“Letters of a World War II Airman” shares original letters to and from my uncle, Frank Ebner Gartz, from 1943-1945, tracing the course of WWII, life on the home front, and the evolution of a neighborhood kid into seasoned airman.
Frank Gartz's best buddy, Frank Von Arx, is at it again, sending greetings from his present post at Elmendorf Field in Alaska. He writes that some of his buddies are flying at altitudes where the temperature is 60 degrees below zero. That's what these boys in the Army Air Corps will have to deal with regularly on bombing missions.
It's Christmas Eve, 1944, and Frank Gartz just took the test to determine what his classification in the Army Air Corps would be. Pilot? Navigator? Bombardier? Gunner? Read on to find out about the tests he describes that will determine his fate. He's now in California—Santa Ana Army Air Base, to be exact, and this next week he'll be on pins and needles, waiting.
One hundred fifty years ago today, President Abraham Lincoln stood before a crowd of ten to twenty thousand people, gathered in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where the bloodiest battle of the Civil War had raged the previous July. Fifty thousand had died.
On November 11th, 1943, when Veterans Day was called Armistice Day, my grandmother sat down to write her youngest son, my Uncle Frank. She had received two anxious, confessional letters from him, telling her how he got into an argument with a sergeant and was now paying the price in demerits and restrictions.
A trove of Modernist art, some 1,500 works, were discovered in a Munich home. You can read why this discovery has personal meaning to me and for my understanding of my Uncle Frank's World War II service.