Lost Eagles: One Man's Mission to Find Missing Airmen in Two World Wars

Prologue

PROLOGUE Some day they will return with honor . . . not all, but some . . . —Brochure from Fred Zinn’s Memorial Air Show, Battle Creek, MI, 1962 As an author you sometimes are granted the privilege of ensuring that some of our priceless history is not lost. Such is the case with Frederick W. Zinn. It is a story of how our nation treats its honored dead. How our military helps families come to terms with their loss speaks volumes about who we are as a people. The quest to locate and bring home the dead or their possessions from war is almost as compelling as the story of the wars themselves. This was something that Fred Zinn understood more than most people. We are de‹ned by how we honor those that have died for us. In doing research for this book I spent a day with my daughter copying Zinn’s extensive ‹les at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. While waiting in the lobby for our escort I glanced up at the carved Airmen’s Creed etched in stone for visitors. The last stanza of that creed struck me the most, “I will leave never leave an airman behind . . .” It dawned on me, at that very moment, that I was writing about the man that line was based on. The entire concept of not leaving an airman behind was started by Frederick W. Zinn. In a time before Crime Scene Investigation, before DNA testing, a lone man who wandered the ‹elds of France, Italy, and Sicily searching for missing airmen and ensuring they were brought home. Such a man deserved a book about his mission—a mission that continues on to this day. The World War I, the Great War, was a meat grinder in terms of human death. The war devastated a generation of young men in Europe. The numbers alone tell the story; 8.5 million were killed, another 21 mil- lion wounded, and 7.7 million were made prisoners of war. The war began in 1914 under the belief that it would only last a few months. Four and a half years later it had consumed millions of people and laid the foundation for another, even more devastating war. It was a war that ushered in the U-boat, combat aircraft, poison gas, mines, ›amethrowers , rapid-‹re artillery, and an array of weaponry that was geared to kill, maim, or cripple. There are no statistics as to how many men survived the entirety of the war, but those numbers are woefully small. Weapons technology saw to that, combined with the deadly stalemate that trench warfare brought to the Western Front. Of the men that enlisted or were mobilized in 1914, only a few thousand were still in ‹ghting trim in 1918. Most of the combatants that followed were newer recruits that had joined the war effort after the con›ict started. Of those seasoned veterans that survived the entire duration of the war, almost all bore the scars of their wounds and memories of the most horri‹c con›ict up until that time. Air warfare had its own breed of carnage. Just over a decade after the Wright Brothers ›ew at Kitty Hawk, aircraft had been turned into weapons of war. Crude at ‹rst, these weapons resembled box kites with clunky engines and machine guns. In the early years of the war, pilots and observers that went into the skies more often fell victim to their planes falling apart than to enemy ‹re. When Anthony Fokker introduced an interrupter gear for the airplane, allowing a machine gun to easily ‹re through a spinning propeller, the war in the skies became even more deadly. The life expectancy of a pilot was around three weeks at the front. Young men, primarily the best and brightest college students or recent graduates, started volunteering to join the ›edgling U.S. Air Service (USAS), as well as the Royal Flying Corps and the French Air Service (Aéronautique Militaire). The fate of those that did not survive was as lethal as those men locked in a tug-of-war over the trench lines but was made more glamorous to the public because of the machines they ›ew. Pilots and observers were seen as gallant knights of the air in a war that lacked romantic imagery. In reality it was a brutal duty that prematurely aged the select few aviators...