We’ll Meet Again: A Scholar’s Farewell

Well, here it is, my last month as a UEA American Library Scholar. It’s hard to believe the time has flown by so quickly and incredible to contemplate some of the historic events we’ve seen together, including a global pandemic, the election of America’s forty-sixth president and the death of Queen Elizabeth II, who as a young woman served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the Second World War. But then, working together through good times and bad is what the special relationship between the United States and Britain has always been about, hasn’t it? The American Library and a PhD program in creative and critical writing at the University of East Anglia were an unknown flight path a decade ago, when I was immersing myself in all things noir. I watched a lot of film noir back then, so much so that I felt like I was living in black and white in my tiny studio on Manhattan’s East Side. Some of the movies I watched from that period were not about crime, but about war, and in one I heard (for the first time, I think) Vera Lynn’s unforgettable wartime anthem, We’ll Meet Again. It’s possible my dad sang it to us when were kids—he was known to belt out classics like You’re in the Army Now and Over There and was also a lover of big band music like that arranged by bandleader and US Army Air Forces Captain Glenn Miller, who died in 1944 when the plane that was transporting him to a concert for Allied troops in liberated Paris was lost over the English Channel.

My father, Flight Officer Eugene L. Solomon, a B-17 pilot with the 384th Bomb Group, himself spent some of his leave in Paris, as evidenced by his well thumbed American Red Cross map of that city. Fortunately, he never had to use the other map he carried, a silk escape map. After flying the last strategic bombing mission in Europe on April 25, 1945, the group was chosen to move to Germany as part of the United States Air Forces in Europe and initially deployed to Istres, France in June. Before that, the crew spent VE Day in London, where the crowd was ‘packed like sardines’ and my father saw King George, Queen Elizabeth, (then) Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

Flight Officer Eugene Solomon, the author’s father, top row, second from left. The crew (not shown in listed order): Pilot Lawrence E. Thurston, Co-Pilot Eugene Leonard Solomon, Navigator Theodore T. Gore, Togglier (bombardier) Robert Lee Wilkinson, Radio Operator/Gunner William O. King, Engineer/Top Turret Gunner Oliver T. Larson, Ball Turret Gunner Elias S. Huron, Waist (Flexible) Gunner James Lindsay, Tail Gunner Ralph Cauthen. Photo courtesy of Christopher Wilkinson, the son of togglier Robert Lee Wilkinson, bottom row at left.

American Red Cross Map of Paris for service members

Silk escape map

According to Walter E. Owens’ As Briefed: A Family History of the 384th Bombardment Group, the 384th transported Allied troops to Germany and American soldiers to Casablanca for return to the US, among other missions. The latter was known as Project Green, which operated from June to September 1945 and was, according to the 384th Bomb Group’s website, ‘a key part of the “Home Bound Task Force” that returned combat troops to the USA following cessation of hostilities in the ETO. Troops were ferried from various European locations to Port Lyautey, Morocco, there to await transport home.’ 

Dad’s crew helped redeploy the 101st and the 82nd Airborne and medical personnel from field hospitals that weren’t needed anymore, some of whom were intended to be sent to the Pacific. They repatriated French citizens who had fled France and were living in North Africa, including the wife, two daughters and son of General de Gaulle’s aide de camp. Dad told us in a family interview I conducted that the crew took the kids ‘up front and let them sit in the seat and “fly the plane”’. The crew also repatriated Greek citizens who had been brought to Germany to be slave laborers. On one of their missions, they flew to an air station outside of Munich to deliver supplies and witnessed the horrifying aftermath of Dachau concentration camp. 

Another operation my father participated in was photographic mapping duty, or as he put it: ‘they photographed the entirety of Europe at 20,000 feet.’ Except, that is, for the USSR, because ‘the Russians wouldn’t let us.’ The 384th BG was inactivated in France in February of 1946; however, my father was on active duty in Europe through July, when he returned to the US.^[1] In Istres, every flying officer had to get a job in a ground position, so my dad became an assistant intelligence officer, for which he had to go to intelligence school in Wiesbaden (across from the IG Farben works, a subsidiary of which produced the Zyklon B gas used in the death camps). He was also the information education officer for the Biarritz campus of the US Army University, a program that brought professors from America and elsewhere to conduct classes for servicemen and women stationed in Europe. Flight Officer Solomon returned to the US on July 17, 1946, and was relieved from active duty on September 11, 1946.

It would take many more paragraphs to list the activities I was privileged to participate in as a UEA American Scholar over the last two years. Highlights include the honor of laying the wreaths on behalf of the Second Air Division for Remembrance Week in 2021 and on Memorial Day this year at the Cambridge American Cemetery; attending the Remembrance service and Evensong at the American Chapel in St. Paul’s Cathedral; staffing the long-anticipated Library launch with colleagues in May and seeing our 2nd AD veterans movingly address us from across the pond through the magic of Zoom (yes, I cried); organizing a resoundingly successful talk by my academic supervisor at UEA, crime fiction writer and scholar Henry Sutton; engaging with the public as an ambassador of American literature and culture; and furthering the Library’s memorial mission by educating visitors about the Second Air Division’s history in East Anglia.

The US Army Air Forces monument at Cambridge American Cemetery

A B-17 flyover at Cambridge American Cemetery

The author, right, with Professor Henry Sutton at his April talk

The American Library and the Second Air Division Memorial Trust have been an invaluable resource, both in my family research as well as in supporting work on my PhD thesis with the UEA American Library Scholarship. My boundless gratitude goes out to Trust Chairman Richard Middleton, Professor Jaqueline Fear-Segal and the other Trust Governors, their American counterparts in the Heritage League, the veterans of the 2nd AD and their families, Trust Librarian Orla Kennelly, fellow Scholars and library colleagues, the Millennium Library and Norfolk County Council Library system, the Norfolk Record Office and the East Anglian community.

And here’s to you, our Scholars’ Blog readers, who commented on and shared my musings on a range of American topics.

Thank you all—but let’s not say goodbye, rather: We’ll Meet Again. 

—post by Suzanne Solomon

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^[1] His service record indicates that when he was discharged, he was attached to the 368th Bombardment Squad, 306th Bomb Group, 1st AD, which ‘engaged in special photographic mapping duty in western Europe and North Africa.’ However, there may still be more to discover about his Occupation service.

‘Indifference to Injustice is the Gate to Hell’

‘Memorial to the Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust’, 1990. Photo credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2010_Appellate_courhouse_Holocaust_Memorial.jpg

On the façade of the New York Appellate Division, First Department Courthouse in Manhattan, there is a Holocaust memorial sculpture carved into a column of Carrara marble, a representation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, based in part on an aerial photograph taken by the 15th Air Force, United States Army Air Forces. I discovered it quite by accident, on one of my usual long strolls in the city, often ending by stopping at a park to jot down my thoughts. The park in this instance was Madison Square Park, a green expanse popular with locals enjoying an al fresco lunch, as well as with tourists taking snaps of the nearby Flatiron Building.

‘Memorial to Victims of the Injustice of the Holocaust’, a sculpture by New York artist Harriet Feigenbaum on the Madison Avenue side of the courthouse at E. 25^th Street, was installed in 1990. The artist worked from ‘photographs of the death houses and a rendering of the main camp at Auschwitz in Poland, drawn by a prison inmate in 1944’, she told the New York Times in 1988. The piece had the impact on me probably intended by makers of public art: I was startled, then riveted, then overcome. I visited the sculpture many times afterward, a regular feature of my walks, a pilgrimage to honor the memory of the dead as well as those who sacrificed their lives to stop the genocide.

The Holocaust was ‘the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators’^[1], as well as ‘at least five million prisoners of war, Romany, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and other victims’.^[2] Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, was liberated by Soviet troops on 27 January 1945, commemorated in the UK and Europe as Holocaust Memorial Day. Over a million people^[3] were murdered there, the vast majority Jews who had been deported from countries all over Europe in furtherance of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’ to annihilate the Jewish population.

Auschwitz was only one of a network of 44,000 concentration, forced labor and death camps and other incarceration sites in the Nazi-occupied countries. Dachau was the first such camp, opened in Germany in 1933 to intern political prisoners. It ‘served as a model for all later concentration camps and as a “school of violence” for the SS men under whose command it stood.’ ^[4] Over a twelve-year period, the camp imprisoned political opponents of the Nazi regime, Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), homosexuals, ‘asocials’ and repeat criminal offenders.^[5] The prisoners were used for forced labour. German doctors performed medical experiments on others. Over 200,000 people were detained there; of those, at least 28,000 died. American forces liberated the camp on 29 April 1945. ‘As Allied units approached, at least 25,000 prisoners from the Dachau camp system were force marched south or transported away from the camps in freight trains. During these so-called death marches, the Germans shot anyone who could no longer continue; many also died of starvation, hypothermia, or exhaustion. … In early May 1945, American forces liberated the prisoners who had been sent on the death march.’^[6]

Photograph of the Dachau Concentration Camp circa May 1945, taken by the author’s father, Flight Officer Eugene L. Solomon. On the reverse, he wrote: ‘moat, barbed wire, high tension wire, living quarters.’

In October’s post for this blog, I wrote about my father’s service as a Jewish B-17 pilot with the 384^th Bomb Group, stationed at Grafton Underwood. In a 2006 family interview, he described a mission in May of 1945, when he and his crew flew to an air station outside Munich to pick up supplies ‘destined for Dachau concentration camp.’ They then drove to the camp. When they went through the gates, they saw these ‘thousand men in striped uniforms.’ They were ‘walking bones – their eyes were sunk into their heads, and they would look at you and … mumble and try to talk. We were just stunned … looking at these people that are literally walking dead.’ He went into the commanding officer’s office and found in his desk ‘a series of little insignias. One was a gas mask.’ The crew walked through the gas chamber and saw ‘pipes with the false spray heads.’

As you walked in there were tons of shoes and clothing and all and you would see piles of adult shoes and piles of children’s shoes … when you came out the other end, you walked into the crematorium—there were three crematoriums there. There was a table there with a grinder, so if any of the bones weren’t completely demolished, they would put them into that grinder and grind them up and there was a basket there to catch it. And then they would take all of the ashes and bring it in the back. There was a huge field back there where for several years they were dumping ashes. … You’re twenty years old and you see that, it really shakes you up. And you don’t know what to say to the people. You don’t speak their language … You go through the barracks where they had nothing but a flat board where like nine people would sleep, and then there would be another deck and another deck, and they would crowd them in there. … There were thousands of US troops in there, and they brought food in. … We brought an airplane full of supplies. … There were men, there were women, there were Jews, there were Gentiles, there were gypsies. There were all kinds of people. [My mother asks, off camera: ‘Children’?] ‘Oh, yeah, there were children. … It was a terrifying sight.

It’s not hard to conclude that what my father and his crew witnessed, the horrific aftermath of unspeakable acts, was in fact, as the Holocaust memorial sculptor back in Manhattan saw it, ‘the gate to hell.’ If it was evil that conceived of and created this hell, it was indifference that facilitated it, and all the genocides afterward.

Holocaust Memorial Day commemorates the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution of other groups and in genocides that followed in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The theme for this year’s remembrance is ‘One Day’. As Holocaust survivor Iby Knill said: ‘You didn’t think about yesterday, and tomorrow may not happen, it was only today that you had to cope with and you got through it as best you could.’ 

You can find resources on genocide and the Holocaust at the American Library and check out e-books in our collection here. The Imperial War Museum’s Second World War and Holocaust Partnership Programme collaborated with writers to create an online exhibit, One Story, Many Voices, featuring the accounts of survivors. Other resources are available on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website.

–post by Suzanne Solomon

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^[1] United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/documenting-numbers-of-victims-of-the-holocaust-and-nazi-persecution.

^[2] The National WWII Museum https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/holocaust.

^[3] USHMM https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/auschwitz.

^[4] Dachau Memorial site https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/.

^[5] USHMM https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau. 

^[6] USHMM https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau.

Retracing My Father’s Footsteps: Part 1, A Visit to Grafton Underwood

Flight Officer Eugene Leonard Solomon

It was a warm, dry autumn day on September 18, 2021, when I made the pilgrimage to Grafton Underwood to see the airbase where my father, Flight Officer Eugene Leonard Solomon, was stationed during the Second World War. I’d intended to visit the previous year, but my plans were scuttled by another global emergency: the Covid-19 pandemic. In England for the duration, I shared the uncertainty of its course until a vaccine was developed, the enforced isolation, the restrictions on movement and ordinary routines, the threats to health and well-being and the collective grief over mass deaths, while admiring the bravery and dedication of National Health Service and other frontline workers. I couldn’t have known it then, but that experience would put me in the perfect frame of mind to retrace the footsteps of the twenty-year-old pilot who arrived on British shores on April 1, 1945. 

My father was a B-17 pilot with the 1^st Air Division, 384^th Bomb Group. He entered active duty on November 20, 1944, after more than a year of flight training and qualification to pilot the Flying Fortress. He was assigned to the 547^th Bomb Squadron, whose patch (second image, below) says it all.

The 384th Bomb Group: ‘Keep the Show on the Road’

547th Bombardment Squadron Patch, image courtesy of the American Air Museum in Britain

My guide for the visit was Matt Smith, a personable and knowledgeable volunteer who coordinates local activities for the 384th Bomb Group, Inc. (the post-war association formed by 384th Veterans in the late 1960s). While my journey there was just a short train ride from Norwich to the East Midlands, Matt immediately made me feel welcome by collecting me from the station. We made our way to the picturesque village of Grafton Underwood to see the stained glass memorial window at St. James the Apostle Church. I’d seen pictures of it, but nothing could compare to the experience of viewing this stunning tribute in person, with the poignant words at bottom: ‘Coming Home’. Our family is Jewish, so for me, it was especially moving to see the Star of David included there. 

Matt Smith

At Grafton Underwood

‘This window is dedicated before God in remembrance of those who gave their lives for freedom during World War II while serving at Grafton Underwood 1942-1945, especially those members of the 384^th Bomb Group (H) of the United States 8^th Air Force.’

The base, built in 1941, was nicknamed ‘Grafton Undermud’. The land was requisitioned from the Boughton Estate, reverting to the estate after the war. According to the 384^th Bomb Group website, it comprised some 500 acres and could accommodate up to 3,000 personnel, with ‘all the facilities needed, including a hospital, cinema, and chapel.’ The living quarters were mainly of Quonset hut construction, with more permanent structures like mess halls and clubs built from brick. Here I should emphasize the importance of having Matt Smith as my guide. He made it his mission to help me see the base as my father would have, which is no small feat, considering it has mostly been reclaimed by woods and the activities of a working estate. 

8th Air Force deployment at peak strength marking USAAF and RAF airfields in the east of England, July 1944-August 1944, image courtesy of the 2d Air Division Digital Archive

Aerial view of airbase, image courtesy of 384^th Bomb Group

Next, we visited the 384^th Bomb Group Memorial, a granite structure on the main runway which informs visitors of this notable fact: ‘The first and last bombs dropped by the 8th Air Force were from airplanes flying from Grafton Underwood.’

Author at 384^th Bomb Group Memorial

384th BG Memorial with 1st AD triangle tail marking

The 384^th lost 1,581 men, about third of its combat crewmen. Among those were 425 killed in action, 880 prisoners of war and 62 who remain missing in action; another 214 fatalities were from other causes. The 384^th website reports that ‘combat aircrews considered themselves very lucky if they survived their missions, becoming members of the “Happy Warriors Club” as a result.’ Reflecting on these losses impressed on me how lucky we were to have my father return safely when so many families did not get to see their loved ones ‘come home’.

We walked around the airfield, with its clearly visible runway and taxi strips and the road to the base sentry gate. Matt pointed out where the planes would have been parked, camouflaged by trees.

We walked the foundations of the 547^th Squadron’s barracks, the site of the movie theater and officers’ club and, in the distance, the operations block where the air crews had their briefings.

547th Squadron barracks

Parking

‘Now showing’ … the movie theatre

Operations block in distance

My father and his navigator, Ted Gore, were the youngest in his crew. In between bombing raids, they flew submarine patrols, food drops and weather missions. It’s easy to imagine the periods of waiting, when they occupied themselves with routine chores, movies, visits to the local pub and constant pranks. It’s a bit harder to put myself in the cockpit of a B-17, although I feel a rush of adrenaline thinking about how it must’ve been.

The crew: Pilot Lawrence E. Thurston, Co-Pilot Eugene Leonard Solomon, Navigator Theodore T. Gore, Togglier (bombardier) Robert Lee Wilkinson, Radio Operator/Gunner William O. King, Engineer/Top Turret Gunner Oliver T. Larson, Ball Turret Gunner Elias S. Huron, Waist (Flexible) Gunner James Lindsay, Tail Gunner Ralph Cauthen. My father is pictured top row, second from left. The other crew members are not pictured in order. If any readers can match names to faces, please get in touch in the comments.

Flight Officer Solomon was credited with two combat missions as co-pilot: Mission #315, on April 20, 1945, targeting the Railroad Marshalling Yards in Seddin, Germany, and Mission #316, on April 25, 1945, targeting the Skoda Armament Works in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia. On the latter mission, he co-piloted Hell’s Messenger with the 384^th Bombardment Group (H), in the last strategic bombing mission of the war in Europe. The Sortie Report replicated on the 384^th Bomb Group’s website states that ‘the 384^th had the honor of dropping the final bombs of the war on Axis Targets’.

Veteran readers of this blog will be familiar with the friendly rivalry between B-17 and B-24 crews. I hope my 2d Air Division friends will forgive me for repeating the old quip told to me: that B-24s were the crate B-17s were delivered in. On a more sobering note, my father’s account of his final bombing raid is a vivid testament to the B-17’s legendary capability.

My father described his experience of that last air raid in an interview I did with him before he passed away:

The Germans knew they were coming and the ack-ack [anti-aircraft guns] was very, very heavy. The weather was very bad. The first time they tried to bomb, they couldn’t get a sight. They went in again but couldn’t see a thing. The squadron leader took them around a third time, and they came in at a different angle (in the meantime getting shot up like hell). There were enough breaks in the clouds for the bombardiers to get a sighting of the plant and “bombs away”—except in his airplane. The flak was so fierce that it cut the wires and their bombardier couldn’t release the bombs. You can never land with bombs; they’ll blow you up. They were flying “hot camera”, taking pictures of the bomb hits, so they didn’t have a ball turret gunner. Ted [their navigator] figured out where they were—over a train marshalling yard—and his engineer and bombardier went back to the open bomb bays at 25,000 feet, without parachutes, and kicked all the bombs out of the plane. The bombs had already been armed—there was no way of disarming them. As they left the target they were flying on another guy’s wing, and he got shot up and lost control of his plane. He recovered but slid into them. My father yelled over to Red [his co-pilot] “Let me have it!” and he grabbed the wheel and sucked the airplane up and the other plane slid under them. The tail gunner was screaming. If it had hit, they would’ve both gone down. The flight was about 10 hours and 40 minutes—the longest flight a B-17 had ever made. When they got back to England, as they were landing, one of the engines cut out, no gas. You can “slow fly” a B-17 at 75 or 80 mph and slowly lose altitude. They were glad to get back home.

Dad stayed in close touch with his navigator, Ted Gore, all their lives. He never forgot his crew, along with the nearly 2,100 men and women it took to keep the Flying Fortresses and crews in the air: the nurses, doctors, mechanics, armorers, ground crews and other support units. While we owe more than we can repay to the bravery of these young men who risked and often lost their lives, it’s also right to reflect on the death and destruction caused by such powerful bombs. The air crews were part of a concerted and successful effort to halt the murderous spread of Nazism, at great cost. At a young age, they faced a painful moral calculus (conscious or not) that no doubt took its toll on them.

After VE Day on May 8, 1945, Flight Officer Solomon would be assigned to occupation duty in Germany and other missions, which I’ll cover in a later post.

The 384^th Bomb Group has been an invaluable resource, from connecting me with the gracious Matt Smith to providing a wealth of information and access to digitized archival materials: https://384thbombgroup.com. Many thanks to all involved, especially Matt and Memorial Site Supervisor Kevin Flecknor.

The American Library and the Second Air Division Memorial Trust have also been a wonderful resource, both in my family research as well as in supporting my PhD in creative and critical writing with the UEA American Library Scholarship. I’m grateful to the Governors, Trust Librarian Orla Kennelly, and my library colleagues for their collegiality and support.

My father passed away in 2009 and never knew that I had moved to England or visited his airbase, but I felt very near to him as I walked in his footsteps. I’m certain he wouldn’t at all have been surprised to find me there. 

—post by Suzanne Solomon

Pride Month at the American Library: ‘Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II’ by Allan Bérubé

The American military has come a long way since the days of dishonorable discharges of gay service members and the discriminatory policy of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’. In early June, Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III spoke at an event celebrating Pride Month at the Pentagon. Secretary Austin praised those LGBTQ+ service members who ‘fought for our country even when our country wouldn’t fight for them. Even as some were forced to hide who they were… or to hang up their uniforms.’ 

In the 1940s, as recruitment and conscription for the war reached record numbers, homosexuality was regarded by the US military as a mental illness, disqualifying gay men and women for service. Prior to and during the war, the commission of ‘homosexual acts’ was considered a crime for which service members could be court-martialed. In the 1980s, the Department of Defense instituted an enlistment ban, which was modified by 1994’s ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ policy, in which ‘service members would not be asked about their sexual orientation, but would be discharged for disclosing it’, according to a Department of Defense-affiliated website for members of the military.

Coming Out Under Fire: the History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, author Alan Bérubé’s account of the gay troops of the ‘Greatest Generation’, was first published in 1990. Bérubé, a community historian, began collecting the accounts that would lead to his book in the 1970s, and the book became an invaluable resource for activists and lawmakers alike. A 20^th anniversary edition was published in 2010, still highly relevant to the debates taking place around military exclusion policies.

Coming Out Under Fire is far from a grim account of unrelenting prejudice. Through extensive research in government records, archives, personal collections and interviews, Bérubé looks at the US military’s efforts to screen out, discharge, manage and, finally, recognize and appreciate the contributions of its gay service members. He also relates his interviewees’ moving personal stories of discovery, conflict, loss and love. Many of Bérubé’s subjects found supporters and allies in the brotherhood and sisterhood of the armed forces during the war. In addition to the barriers and challenges they faced, which for some included the double bar of racial discrimination, Bérubé recounts their experiences of the conflict’s toll, along with the victory celebrations and the simple but significant act of survival. 

Years of activism by gay service members, along with their allies, from challenging and reforming the US military’s discriminatory and punitive policies to the courageous and proud statement of refusing to deny their sexual identity while under fire, finally led to the repeal of ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ in 2011, allowing openly gay men and women to serve; the extension of spousal and family benefits to gay and bisexual service members in 2013; and the 2021 removal of the ban on transgender troops. However, as Secretary Austin said in his speech, there is still more progress to be made, including addressing sexual assault and harassment in the force and creating ‘a safe and supportive workplace for everyone–free from discrimination, harassment, and fear.’ 

–post by Suzanne Solomon