Piccolo and a WW2 vet. A very whacked out story.

Before I got off the boat someone asked me what I was going to do with my shore leave. I told them I was either going to have an ice cream cone with a five year old girl or split a half-pint of bourbon with a 90+ year old man to get away from the bullshit. I said the little girl is too young to know any better and the old man is too old to give a $hit.

A day or so later I boarded my flight home. Plan A was to have a snort and try and sleep.

As I boarded the airplane one of the flight crews looked to be a little on the feminine side and was probably some kind of binary trinarey whatever. I didn't care because whoever it was looked capable enough. They were also impeccably dressed and I told then they looked pretty damned sharp. It wasn't a case of their uniform, it was how they wore it. 

I always have kind words for aircrews while boarding and it always seems to pay huge dividends.

I took my seat and noticed the guy next to me was an ancient and made a mental note of it. 

The minute we went gear up I asked the attendant I had spoken with how to get a damned drink without that stupid app. I was asked what I wanted and replied, bourbon, if they had it. He said there was some unaccounted for scotch on board if that worked. It would, I told him.

A few seconds later he quietly dropped not one, but FOUR little bottles on my lap. Two probably would have been perfect.

I turned to the old man next to me and offered him two of them which he gratefully accepted. It proved to be tongue loosener and when I asked him if he was a WW2 vet he said he had been.

As some of you know I have a knack for getting good stories out of WW2 vets, what few of them we have left.

I asked him where and he replied he had been a waist gunner in a B-17 and knocked back the second drink and started telling his tale.

The story was so whacked out it had to be true because you can't make a story like that up. This is his story as best as I can remember it.

After graduating from a Catholic high school he joined the Air Corps and quickly washed out of primary flight training for some untold reason. When he joined he never mentioned that from grades 7-12 he had taken French. He was fluent in the language and had been one of the officer of the school 'French Club'.

I looked at this old geezer and saw that not only was he spry but was as sharp and clear minded as he had probably been when he was twenty. Clearly he was no doddering old geezer.

He was on his 6th mission against the sub pens at St. Nazaire when he got shot down. He said that it was a wasted endeavor because the reinforced concrete roofs were so thick even direct hits had little or no effect on them.

When a fire broke out the pilot gave the order and he immediately hit the silk and seconds later the plane blew up. He said he doesn't know what happened to the rest of the crew.

As he was hanging in his parachute he said he was preoccupied with coming up with a plan of escape that he didn't notice the ground coming up and he hit the ground like a sack of potatoes.

On the way down he had contemplated all of the escape and evasion lectures and said to himself that most of it didn't apply to him because he spoke French. He was going to try and evade.

The instant he got up he took off everything that was GI and could be used to identify him and hid it in a nearby pig sty. "There I was," he said. "Bollickey bare assed  running around in some French village."

"What if you had been caught?" I asked.

"At that point I figured I'd just babble my way into an insane asylum," he replied. "It would have been a lot easier and less risky to escape from a nut house than a PW camp."

I laughed like hell. I liked the way this guy thought.

"Anyway, things started happening fast. I saw a pair of muddy boots on someone's porch and grabbed them. There were a little large but I couldn't be picky at the time. Next I saw a clothes line and ran over to it and helped myself to a damp set of clothes that were a little large but were not obviously so. It was none too soon because when I did the last button a German squad of six soldiers popped up. They saw me and said they were looking for an American parachutist. They spoke German and I looked at them confused until one of them that spoke French translated." he explained.

"That's where I almost messed up because I pointed towards a wood line and in French I said, 'He went thataway!' straight out of an old American western. I figured I'd better smarten up right then and there. If I had told them to 'head him off at the pass' I would have probably given myself away," he continued. 

"Anyway, the French speaking German asked if I would help find the parachutist (who was me) and I said I would. I spent the next few hours helping the squad of krauts try and find the missing parachutist to no avail."

"Now after the war this saved me a lot of work, time money and trouble because  unlike that guy in the Somerset Meegham novel that went to Tibet trying to find himself I had already tried to find myself  in France and I was nowhere to be found!" he laughed.

"Then what?" I asked. 

He explained that he worked his way north by east. His plan was to get to a fishing village along the channel and maybe try and steal a boat and sail for England.

He told of getting occasional rides in horse drawn carts from the locals and had some kind of story made up about wanting to see his sick mother and how he had a job as a laborer building defenses for the Germans. He said most people accepted the story as he told it. One didn't.

The farmer took him home and he spent the night in the farm house and the farmer gave him a set of papers that had belonged to his son who he said was in England with the Free French. The papers were in terrible shape and the photograph was smudged so as to be unrecognizable but he figured if they were just given a passing glance he'd be OK. The farmer's wife also packed him some food. The next day he was off on foot.

"With no map, how did you navigate?" I asked.

"Simple. I'd ask people. In fact, once I got directions from a police station," he replied. Another time I got directions from a police officer.

"My eyes probably popped out. "You went into a police station?" Clearly he had been totally mad. Police stations were overseen by the Germans.

"Sure, why not? I spoke good French. They thought I was a Frenchman," he replied.

He said that after a couple of weeks wandering he found a fishing village and found the piers were guarded. He did locate a fisherman and they hammered out a deal. The fisherman told him he'd take him to either England or the first British boat patrolling the Channel IF he promised to tell the senior officer to instruct downed fliers to stop trying to steal fish boats because they needed them to feed their families. That was a no brainer done deal.

The next day they sailed.  On the way out of port thay wer briefly stopped by a German boat that paid a passing glance at his sloppy papers and sent them on their way. 

By late that afternoon he was on board a British patrol boat. A few days later he was in an American hospital for a couple of days with an open pass to London. He want to SHAEF and explained that he had a message -eyes only- for Ike from the French and to his surprise Ike told him to come in and he said he spent well over an hour discussing how to return stolen French fishing boats.

As an evadee he was not permitted to return to combat duties and after a few weeks was sent home to teach at a flexible gunnery school. He had a funny story or three to tell about that but I'll save it for later.

I figure the story is probably true with little or no embellishement because you just can't make that kind of thing up.

 

To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY