On Veterans Day, I always think of my beautiful, young, handsome Uncle Frank Ebner, whom I never met in person, yet I feel I know intimately. Why? Because I have nearly 300 letters written to and from him from January 1943 to the end of September 1945. Then the letters stopped coming home.
Pearl Harbor was bombed seventy-six years ago today. My mom, Lillian Koroschetz, started a brand new diary on New Year's Eve, 1941 reflecting back on the previous year and the effects the barely three-week-old war was already having on the every-day lives of Americans.
After arriving overseas, Ebner was allowed to tell his family only that he was stationed in Italy. It wasn't until I discovered the Second Bomb Group website (in 2009) that I found out exactly where he was in Italy, the missions on which he had flown, and the crew members with him on each mission. He was stationed in Amendola, Italy, on the Adriatic, just east of the town of Foggia.
This post will summarize what happened to Ebner after he graduated from Navigation School in Hondo, Texas, in September 1944 and eventually was shipped overseas to put his intense training into navigating bombing missions to bring World War II to an end.
Seventy-one years ago, World War II navigator-in-training, Frank Ebner Gartz, wrote to his mother about his hard work and some health trouble he was having, but I think primarily to reassure her he was all right and just too darn busy with school work to write. His mother's loving, prayerful response was written just four days later.