I’m walking around with a notebook full of war stories. I heard them Sunday when I was at the reunion of the 484th Bomb Group. I could have filled several notebooks with the recollections of the veterans I met. They are as aware as everyone else of how time is running out. They confront this certainty without any mawkishness. Death comes for everyone. But for many years these men kept their stories largely to themselves, and now those same stories will not let them rest.
Along with the camaraderie and the joking, there was a sense of urgency. Let us tell you what happened because soon we will be gone. In the telling, a few of them grew emotional. Their eyes watered, their voices grew thick, and when this happened not one of them apologized for it, not one looked away. They just kept talking.
I am loathe to leave their stories in my notebook, where they will join other notebooks full of other stories with which I could not part. I take them home and put them in cardboard boxes in the basement and years pass before I pull them out again.
They are treasures. So, I’ll pass along two. They are war stories only in the sense that their beginnings lie in combat, in World War II, in lumbering B-24s in the skies above Europe. But they speak more broadly to the restlessness of the human spirit, to the need to make sense of things, to order the world and find one’s place within it.
“It was January 15, 1945,” Mike Hartunian begins. “I was part of a 10-man crew. I was the bombardier. It was the 15th mission and we were to bomb oil refineries in Vienna. We sighted our target and I dropped the bombs when we took a couple hits. We lost an engine and the pilot lost control.”
The crew abandoned ship and Hartunian landed in a vineyard deep with snow. He was caught by a farmer who led him to a farmhouse. The young men of the village rounded up a couple of his other crewmates. In the end, only one crewmate was never found. The men of the village turned them over to the Germans and Hartunian ended up in a prisoner camp for the next four months.
Hartunian returned to California, where he turned his carpentry skills to a wooden version of the television tray. It made him a multi-millionaire. But he never stopped wondering about Kirchberg, the village where he was captured. He visited there in 1994 hoping to find someone who might remember him and the other Americans. He left his address at the post office and soon enough, a man named Franz Dechant wrote him. “I remember,” Dechant wrote. “I was there.”
Over the next two years, the two men wrote back and forth to each other and in 1996, Hartunian, his wife and two daughters returned to Kirchberg.
The village threw him a party.
Orville Hommert of Missouri stopped me on my way out of the reunion Sunday. He launched right into his story, choking up at several points. “Sixty years later,” he tells me, “and it still gets to me.”
“I was 19 years old. It was my 19th mission. It was December 17, 1944. Our target was the Ordertal synthetic oil refinery right on the Polish border. We were over Czechoslovakia. We were part of the 49th Wing and the 461st Bomb Group was right behind us on this particular mission. With me being the tail gunner, I’m looking backward and I could see the 461st was under attack. I saw eight B-24s shot down as fast as I could snap, and I’m not kidding you.
“At that point, our fighter escort caught up and they had a tremendous dogfight. I was calling this info out to the crew and then we were under attack by some German Messerschmitt 109s. They shot down two planes from our group. One of the Messerschmitts scooted out of position and was right up next to our plane. There was smoke coming out of the bomb bay doors. He rolled up to the left and went down.
“All of a sudden, a Messerschmitt flew in right next to us, so close I could see the pilot. He wasn’t firing at us. Our waist gunner should have shot him down, but his ammunition belt jammed after two rounds. I couldn’t traverse my guns around to shoot at him.
“So, he’s looking at me and I’m looking at him and I could see his leather flight helmet and his oxygen mask and then he waved! And I waved back. It must have been reflex.
“I have never stopped wondering about that. Why didn’t he shoot at us? Was he out of ammunition? Did he make it out alive? Why did he do such an insane thing? Maybe it was just meant to be that we didn’t shoot each other, but I’ll tell you what: I will see his face until the day I die.”
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
