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Missing

GQ with a haunting tale of searching, finding and the pain that lasts decades in the story of Jimmy Doyle and his B-24 crewmen, missing for more than 60 years. Also, about the strange things the pain makes people do.

Jimmy Doyle left a son, who was told his father had abandoned him and only as an old man learned the truth, that he gave everything. The absent of our time, lost in service, include hundreds of thousands upon hundreds of thousands of missing fathers, uncles, brothers, sons, and now wives, mothers, sisters, daughters and a nod today to my own absent uncle, lost in flying battle over Belgium, night of Oct. 20-21, 1941, with the crew of Wellington IV Z1218.

SGT P.J.M. Hamilton (RAF) killed
SGT P.G. Crittenden (RAAF) killed
PLTOFF D.K. Fawkes (RAF) killed
SGT T. Jackson (RAF) killed
SGT A.Y. Condie (RAF) killed
SGT P.G.E.A. Brown (RAF) POW

Their fate was determined in relatively short order by the Red Cross, citing POW Brown and enemy accounts, and confirmed after the war by examination of exhumed remains by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. PDFs of my uncle’s file from the Australian War Museum recently forwarded by a friend included bureaucratic correspondence re his status to my grandparents over a period of months and years, each item of which would have been met with pain, grief and probably not much solace.  Hamilton, Crittenden, Fawkes, Jackson and Condie lie beside each other in a World War I cemetery near their crash site in Charleroi, Belgium. For an excellent account of the life of bomber crews and the gaping holes left by their loss, read “Wings of Morning,” by Thomas Childers, a history professor whose discovery of a packet of letters and subsequent investigation resulted in a work that is a towering monument.

Topics: history, military

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:21 am on Sunday, May 25, 2008

One Response to “Missing”

1. Joe B. Says:
   May 27th, 2008 at 1:16 am

   My father lost his half-brother, Harold Berg, from Minnesota, U.S.A.F., in 1942 somewhere over Burma. I do not believe his plane was ever found.

   Photographs of Harold show a very tall, handsome fellow with wavy blond hair, always with a genuine grin on his face. My Dad and my aunt (Harold’s half-sister) remembered him as a good golfer, a good athlete, a real “sport” with the girls, with one of those personalities that made him instantly likeable. What a pity America lost men like Harold; what a blessing such men were there.

   Thank Goodness the 21ST century U.S. soldier, sailor, and airman has the same kind of spine those warriors of the 1940s had. Be proud, America!

   Signed, a grateful Canadian, son of a World War II veteran, nephew of 4 other returned men… and nephew of Harold Berg, a man I never met, who gave it ALL up for freedom.

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