To the editor:
On Veterans Day, Nov. 11, Americans expressed gratitude for the military service of the living.
On this day in Britain, designated as “Remembrance Day,” the people of the United Kingdom honor the memory of those who cannot be thanked in person. In the thousand-year-old Norfolk village of Thorpe Abbotts, England, incongruously situated adjacent to verdant fields of sugar beet, thatch-roofed houses, half-timbered buildings and narrow winding roads, stands a small, nondescript, block-shaped building.
Next to it, here in the heart of East Anglia, flies the flag of the United States of America. It serves as a reminder. A reminder of the time when, in the words of Winston Churchill, “the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.”
During WWII, this was the control tower, and nerve center for U.S. Army 8th Air Force Station 139, home to the 100th Bombardment Group (heavy). Sustaining a combat casualty rate of 77%, it would become better known as “The Bloody Hundredth.” The recent television series “Masters of the Air” portrayed the role that this base, and its 3,500 airmen played in prosecuting the Allied strategic air campaign against targets in Nazi-occupied Europe. It is a place of ineffable sadness, whose enduring legacy is also that of valor, devotion to duty and the human cost of preserving freedom.
On the morning of Oct. 10,1943, 13 B-17 Flying Fortresses, each with a crew of 10 young Americans, ascended from the nearby runways for a “Maximum Effort” mission to Munster, Germany. At day’s end, only one of these aircraft returned, battle-damaged and barely flying, carrying its wounded crew back here… their home.
Years later, in a personal correspondence, the pilot of that B-17, Robert Rosenthal, recalled that “Thorpe Abbotts was a very quiet place that night.”
Just something to think about on this Veterans/Remembrance Day.
Michael M. Fuenfer, MD
Colonel (retired), Medical Corps, U.S. Army
Franklin Street
