My Father Never Sang for Me

In May, 2021, I had a story published here: Memorial Day, When the Meaning is Personal. I was especially honored to have it selected as a Top Story for that month of May. Now, five years later, the meaning of each Memorial Day is, if anything, more meaningful to me.

In September, 2023, I had set aside the cloak of widowhood I had worn for 9 years and became the wife of Mr. Joseph B. McNamara, III. After almost 11 months of marriage we were embarking on what we called The Travel Saga – 4 Countries, 6 Weeks and 12,000 Miles.

For both of us, Joe & me, this was a trip we’d each dreamed of for several years . . . to visit, in my case to partially re-visit, the sites that were directly connected to our fathers and their WWII experiences. For Joe, it was to walk the ground on which Joseph B McNamara, Jr had walked every day of his life from May through October, 1944, at the 485th Heavy Bomber Air Base on the outskirts of Venosa, Italy, from Mission #1 through Mission #51. For me, it was about that same ground, but for a much abbreviated time that included only 5 missions, the 6th the final tragic end for him & his fellow crew members on 2 March, 1945; the memorial to that mid-air collision in the Tirol region of Austria, and his grave site in the Lorraine American Memorial Cemetery, St. Avoid, France.

That we would make this trip together, as a married couple, was something totally unexpected for both of us. Looking back at those seemingly random events that brought us together in the first place, we can’t help but believe it was much more than that.

It was our fathers’ WWII histories that brought us together. . . our initial encounter happening in Albuquerque, NM (a far distance from both of our homes in PA and NC) where we were attending the veterans’ reunion of the 15th Army Air Force, 485th Bomb Group, 828th Squadron. Beginning with those moments in October, 2021, an acquaintanceship became a friendship, then a relationship and finally our marriage on 22 October, 2022.

Returning to Europe for the first time since May, 1988, I hoped for one more visit in my lifetime to my father’s gravesite at the Lorraine Memorial Cemetery in France and to the memorial in Austria that had been erected in 2005 in memory of the 19 young airmen who lost their lives in that mid-air collision in 1945. That goal became a reality in September, 2023.

At the ages of 78 (me) and 76 (Joe), we embarked on planning that trip back in time with the understanding it could very well be our one and only opportunity. The fact that my children, Tom and Megan, would travel along with us, made the trip even more meaningful. They had been 10 and 13 years old when the three of us were part of the 1988 Memorial Day ceremony, 35 years in the past, at the Lorraine Memorial Cemetery featured in my 2021 Vocal story.

The 2023 visit to the Memorial Cemetery in France was another sort of “memorial day” for this Doran-McNamara family, one that touched all our hearts.

The Lorraine Memorial Cemetery, Saint-Avold, France, covers 113.5 acres and contains the largest number of graves of our military dead of World War II in Europe, a total of 10,489.

Joe perfectly expressed what it is like to view that sacred ground:

“I was not expecting nor prepared for the rush of emotion and overwhelming feeling of reverence and heartfelt gratitude that overcame me when I walked over that hill in France and saw before me fields and more fields of white crosses. I was speechless, immobilized and could not contain the tears.”

A member of the memorial cemetery staff, Eliz, carried a container of wet sand from Normandy beach for me to rub into the engraving on the marble cross over my dad's grave. Each member of the staff is warm, welcoming & dedicated to the site and the families who visit. I was a reminded of a quote: "Dying in war is not the worst thing that can happen; being forgotten is." Above all, the Memorial Cemetery staff see to it that every single individual represented by every marble cross & Star of David is remembered.

It was difficult to leave that place, knowing it will be unlikely that I will ever return. In a manner of thinking, that gravesite is the closest I have as a memory of being in the presence of my father. No, he is not there. But his name, on that white marble cross, is proof of his existence. More importantly, however, is the fact of my existence, as his daughter, but so, too do my children and grandchildren owe their lives to his having lived, however briefly, on this planet. It is my great hope that those grandchildren and continuing future generations will visit that place, pay respect and feel gratitude to their ancestor, as well.

All of Austria in September is beautiful . . . snow on the highest peak, vibrant green fields and wild flowers in the valleys. But the forests are filled with the grim reminders of the war that was fought there, of the many B-24 bombers and other Allied aircraft that fell from the skies, into the unforgiving mountains of the Tirol region.

In the early 2000’s, it came upon the hearts and minds of a small group of Austrian men who came together with the idea of acknowledging the loss of lives on their mountain, gathering debris from the crash site, along with local wood & stone, to create a memorial to those specific young men from the two B-24’s whose bodies were recovered from the crash site near the village of Kossen. I first met one of those kind men, Jakob, when he was a guest of one of the 485th BG reunions. On this trip to Kossen, Austria, in search of the memorial that includes my father’s name on the roster of fallen, our little family of travelers met, were befriended, and guided by two more of that group, Roland and Stefan.

Not even the beauty of the surroundings could diminish the depth of feelings, seeing that piece of debris forming the center of the memorial, knowing it is the steel rotation track for the top turret from one of the very B-24’s from which my father & his crew mates fell that day. Tom & Megan, along with Roland & Stefan, made a bittersweet discovery further up the mountain . . . a few more pieces of aircraft debris very probably from one of those same planes.

The experiences, the sites & sights having to do with our fathers, the history & heritage of that time in their lives . . . all that had been far more fascinating & emotional than we anticipated, from cemetery to memorial, and finally to the silent farmland that once vibrated beneath those B-24 Liberators, the site of the 485th air base.

Venosa, the 3 BC town and countryside has been conquered and liberated countless times throughout history, is a charming small town that hosted the men of the 485th Bomb Group in 1944-45. There were the same tiled and cobblestone streets our fathers wandered, the fountains where the children gathered around them for ice cream and the American treats of chocolate bars, the fountains where local women laundered the airmen’s clothes.

Outside the town, were the open fields that were the runways constructed of Marsden planks (salvaged by the locals to be repurposed as a modern element of architecture referred to as The Gates of War). The rusting remains of a Quonset hut with the landmark Mt. Vulture visible in the distance, and the headquarters building are all that remain. An extensive almond orchard grows where rows of tents once housed the men and where bits of artifacts from ancient Greek and Roman pottery shards litter the landscape alongside of pieces of Coca-Cola bottles, shell casings, a 1944 penny.

It was from this place . . . the towns and fields of the Basilicata region of Italy, that Memorial Day happened for me. It was the last place my father knew as a home, a place of war from which he had every expectation of leaving to return to his home in the States, despite the grim statistics that saw 30% casualties on almost every single mission. And while he flew only five completed missions, Joe’s father saw fifty-one of them. Getting up day after day, manning their aircrafts, knowing full well they could be downed by their most deadly enemy – flak – every day and mission they flew.

The base site outside Venosa doesn’t have the haunted atmosphere of many battlefields, because it was never a battlefield, but a high risk workplace, a place where there were jobs, tasks to be completed (herculean & dangerous as they were), a goal to be accomplished. But it had a dark side, as well, as Joe pointed out at the time:

“For the air crews, the ones who climbed in the planes time and again for the long flights over the violent skies of Europe, it was a place where they lived and worked, with the highest stakes possible. Everything they did was against the backdrop of not knowing if the next day might be their last. They could not dwell on that crippling thought, but it was always there.”

Those stubbled fields will forever be sacred ground. The airfield filled us with reverence for the ultimate sacrifice my father, Sargent Leegrand Huff Koller, and so many others gave for the final missions from which they did not return.

What does all this have to do with the title of this piece, My Father Never Sang for Me? I never knew my father, having been only five months old at the time his plane crashed in Austria, so I never heard my father sing. Did he have a fine voice? One that barely carried a tune? Hearty and robust? Something truly musical? That is something every Orphan of War is missing . . . the songs of our fathers. More recent wars have left children behind who may never have heard or will never again hear the songs their fathers might have sung. Their voices and those songs are forever lost.

Memorial Day is a time for just such a remembrance.