On His 109th Birthday

My father was born one hundred and nine (109) years ago today.  He’s been gone now for somewhat more than nineteen years.  But I’m thinking about him today, and I wanted to use this opportunity to commit a small handful of anecdotes about him to writing.  As I’ve said on prior occasions here, this blog serves several functions, one of which is as an occasional venue for first drafts of my own life history and the story of my family.

For a part of the Second World War before he himself crossed the English Channel onto the European continent shortly after the D-Day invasion as part of General Patton’s Third Army, my father was stationed in High Wycombe.  It’s a town in Buckinghamshire, England, nearly thirty miles (forty-seven kilometers) to the west northwest of London, slightly more than halfway to Oxford.  High Wycombe is far enough out in the countryside that it wasn’t subjected to the V-1 and V-2 attacks that were terrifying London at the time, and my father was safe there.

But he wasn’t allowed to remain safe.  He was a staff sergeant at the time, and one of the American captains assigned to High Wycombe regularly requisitioned him as a driver into London, where the V-1s and V-2s were raining down.  Why?  Because the captain, who had a wife back in the United States, was carrying on an affair with a female English military volunteer in the city.  So my father was obliged to sit in London during the Captain’s adulterous trysts, under German assault.  At one point, the captain was standing by a window in his love nest, looking out and smoking a cigarette, when a bomb or a rocket exploded nearby.  The window shattered, and a shard of glass scratched his face.  He received a Purple Heart for having been wounded by enemy action.

My father always lamented that he had never seen London at night with its lights on.  It had always, of course, been under a blackout during his time there.  We got him back to Europe more than once, but one of my dreams was to take him to England so that he could see London illuminated in the dark.  Unfortunately, I never did.  I regret that.

Incidentally, my father said that the V-1s were much more frightening, in a sense, than the V-2s were.  The V-1 was subsonic, a primitive kind of cruise missile powered by a jet engine, and people below were painfully aware of it as it flew.  (It was often nicknamed, for that reason, a “buzz bomb.”)  In the perpetual London fog, above the clouds, you could hear it.  Then, suddenly, it would run out of fuel, its engine would cut off, and those on the ground would know that it was falling.  They just didn’t know where it would hit.  And that, he recalled, was terrifying.  By contrast, the much more advanced V-2 rocket, a ballistic missile, was supersonic.  Which meant that you weren’t aware of it until it struck.  It was terribly destructive, but there was no warning and, hence, in a way, no immediate apprehension.