Alaska, autumn is morphing, or already has morphed, into winter. I think Anchorage has already had snow.

At the other end of the Northern Hemisphere, many, many people in the American South pine for summer to end, for the obnoxious Dog Days to end, for the triple-digit temperatures to end. By the time it really ends, we are hot and sticky and the ants are too hot and sticky to show up at picnics and backyard cookouts. The pool and lake waters no longer refresh, since they are as hot as the outside air. The sugary white sand on our Gulf Coast is as hot as hot tar on a roof. And air conditioning units fall victim to the hot and sticky monster’s final insult.

In my childhood, we had window and attic fans running in summer. Soon enough all they did was suck in hot and sticky, thick air.

People who spend their summers in Alaska are really tired by the onset of fall, because the summer days stay light all night. People in the South, especially those with broken or no air conditioning, are exhausted by summer’s end because no one can sleep in molasses-thick air.

. . .and peaches

About the time the Dog Days arrive, one of the best parts of a Southern summer are over – when all the fabulous fresh vegetables and fruits that the sun and heat and rain and humidity have offered up are gone. Gone. You go to the farmer’s market and ride all over town looking for the fresh food stands in trucks and shaky wooden huts and you find nothing, so you throw your head onto the steering wheel and weep. Tomatoes gone, peaches gone. Lady- and black-eyed peas, Silver Queen corn, butter beans, limas, blackberries, figs, watermelon, cantaloupe – everything – poof – gone. Disappeared into thin. . . .no, thick, hot air. No more BLTs, no more peach cobbler, no more blackberry pie.

Then you go home only to find the kids moaning and whining about how bored they are and how they don’t want to go swimming because it’s too hot. In your emotional mind you’re screaming, “SHUT UP!”

Just add bread slathered with mayo and you've got BLTs

Then, finally, the end-of-summer signals start beeping: School starts. College and NFL football games replace baseball. Labor Day, the unofficial end of summer, demands you put up your white patent leather shoes, white cotton gloves, and light linen clothes. OMG, some relief is in sight.

(An aside: I wouldn’t wear white patent leather shoes or white cotton gloves for all the jobs in China. Furthermore, neither Alabama’s second-ranked Crimson Tide nor Auburn’s Tigers are doing very well on the gridiron. I think we’re both all in for a long season.)

Cobbler in an iron skillet

But the most definitive signal of all is tomorrow, Wednesday, September 23, at 3-something a.m.Central Time. There is a moment, an almost magical moment, an astrological moment, when our sun shines all the way across the Earth’s equator, giving both hemispheres equal amounts of day and night before slipping downward to the Southern Hemisphere – the Autumnal Equinox. You’ll find much more about it here: http://spaceweather.com/ gives you information about the aurora watch and autumn equinox. This site also tells you about near-encounters, geomagnetic storms, and much more happenings in space. Also see http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2000/ast22sep_1/ for exciting visits into space.

Autumn is as slow getting to Alabama as a Southern drawl. But a couple of weeks ago we had a rare weather event – a late summer “cool” front slid all the way to the coast. Nighttime temps fell into the upper 50s, which we haven’t seen in a coon’s age. Three or four leaves fell onto my patio, heralding the avalanche of leaves to fall. The “cold” tap water coming out of my faucets got cooler; soon it will run cold again.

But summer is not lost. Before you know it, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas will be over, thank goodness. Soon after, crocus and daffodils will pop up like Jack-in-the-boxes. The spring equinox will happen, somewhere around March 22, and summer will return with all its bounty.

It is sort of magical: It’s always summer somewhere.

Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Rod Stewart Rumored to be Teaming Up for a Mega-Concert in London

The ultimate concert in 70 years is barely a month away, unless that is, you think you might be around for the one in 2045. Rumor has it that the 70^th anniversary of VE Day Concert will headline Paul McCartney, Elton John, and Rod Stewart. If true, they will perform May 9 at the Horse Guards Parade in London. The 100^th Anniversary of the event in 2045 might outdo this one, but I wouldn’t bet a concert ticket on it.

In fact, good luck on tickets of any kind.

Could it be? All three at one concert?

In the U.S. a huge flyover of World War II aircraft is planned in Washington D.C. Free. No tickets to worry about, except maybe your airline ticket. According to that Warbirds.com announcement, the three-day events include a gala dinner at the Smithsonian on the Mall and lots more activities.

Events for this Anniversary will likely be held all over the U.S. and the world, including in your hometown. Watch for announcements in local news outlets in your area.

On May 7, 1945, two events happened: one event impacted me, the world, and probably you, somehow. The second was a revelation that occurred at my house in 1990.

The original of this historic document of Germany's unconditional surrender is in our National Archives in Washington D.C.

First, the unconditional surrender of the German Third Reich was signed before dawn on a rainy Monday, May 7, 1945 at “The Little Red Schoolhouse,” location of the Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) at Reims, about 90 miles north of Paris. Present were representatives of the four Allied Powers—France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States—and the three Germany officers delegated by German President Karl Doenitz—Gen. Alfred Jodl, who had alone been authorized to sign the surrender document; Maj. Wilhelm Oxenius, an aide to Jodl; and Adm. Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, one of the German chief negotiators. Lt. Gen. Walter Bedell Smith, SHAEF chief of staff, led the Allied delegation as the representative of General Eisenhower, who had refused to meet with the Germans until the surrender had been accomplished. Other American officers present were Maj. Gen. Harold R. Bull and Gen. Carl Spaatz.

In The Little Red Schoolhouse at Reims, May 7, 1945

Alfred Jodl was notoriously arrogant. A year after surrender, he was tried in Nuremberg, found guilty, and hanged for war crimes against humanity. Adolf Hitler was unable to be at the table in the Little Red Schoolhouse; he committed suicide in Berlin and had ordered his body to be burned. No trace has ever been found. A shame.

And second, that same day was my father’s 30^th birthday.

At my house in 1990, we celebrated his 70^th birthday. It was a beautiful May day and I had made his favorite: a homemade coconut cake. We were outside on the patio to east dessert.

I noticed he had become quiet and was staring out into space. Then he said it, out of nowhere. Or so it seemed that day, which today feels like all of my life ago.

“Forty-five years ago, on my 30th birthday, a friend and I were wandering around a town outside the POW camp begging for food.” Then his consciousness brought him back.

It was jarring.  I said, “Oh my God, dad.” I hoped he would continue. He didn’t. The memory of that birthday lunch stayed tucked away in my brain’s ridges, valleys, and synapses, as a stray piece, until it became part of a whole picture that I would never have known had it not been for a strange, wholly unlikely, improbable event in September 2012, well after dad’s death in 1995. He died in February 1995, missing the 50^th Anniversary of the end of World War II, as well as his 80^th birthday, by fewer than three months.

He had been liberated from Stalag VII, Moosburg, by General Patton’s army on April 29, but he wasn’t yet released to be taken to a camp in France to wait his turn to be shipped back home. The neediest prisoners had to be taken first. He arrived in New York in early June, skinny and glad to be heading to Atlanta to rendezvous with mom, who had no idea he had lived to make it back to U.S. soil, let alone to be on his way south.

While I can’t make to the London event, I am going to find something special to do this May 7.

Today, April 12, is also the 70th anniversary of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death in Warm Springs, Georgia. He was 63. A few hours later, Vice President Harry S. Truman became the 33rd President of the United States.

Other blog posts detailing dad’s World War II ordeal:

June 22, 2009, Father’s Day

http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2009/06/real-fathers-day-part-ii-destiny.html

February 20, 2013

http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2013/02/wont-you-please-come-home-for-reasons.html

Feb. 21, 2013

http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2013/02/mission-78822february45-on-february-22.html

Nov. 9, 2013

http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2013/11/veterans-day-2013-saluting-two-lt.html

A Cold Day in Italy

http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2014/01/january-28-1945-cold-day-in-italy.html

In Memoriam: Keith Bullock

IN MEMORIAM

Keith M. Bullock

Mils bei Imst, Austria

d. 11 March 2015

Although I never met Keith Bullock, either in person or by correspondence, I owe him a debt of gratitude, albeit indirectly. An unexpected request and photograph that he received in 1992 propelled him into a determined and dedicated pursuit to uncover the facts and historical data surrounding crash sites of U.S. Army Air Forces air craft downed in his area, any eye witnesses, and any survivors or family members of airmen attached to the aircraft. In the years of his aircraft archaeology and research of details, he became a mentor to others who continue his work in the same relentless, selfless, and exacting manner.

Because of Keith Bullock, I now know precise details of my father’s downed P-51 and his unlikely survival. One of Bullock’s students, Roland Domanig, of Lienz, Austria, became aware of the crash site of the P-51 on Ubetal Glacier in the South Tirol, did extensive research, and pursued the story for nearly a decade until he found me on the Internet.

This past summer, I, my sister, Susan Cravey, and my granddaughter, Joanna Leigh Hutt traveled by way of Munich and Innsbruck to meet Roland and travel on to the village where my father emerged after descending the mountain where he landed with his parachute. Many times Roland has named Keith Bullock as his mentor and inspiration.

Indeed all of us who have benefited from the precise research and determination of those whom Bullock mentored ultimately owe Keith Bullock.

And so, I thank him; and I thank those who followed him, including Roland Domanig, Jakob Mayer, and many others who learned from him. Bullock did not feel his task was finished until he made every effort humanly possible to find survivors or family members of those airmen who were MIA or KIA. One of those stories is STORY SULLIVAN CREW #49 - RICHARD SULLIVAN, told by the airman’s son, who went to visit Bullock and his father’s crash site.

After serving in the British RAF during World War II, Bullock eventually decided to live in Mils bei Imst, Austria, where he met and married his wife, Helene.

In the early 1990s he was asked about a bomber crash site near the village where he lived: would he try to find out how many of the airmen had been killed, how many had survived, and were any of them alive, This project and the research it would require so intrigued him that he spent all the rest of his years before his debilitating stroke in 2002 in search of answers. The fruits of his labors are recorded on his web site: http://www.bullock.at/tl_files/texu748.pdf.

His research took him to every Veterans organizations in America, numerous government departments, including the Secretary of the Air force, the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, The Maxwell Air Force Base Military Records Office, Veterans Administration for the Records of living and deceased Veterans and other branches of government.

He compiled records containing many Missing Aircrew Reports (MACRs) and a listing of more than seven thousand heavy bombers shot down over Europe during WW II; he visited many crash sites and was instrumental in determining the names of the men KIA or survived, and those who were POWs in Germany. He recorded eyewitness accounts of downed bombers; he has traveled to many church cemeteries to try to find any record of the airmen KIA. And he contributed closure and peace to many American families.

And so, Keith Bullock, may you rest in peace.

NOTE: Chrome's Translator app does a passable job in translating Bullock's web site pages.

ALERT: Superfish is on the Prowl

Yep, the hijacking crapware Superfish is after us. It is relentless. So I went to the Microsoft Store.

Wait, there’s more. I rarely tackle technology on Spittin’ Grits, but Superfish and hijacking crapware must be outed. This grotesque piece of work called Superfish is boring its way deep into your computer, and the consequences include your on-line identity and safety. I’ve spent several days reading about this menace because it is that serious a threat. So here goes.

Like most of you, I am an ultra-ordinary computer user, so I subscribe to a readable techy site, How to Geek; I owe those geeks a serious Thank You. It began for me with the most horrible-est piece of junk that I was aware of: The ethically challenged Ask toolbar. You’d better see if you have it. Look at the toolbar of your browser, located just under the URL line. If you have it, go here to read about it on How to Geek. That step led to reading several articles on horrible add-ons and adware. That led to an article that really caught my eye: it contained words like “Windows,” “Lenovo” (an up-to-now maker of highly rated computers), “hijacking” adware, “browsers,” “https,” “SSL” (which I had never heard of), “root certificate” (which I had never heard of), “scary,” “fake,” and “hacker.” The headline read Download.com and Others Bundle Superfish-Style HTTPS Breaking Adware, located here.

That article sounded ominous, with all those words together in the same sentence, ominous enough that I went looking for what this stuff was, because I was in the market for a new computer; I was looking at a Lenovo computer.

First I came to a tech article on arstechnica with the headline Lenovo PCs ship with man-in-the-middle adware that breaks HTTPS connections [Updated].

Uh-oh. I was going to buy a Lenovo computer at a retail store. What a close call that was.

“SSL” stands for “Secure Socket Layer.” Without this technology on web servers hackers/criminals can steal all your personal information, your ID, and rob you blind in a heartbeat. Yikes! This IS the “root certificate.” And Superfish bored into it.

Some people and almost all businesses, most importantly, your financial institution, apply for an SSL certificate. The granting agency verifies all the information about the persons or businesses to ensure they are who they say they are: Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Bank America, Best Buy, most retail stores, credit unions, pizza franchises, everything you can think of have the SSL certificate to ensure users’ safety. After being thoroughly verified, these places are sent the SSL "root" certificate to put on their servers. Some businesses, of course, like Amazon and Facebook and Twitter and on and on have a gazillion servers. The servers are the internet’s skeletal make up. The rest of us ordinary users ride the servers like riders on bikes, skates, trains, boats, planes, anything mobile, and up to now we’ve enjoyed a relatively free ride, since others were looking out for our safety and privacy.

No more. Once Superfish and other hijackware bored their way into servers, the “Private: Keep Out” door is opened wide, to all manner of hackers and criminals, and there we stand naked behind that door.

Those hijackware borers are not to be confused with the “normal” obnoxious, sometimes dangerous, crapware, malware, and adware that come on Windows’s operating system and are picked up by the major browsers: Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and search engines like Yahoo.

They are the repulsive pop-ups and worse. Those are bad enough, and the major players like Microsoft, Google, and others have been complicit in this ethically challenged behavior; it makes your PC run like molasses in the winter of 2014-15 and opens you up to hackers/advertisers. That’s why when you open your browser to go somewhere, ads pop up that have been following you, recording you, and know what you like.

So how do you know if a business or financial institution has a secure SSL root certificate?

When I go to my financial institution via Explorer, Chrome, or Firefox, I first see on the address bar that it turns green, although it doesn’t stay green. Then I see https://, and the ‘s’ is significant. Then on the far left of the URL bar I see a small padlock. The site is “secure,” that is unless something like Superfish bored into the root certificate.

My own view of American businesses, as unpopular as it may be, is that they are inherently amoral, right out of the box. Too many, including the “too big to fail” Wall St. banks, are immoral and may be into illegal stuff. Many are at least unethical. They all depend on consumers, but they want consumers, lots of them, who don’t know or don’t want to know what they are getting. Thank goodness for the watchdogs. They are the ones who discovered the ton of crapware, adware, malware, and most importantly, the hijackware. I would no more go to a retail store to buy a PC right now than I would believe that the big banks are not into sub-prime loans -- again.

But I need a trustworthy computer. That’s why I went to the Microsoft store, to buy one of their guaranteed “sterile” computers. Their sterile “Signature” line of PCs are free of any viruses, adware, crapware, and hijackware. If they don’t do what they advertise, I have recourse.

The only recourse current PC users with a Windows operating system have against the bad stuff inside their computers is to go to a Microsoft store and have them remove the crap. And we must put pressure on the computer giants; no one will do it for us.

In fairness, Google has pledged to make some changes regarding crapware. You can read about this here on How to Geek. On the other hand, there’s Yahoo. Here’s what the HTG geeks have to say:

Contrast this [the Google page] with searching for “vlc download” [a software] on Yahoo… Every single thing you see on the screen is an ad for crapware, some of which is pretty much malware. In fact, you can keep scrolling, because there are even more ads for crapware when you scroll down, and you have to scroll near the bottom to find the real download location. In order to get all the ads in a single screenshot, you have to use a tablet in portrait mode.

The moral of this techy tome is that we will have to look out for our interests, including knowing more about what is under foot and listening to the watchdogs’s barks.

Seventy Years Ago: Pushing into History

By January 1945 the Allies were beating back Hitler’s forces in the Ardennes, what history would call the Battle of the Bulge. Winston Churchill asked Joseph Stalin if the USSR forces could take over the offensive forces into Poland to relieve the beleaguered Allied Forces on the western front pushing toward Germany. It worked: by mid-January, the Soviets had freed Poland from Nazi control. (In clearing out the Nazi scourge, the troops came upon Auschwitz, which was the first discovery of the horror the Nazis levied on Europe’s Jews and others. See the previous post.) 

At the end of January, General George Patton’s Third Army crossed the Our River. The Allies by this time were in push-back mode, and it would not be long until World War II would be on its way into history.

The U.S. Army Air Forces were finally on the offensive, and February ended with what would soon become the Allies’ victory in Europe.
On February 22, George Washington’s birthday, seventy years ago today, my father left San Severo in Italy in his P-51 Mustang as wingman to the flight leader, Capt. Roger Zierenberg. It was a fateful day for him -- and his family, including two yet-to-be-born children. That story is here.

An almost unbelievable twist of fate occurred twenty years ago, in 1995, when Anton Volgger, living in the South Tyrol in northern Italy, went exploring on the Übertal Glacier in the Stubai Alps above his village of Ridnaun (Ridanna in Italian). He stumbled onto the crash site of dad’s plane. It was about almost a decade later, in a second twist of fate, that this exploration came to the attention of Roland Domanig, part of a group of air crash archaeologists, in Austria; then it was another half-a-decade and another twist of fate before he found me and sent the cold-contact e-mail in September 2013 asking me to replay if I were indeed the right person. (That story is here.)

Dad survived and returned home in 1945. Several years later he was stationed in Munich, Germany, as part of the Allied Occupational Forces that were sent to help Germany rebuild itself. It appears that one of the first things dad and mom did, maybe it was 1949, was to return to the village where dad ended his descent from Zuckerhutl, where he landed in his parachute.

In looking for and finding the 35mm slides that dad took during his assignment in Munich, we found many that he took in Ridnaun/Ridanna. One of them is this, of my mother leaning on the Woodie and looking down into the Ridnaun Valley. The 11,000 foot Zuckerhutl is the center peak in the distance. Others photos can be seen here and here.

My mother leaning on the Woodie that she and dad rode in
on their trip into the Ridnaun Valley in 1949.

The day dad went down, he was several months away from his 30^th birthday on May 7. He would spend that birthday wandering the streets of Moosburg begging for food. General Patton liberated his POW camp only a few days before, April 29, 1945. Today he would be several months shy of 100. That story is here and here.

Below are several sites for posts dealing with dad’s World War II ordeal:
June 22, 2009, Father’s Day
http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2009/06/real-fathers-day-part-ii-destiny.html
February 20, 2013
http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2013/02/wont-you-please-come-home-for-reasons.html
Feb. 21, 2013
http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2013/02/mission-78822february45-on-february-22.html
Nov. 9, 2013
http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2013/11/veterans-day-2013-saluting-two-lt.html
A Cold Day in Italy
http://spittingrits.blogspot.com/2014/01/january-28-1945-cold-day-in-italy.html
 
* The details of his February 22, 1945, mission are housed at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell AFB, in Montgomery, Alabama, which holds more than 500,000 historic Air Force documents: http://www.afhra.af.mil/. I drove there to see these original records on microfilm after e-mailing in advance a request for mission reports from that date. The staff had made copies and had them on the reading desk when I arrived. I am especially grateful for their help and support. [AFHRA’s IRISNUM call numbers for these documents were 00248401 and 00248402].
The AFHRA database is searchable on the web at: http://airforcehistoryindex.org/
The Lt. Col. John Thomas Cravey WWII USAAF and USAF Careers Collection^© is the copyrighted property of Joanna Cravey Hutt and Susan Rebecca Cravey for their sole use. The collection includes but is not limited to the contents of three scrapbooks displaying letters, pictures, icons and other visual matter; 35 mm slide transparencies contained in the original storage tins; black and white photographs related to Lt. Col. Cravey’s USAAF and USAF careers; e-mails and letters donated to, given to, or addressed to the owners regarding the careers; private records; and other visual and audio materials.

BuzzNet Tags: San Severo airdrome,Moosburg POW Camp,Ridanna,Ridnaun Valley,Zuckerhutl

Too Big to Forget: World War II Anniversaries

 
On the cold first day of January 2015, I stood on the tarmac at the Birmingham, Alabama, airport at 10:24 a.m. Like a colt in a bare, winter meadow, the wind blew freely around the runways. The Delta personnel on the ground passed around earplugs to each of our small group of about 10, explaining that when the plane turned off the runway to pull into its slot, it would be loud. We spotted the plane coming in for a landing from the east. My sister was on that flight in order to join our group; when she boarded in Atlanta, she introduced herself to Major Choi as instructed. They would be the only passengers to exit the plane until the ceremony ended.

 
 
The flight was bringing the remains of my father’s first cousin, Major Peyton Mathis, Jr., home at last after being MIA and presumed dead for 70 years. Major Choi was on the flight to escort those remains, to be transferred to the family with the Honor Guard on the ground, in a formal ceremony, as the Delta passengers watched from their windows. (See the previous post for details leading to this Homecoming.) This formal military ceremony was structured, yes, but very moving and emotional; members of our small group were not the only ones to fight back tears.

The military Honor Guard, with Major Choi, transport Mathis’s remains from the plane, to be transferred to the waiting family.

,
I wondered, “This is the first day of the 70^th anniversary of the end of World War II. Could this New Year’s Day ceremony for Peyton be the first event of this anniversary year?”
 
Many Alabama news outlets ran this bitter-sweet story of a U.S. flyer returning to his home to be laid to rest after 70 years hidden on Guadalcanal; it also ran in a few national print publications. But none remarked on its place in the context of this year’s anniversary.
Oh, yes, anniversaries of all stripes come and go and come and go. Some anniversaries go out with a whimper; some, like one’s birthday, simply end. Some are simply too big to be ignored; they should arrive as a supernova, having built up over the eons like those mega-dense white dwarf stars in our Universe that carry a dense mass disguised by its camouflaged power. I hope that the next five years of World War II anniversaries do not pass unwatched until we look around only to realize we have lost all those veterans and sufferers and survivors and wives and support workers who link us to such a monumental history lesson. I hope fervently that my granddaughters, who will be young adults when the 100^th Anniversary of World War II arrives, will feel deeply their direct connection to that history.

 
 
To have even childhood memories of World War II, you have to have been born before about 1938. My father returned home in 1945; I was short of two. Even Baby Boomers, born between 1944 and 1964, could have only indirect memories, and it’s frightening to think how few of that group will still be around to celebrate the 75^th and 100^th anniversaries.
World War II -- its history, its lessons for humanity, its survivors and its fallen -- is simply too important to fade into a misty past.
 

Auschwitz
If only one event could stand for all the lessons the War holds for humanity, it would be this one:
On January 27, a weather event in the northeast captivated the media and their viewers/listeners for hours and days while a truly monumental event was taking place in Poland. That day marked the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz and Birkenau Nazi death camps. Some 300 survivors were there, and many expressed their sorrowful recognition that fewer and fewer will be able to attend future anniversaries. Many expressed their greatest fear – not that they would not be able to attend future anniversaries, but that humanity could forget.
Seventy years ago that day, a contingent of the Russian Army arrived at Auschwitz not knowing what they were going to find. What they found was beyond gruesome, beyond horror, beyond human.
Survivor Roman Kent presented his moving account of his experience with his call to remember:

I am often asked how long I was in Auschwitz. My answer is I do not know. But what I do know is that one minute in Auschwitz was like a day; a day was like a year; a month, an eternity. How many eternities can one person have in a single lifetime. I don’t know that either.
“Remember”: this was the work my father frequently uttered to me during the Holocaust. . . . How can I ever forget. . .? I wondered if the cries from youngsters [torn from their mothers] ever penetrated Heaven’s Gate. . . .We survivors DO NOT WANT OUR PAST TO BE OUR CHILDREN’S FUTURE. . . .

Kent quoted from Primo Levi’s excruciating Survival in Auschwitz (1947), as he repeated the need to never forget.
Levi defined how Auschwitz should be remembered in a 1986 interview with The New Republic:

The war can be explained, but Auschwitz has nothing to do with the war; it was not an episode in it, nor an extreme form of it. War is always a terrible fact, to be deprecated; but it is in us, it has its rationality, we “understand” it. There is no rationality in the Nazi hatred. It is a hate that is not in us; it is outside man, it is a poison fruit sprung form the deadly trunk of fascism, although outside and beyond fascism itself. If understanding is impossible, however, knowledge is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again: even our consciences.

 
Other Resources:
The 2005 PBS “Frontline” presentation Memory of the Camps, created from footage found in stored in a vault of London's Imperial War Museum, can be viewed on line here.
HBO’s “Night Will Fall,” made from the original footage taken by British film makers, under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock, is currently running; check for local airing times. We must remember.

 

BuzzNet Tags: Peyton Mathis,crash site,Honor Guard ceremony,Auschwitz liberation,WWII MIA,Night Will Fall,WWII anniversaries,Roman Kent,Survivor in Auschwitz,Primo Levi

WWII Hero, MIA for 70 Years, Comes Home

Special Introduction: I’ve shared a several posts over the past couple of years about the discovery of my father’s WWII P-51 fighter plane high atop a Tyrolean glacier. That story began 70 years ago in Feb 1945; dad bailed out, succeeded in descending the mountain, was cared for by some villagers in the valley below, and spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp. His story reached a resolution of sorts this past summer when my sister and I visited the valley, got a view of the crash site and met with villagers who remember dad.

A parallel story about dad’s first cousin Peyton Mathis has been developing over those same 70 years. His story began a few months before dad’s plane went down, and now comes to its resolution this week. My first cousin Emory Kimbrough has done the research and made the contacts with the people involved in this story. Here it is:

 

By guest writer, Emory Kimbrough

 

World War II pilot, Major Peyton Spottswood Mathis, Jr., USAAF, will be returned home to Montgomery, Alabama, after seventy years as MIA on Guadalcanal. On the morning of January 1, 2015, the plane carrying Mathis’ remains will land in Birmingham, where a special escort will release the casket in a ceremonial transfer to the family and funeral director. An escorted motorcade to Greenwood cemetery in Montgomery will follow the transfer.

 

Mathis will be laid to rest next to his father and near his mother and step-mother in a formal military burial ceremony at 2 p.m., January 3, 2015, at Greenwood cemetery.

 

 

As commanding officer of the 44^th Fighter Squadron, Mathis was returning with his squadron on June 5, 1944, to Kukum Field on Guadalcanal, after a bombing mission on Japanese facilities was recalled. Mathis suffered an engine failure in his P-38J. After jettisoning his two 500-pound bomb clusters into the sea, he instructed his squadron to land ahead of him.

Mathis on Guadalcanal

Mathis flew over the airfield and turned into a landing pattern. For unknown reasons he aborted his final turn and flew south. He was last seen from the airfield disappearing behind hills. Another pilot flying an A-24 saw Mathis’ fighter flip on its back and crash into a ravine. The squadron’s maintenance and engineering officer led a search party in a difficult four to five hour push through the jungle to reach the crash site. They found the aircraft nose-down in a swampy creek with only the tail booms exposed. Pvt. G. H. Hanna swam down six to eight feet to reach the submerged cockpit, but was unable to free Mathis. Exhausted and lacking tools, the search party returned to the airfield.

On February 10, 1949, a Graves Registration company attempted to locate and recover the remains, but the crash site could not be found. The P-38 had likely settled into the swamp, and the crash site was lost to history.

The mystery remained for seven decades until a farmer clearing land for planting saw some metal sticking up out of a swamp. The farmer, Eddy Aku, contacted Anders Markwarth, an Australian resident of Guadalcanal known for recovering military artifacts. Eddy led Markwarth to the swamp at night to keep the site secret from anyone who might harvest the metal without permission or respect for the pilot’s remains.

Aku and his cousin found remains at the site, and within days, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) arrived, beginning a year-long procedure to definitively identify the remains found in and near the cockpit. With the aid of local Solomon Islanders, JPAC constructed sandbag dams to pump out water for investigation and recovery. The remains were transferred to Hawaii. Evidence from forensic anthropology and military records would be investigated, along with DNA testing against a sample from a relative of Mathis’ mother, Laura Davis Mathis.

                                                       The JPAC team working at Maj. Peyton Mathis’ crash site on Guadalcanal

Mathis had no children, but Peyton Mathis III, of Montgomery, whose father was Mathis’ half-brother, is named in his honor. He has been searching for over a decade for more substantial information about the war hero he was named for. Mathis had been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and a Silver Star in North Africa before his tour in the Pacific.

Personnel who helped in the planning for Mathis’ return to Alabama include Karen Johnson with Mortuary Affairs at Fr. Knox, KY, and Major Robert Tindall, Casualty Assistance Officer, Ft. Benning, GA. According to Mathis III, the JPAC team was more thorough than he could have anticipated, explaining why the process took a year to complete.

“It is now quite clear why the I.D process and notification of the family is such a lengthy process. They are so thorough and meticulous that it is almost miraculous that we got our results as quickly as we did. We were given a bound report that documents all of the steps in the discovery and identification process and chronicles the events that started on the day of the crash, June 5, 1944 through basically the present, and Karen literally went through it page by page for our benefit,” said Mathis.

JPAC’s mission is to bring America’s fallen soldiers home, no matter the difficulty or cost. Their teams may go to the jungles of Vietnam and Laos, the deserts of North Africa, Europe, and Korea. These recovery missions sometimes require complex diplomacy, are often difficult, and sometimes dangerous.

Anderson Cooper recently aired a piece on 60 Minutes dealing with a WWII aircraft’s crash site and the pilot’s remains, as well as featuring the group that researches such sites.

 

                                        JPAC recovery missions sometimes require complex diplomacy, are often difficult, and sometimes dangerous.

                                                                                          

The New Year will begin the 70^th Anniversary of the end of WWII, and the year will bring numerous memories, events, memorials, stories, and finally, celebrations. Unhappily, at the same time, the United States is losing its WWII veterans at a high rate. Estimates put the number at 1,000 a day. Some 16 million Americans from all walks of life served in the war to bring an end to the scourge of Hitler’s and Japan’s oppressive forces worldwide.

 

Photos provided by Emory Kimbrough (who restored the oldest pictures), Anders Markwarth, and the JPAC team.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Major Peyton S. Mathis,WWII MIA,WWII crash sites,Guadalcanal,Kukum Field,44th Fighter Squadron,Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command,JPAC

Riding the AlCan to Grow Up in Anchorage

GrowingUpAnchorage.com is not a blog, but a group venture dedicated to preserving authentic

stories of life in Anchorage during the 1940s through the 1980s.  These are not the narratives
of the luminous historical figures in Alaska’s history; rather they are the memories of everyday
people who lived under rather extraordinary conditions.

Growing Up Anchorage invited me to contribute stories to this fun blog, and I was honored and pleased to join in. The twenty-three contributing writers represent locations and states from Florida to Moose Pass, Alaska; several are descendants of Athabascan Native Americans in Alaska; their memories and experiences are as varied as your imagination can make up.

My first post tells the story of how I learned that my father, a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, got orders to take us to Alaska, a place I had never located on a map. Simply getting there was an adventure of a lifetime: driving for six weeks from Alabama across this country, upward to Anchorage on the 1,700-mile AlCan Highway as it was in 1958 – unpaved, pot-holed, fire-smoke infested, and gorgeous.

If you look really, really close, you can see the royal            
blue Packard camouflaged by AlCan dust (below).             
When we got here, we still had a long trip ahead                                                                 

Please join us at this magical location.

Technorati Tags: Anchorage,Alaska,AlCan Highway,Athabascan Native Americans,GrowinUpAnchorage

The Meaning of Crashite Hunting: Real World War II Legends

In the second e-mail I got from Roland Domanig two years ago, September 9, 2012 – after my terse reply to the first one asking that he verify his identity, he wrote:

I assure that all is OK with me. One

Identity you see on my mentor’s homepage Keith Bullock

http://www.bullock.at/

. . . .

For third:

In short sentences: but more to follow

We visited your father’s crashite.

 

The first photo Roland sent of the location of dad’s P-51 crash site on Übeltal Glacier

 

I looked up, turned my head to the window, and said, “What the hell is a crashite?” The e-mail continued:

 

We/I assume you are his daughter, as you delivered all info in your blog “Spittin Grits”, we had either [earlier?]. So there was 100% correspondence.

Could Lt. John T. Cravey be STILL WITH US? Was our question on tour when

Talking about this pilot.

Again I looked up and said, “Does he mean ‘crash site’? That’s impossible.”

 

Yet here we were. Here to see dad’s crash site, but driving back to Innsbruck, wasting a day, to pick up the infernal Hertz car. I used the time to ask questions.

 

“Roland, tell me again what motivated you to get so involved in finding and researching crash sites?” I was madly writing in my journal as we drove.

 

Roland laughed. I had asked this questions several times over the past two years of being in constant communication. It was clear that he spent a lot of time and energy (and probably money) on this “hobby.” A toll booth was coming up. He kept his eyes on the road. While talking and asking questions, I tried to look at the surroundings as we drove the Brenner Pass on a sunny day. A tunnel was coming up.

 

“For our or all ancestors we do this research as hobby. And we are happy if we find interested living -- and loving -- people to talk with them about this crash,” explained Roland. “Sometime we find crash survivor.”

 

I turned back to the scenery. There’s no way to get a clean sense of going through this pass, I thought to myself. Autobahn traffic. Speeds. Toll booths and 18-wheelers, four lanes on both the north- and south-bound sides. It’s about all your eyes can send to your brain.

 

“How did you get started?” I asked.

 

Then I thought to myself, you’re crossing over the Alps, dummy. Pay attention. My mind flashed with the memory of driving downward out of Glacier National Park in 1958 on our reassignment trip to Alaska. Winding downward at such a steep angle scared me. Living in Alaska for three years cured that. This brain flash directed me to dad, who was driving that downward spiral Glacier road: What would he think of this trip to see his crash site? How would he feel? How would he have felt when first getting the news it had been found? By Anton Volgger, of all people?  (Anton’s connection with dad’s story will come later.)

 

Anton (l) and a colleague at the debris field on of dad’s P-51 on Übeltal Glacier

 

“There,” said Roland, bringing me back to the Pass. “Mountain of dolomite. That is.” My sister Susan and I had wanted to visit The Dolomites, wherever exactly they are.

 

Off to the right, as if iced with white glitter-glue, the entire mountain glistened in the sun. What a sight, I thought. I guessed that it was some kind of marble or mineral. Suddenly this morning’s vision of Zuckerhutl in the unimpeded sunshine raced through my mind. I’ve got to practice remembering that sight, I thought.

 

Now I saw that there were many mountains of dolomite, all glistening, but it must be different from The Dolomites dad and mom talked about, and how beautiful they were. Yes, they’re different, I discovered. The Dolomites are located south of Roland’s hometown of Lienz, Austria, into Italy toward Bolzano.

 

Roland broke the reverie. “You see, interest happened when my aunt once told me about her experience with a going down bomber aiming at her house and almost making a victim of that crash. That bomber crashed near my town Lienz,” he explained. “That was 1999. I started research then after talking to mentor Keith Bullock. Anton knows about six crash sites; I do about 20.”

We were nearing Innsbruck. We were to meet Jakob Mayer, whom we had met at the Innsbruck train station. Jakob is, with Roland, in the inner circle of the crash site archaeologists, researchers, and historians who mentored under Keith Bullock.

 

After coffee, again at the Europa Hotel and after I picked up the car, we drove west to the outskirts of town to visit the crash site of B-17 “Priority Gal.” Jakob had been the moving force behind establishing a bronze plaque at the site in honor of the Flying Fortress’s pilot. The site was located on a slope of the mountain where events at the Innsbruck 2002 Winter Olympics were held. Jakob gave me a copy of the astonishing 2006 story published in a New Jersey newspaper.

 

Below: Jakob Mayer and myself at the Priority Gal crashsite

 

This B-17 Flying Fortress had taken flak over Munich. Two engines (out of only four) were on fire. Pilot Lt. Henry Supchak decided to aim for Switzerland rather than go down in Nazi territory. Over Innsbruck, still a long way from Switzerland, the plane took more flak. The crew couldn’t put out the fire in one engine, and flames were aiming for a fuel tank. Supchak ordered everyone to bail. Right then! The Priority Gal went into a nose dive. Centrifugal force pinned him down, keeping him from bailing. Then a sudden updraft righted the plane momentarily. He looked out and saw that Priority Gal was aimed directly at the town. In a split second he decided to trim the plane to far left, then jump. Priority Gal crashed on the outskirts, thereby saving the town and inhabitants, but wounding a small boy and his aunt as it crashed.

 

Supchak’s quick decision had also saved his crew members, but their ordeal was not over. They all spent the remainder of the war in two Nazi POW camps, including dad’s at Moosburg near Munich, where they and 80,000 other POWs would be liberated by George Patton’s troops April 29, 1945.

 

The story of the pilot of Priority Gal was legend in Innsbruck. His story didn’t end there either, thanks to Jakob Mayer.

 

At last, during the mid- to late 1990s and early 2000s, locked gates opened wide on the Internet. Quickly evolving technology sent unimaginable quantities of data to flow to the World Wide Web, allowing the internet to begin doing what it does best: opening new knowledge to the World. For so many researchers like Roland and Jakob and for many families like Henry Supchak’s, that accumulation of information could bring into the light some unknown corners and unanswered questions of World War II. Some stories would bring families and friends sadness, but closure; for others, joy at finally learning the real events and real roles played by their loved one, still living or dead, who helped bring an end to Hitler’s unspeakable ideas and actions.

 

Legends could become real.

 

Mayer was scouring the Internet about 2002, looking for the pilot of Priority Gal. About the same time across the Atlantic in New Jersey, Supchak’s daughter, Liz S. Hoban, had begun research on her father. Touchdown. Hoban and Mayer found each other in 2006.

 

At age 90, Supchak welcomed Jakob Mayer into his home in New Jersey and learned of the plaque and his legendary status. He reportedly said to Mayer, “You’ve added a new dimension to my life. Your communication with me has done more for me than you know.”

 

A year later Supchak traveled to Innsbruck to rededicate the plaque with his name on it. At that time he learned the rest of the story of the wounded little boy, Ander Haas: He grew up to be a successful hotelier, and he erected a plaque in Supchak’s honor at the foot of his hotel near the crash site.

 

Priority Gal, an American Flying Fortress, on the outskirts of Innsbruck

 

 

After returning home to New Jersey, Supchak, with his daughter Elizabeth Hoban, wrote a book, “The Final Mission: A Boy, a Pilot, and a World at War” available on line and in public libraries.

 

Roland had met Jakob in 2002 after reading in a news account about his research of a crash site; then he guided Jakob to mentor and researcher Keith Bullock. Jakob already knew about Anton Volgger and his trip to the crash site of dad’s P-51 Mustang in 1995, after which documents were lost for about six years. After Jakob introduced Roland to Anton; together they went to dad’s crash site on Übeltal Glacier. Then it took six or eight more years of researching the internet to find me at Spittin’ Grits.

 

Much earlier, in 1965 or so, an Italian man heard rumors of a crash site where he was living; then he heard a second rumor about a “war tragedy” having occurred as well. These rumors stuck in the “item of interest” area of his brain for more than thirty years. Then in 1999 he, Giorgio Pietrobon, found a record of the disaster in a Parish book. His “activity as an aeronautical researcher” had begun, he says in his book, “B-24 Sandman.”

 

 

 

Next: The story of the B-24 Sandman, one of the most iconic USAAF planes in World War II. See more images here.

 

Technorati Tags: World War II aircraft crash sites,B-17 Priority Gal,B-24 Sandman