Gerry Papineau
Tony entered his garage, placed the metal box on the work bench, and began to scan the garage for metal cutters or a hacksaw. The first one he spotted was a hacksaw. In five minutes, he had sawed his way through the old-fashioned lock and had the box open.
He noticed two medals with ribbons, but had difficulty reading the inscription on them. They badly needed to be cleaned and polished, as he set them aside and gazed at what else was in the box.
Lying flat on the bottom of the box was a journal written in what appeared to be the composition pads used for essay exams back in his high school days. It looked to be about ten pages long, handwritten in ink, but quite legible. He entered the house and tossed the journal on his desk. He then walked to his dry sink, took out a four-ounce glass and poured himself an apricot brandy. After he added a few ice cubes from the refrigerator, he went back into his office, sat down in his recliner with the drink placed on an end table and the journal in his hands.
“My name is Gerry Papineau. On August 23, 1943, my squadron was assigned to fly over Belgium to Hamburg, Germany to bomb the shipbuilding factory there. American flyers did day raids, while the RAF flew raids at night. As many as ninety B-17s bombarded Hamburg that day under Operation Gomorrah, an eight-day assault operation day and night. Our B-17 had three gunners. I was the one in the tail, the other two being in the ball turret and the waist gunner.
We had left London at seven o’clock in the morning and were nearing our target by ten o’clock. We didn’t encounter too much flak from the ground heading into Hamburg, but heading home after a direct hit on the target was a different story. On the way back, as many as fifteen bombers were lost, including ours.
German fighters were incessantly attacking our bomb squadron from all sides. As the tail gunner, I especially encountered many fighters coming up on us from the rear, and I was fortunate enough to disable one of them as smoke began trailing the fighter until it began to nose dive. Unfortunately, I was grazed by a bullet that nearly knocked me unconscious as our plane took a direct hit from another German fighter. Within minutes, the captain gave the announcement to all of us to prepare for evacuation. I immediately slipped on the harness holding my parachute as the plane began to spiral downward. I saw several crew members slide open the rear door closest to me and bail out.
I ended up parachuting into northern Belgium, equipped with my escape kit and little else. I had tied my white neck scarf tightly around the arm wound to stop the blood flow before I jumped. I found out much later that I was one of the lucky ones to parachute to the ground without being shot on the way down. The flesh wound began to throb as I fell to the ground and tumbled a few times before grabbing my chute.
I had landed in a cornfield in Soiron, a small village south of Liege in Belgium, and quickly hauled in and hid the parachute in a thick clump of bushes nearby. At the time, I had no clue where I was. It was still broad daylight and I was certain German patrols on the ground had spotted my parachute. I fully expected to be captured and sent to a POW camp, but it never happened.
A local farmer raced toward me and had me follow him back to his farmhouse where he hid me in the attic. His name was Henri Mongeon, I will never forget it. His wife, Giselle, looked at my wound, cleaned it out, and then sewed it closed. Thank God for the bottle of wine she had me drink before she began. They fed me with some sort of vegetable soup and bread and told me not to make a sound as I lay on a mattress in the attic.
My French upbringing in Rhode Island proved to be quite helpful as they both spoke French and Walloon, their native tongue in this part of Belgium. At eleven that night, the trap door to the unfolded staircase opened and I was faced with a member of the Belgian resistance, Louis DeGuire, who promptly instructed me to come down from the attic. He would personally take me by car to Brussels, several hours away. He hid me under several blankets on the floor of the back seat of the car.
As the car finally came to a stop and Louis turned off the motor, my heart started to beat rapidly and I waited for the next move anxiously. A woman’s voice shouted to me to quickly come out of the car as we entered a house I assumed was in Brussels. I never saw Louis again.
The woman’s name was Lily, just Lily, nothing more. She led me carefully while holding me up as she noticed my wound. She took care of me like a mother does a child. Ironically, she looked like a child herself. Whether she was deliberately playing a role to baffle the Germans, or just had the appearance of a teenager, Lily was the reason I survived the war. She told me she was trained as a nurse and that it was better if I didn’t know her real name in case I ever was captured. Without her help, I don’t know where I would have ended up. As my guide, she led me out of Belgium into France by car, rail and bike, and eventually into Spain, where the British consulate safely returned me to London. She personally escorted me over the Pyrenees Mountains and across a river to reach Spain. I am forever grateful to Lily and other members of the Comet Line. Perhaps one day I will revisit the area to personally thank her, if I get to know her real name somehow. I was a lost soul in a foreign country I knew nothing about. When I left two months later, Belgium seemed like home.”
Tony was dumbfounded by what he had just read. He picked up the two medals again and needed to know what they represented. The thought of his father being in World War II and being a downed airman blew his mind. This had never been talked about in the forty years his mother had been alive up to her death in 1980 at age sixty-five from a massive aneurism to the heart.
He opened his laptop, typed in ‘Military Medals’, and waited for the photos to appear. One by one, he swiped each medal trying to match the two found in the metal box. Then finally, he came across them, the Distinguished Service Cross, and the Distinguished Flying Medal. Who was this man?
Tony read the requirement for each medal:
The Distinguished Service Cross is the second highest military award to a member of the United States Army (and previously, the United States Army Air Forces) for extreme gallantry and risk of life in actual combat with an armed enemy force.
The Distinguished Flying Medal was a military decoration awarded by the British RAF for acts of valor, courage, or devotion to duty by a non-commissioned airman while flying in active operations against the enemy.
Tony was stunned. He went back into the garage, searched for some chrome cleaner and an abrasive sponge, and returned to his office with these and a clean rag. He began cleaning the medals until the images on both sides became clearly recognizable to him. He held each medal against the image on the Wikipedia website and shook his head.
He picked up the journal to see if there was more writing on later pages, but the pages were blank. He looked into the metal box once more and pulled out a small manila envelope sitting on the bottom. He opened the envelope and pulled out two certificates.
Distinguished Flying Medal
16752444 Sergeant Gerard Papineau, USAAF Member
Squadron 107. This airman was the rear gunner of an aircraft detailed to attack Hamburg one day in August 1943. When returning from the target area, the aircraft was hit by machine gun fire from a fighter. The turret gunner was killed and Sergeant Papineau was wounded in the arm. Although in great pain, Sergeant Papineau remained at his post. Coolly withholding his fire until the attacker came into close range, he then delivered an accurate burst which caused the enemy aircraft to break away. Later, it was seen to be on fire. On two occasions more recently, his cool and determined work has played a good part in the success of the sortie. Sergeant Papineau withstood his position until explicitly ordered to evacuate in the face of the B-17 about to crash following serious flak damage. He is truly an example of courage and resolution.
The second certificate, which undoubtedly accompanied the Distinguished Service Cross stated,
Awarded to Sergeant Gerard Papineau for extraordinary heroism by distinguishing himself while engaged in an action against an enemy of the United States.
“How come I have never heard about this, Marge?” Tony asked as he related the contents of the black metal box. “Why am I finding out about this at seventy years old?”
“I wonder if Bill knew about your dad’s military service?” she asked. “Give him a call.”
Bill, at sixty-eight, had retired three years earlier in 2015 following a forty- year career as a civil engineer for Chapman Construction in Somerville, Massachusetts. He had married his high school sweetheart, Nancy, just after graduating from Worcester Polytechnical Institute in 1971. They had two children, David, a single, forty-five year old human resources director at Heywood Associates in Franklin, Massachusetts, and a daughter, Jessica, a professor in the Syracuse University exchange program in London, also not married. Their home in Arlington sat atop a steep incline, and the magnificent view from their deck overlooked the Prudential Center in Boston, some fifteen miles away. With real estate values booming in the area, Bill’s property had nearly doubled in price in the last seven years, and was now worth nearly four times what he paid for it in the early 1980s.
“Bill, what would you say if I told you that Dad had served in the service during World War II, and that he got two medals for bravery in the war?” asked Tony.
“I’d say you’ve been smoking the wrong stuff, brother. Where did you hear that?”
“Do you remember the house on Little Pond in Cumberland?”
“Jesus, Tony, I was only three years old when we moved after Dad died. I don’t remember the place, and I really don’t remember Dad at all.”
“Well, I remember it. I was there today because the guy who owns it called me to tell me he had found a sealed room in the old house, and there was a metal box in the room that belonged to Dad…Sergeant Gerard Papineau.”
“How come Mom never told us about this?” Bill asked.
“I don’t even know if Mom knew he had been in the service either.”
“Did you ask Lillian about this? Maybe she knows?”
While he was still talking on the phone with his brother, Marge casually picked up the journal and started flipping pages, stopping every so often to read her father-in-law’s account from 1943. As she thumbed through the blank pages, she noticed that two of the journal’s pages had been glued together around three sides. The pages were hardly noticeable amid the rest of the blank pages. She motioned to Tony at her discovery.
“I’ll call you right back, Bill. Marge just noticed something else in the journal.”
“There’s something between these two pages, honey. I can feel it when I press against the pages.”
“Wow, are those pages glued together, or what? It looks like one page when you flip through all the blank pages at the back. Get me a pair of scissors. I’m going to cut a very thin strip on the outside edge of the page. I hope I don’t cut out anything important.”
Tony grabbed the scissors from Marge and carefully slit the glued page until he could see two small onionskin pieces of paper with slightly faded handwriting on it. As he lifted the pages from the journal to get a closer look, he began to make a slit at the side and top portion of the glued areas.
“It looks like a letter. Remember years ago, all air mail letters were written on onionskin paper because the paper was much lighter than regular stationery? I’ve got to be careful taking this out,” he told his wife as he became excited. He then gently removed two sheets of paper, each with writing in longhand on both sides. The ink on the sheets was faded somewhat, but it was still legible. The handwriting was very clear, and the ink from a fountain pen had not penetrated to the back side.
3 juin, 1947
Mon Cher Gerard,
Yes, it is I, Lily. I was quite surprised to receive your letter in April. Henri Mongeon, the farmer who took you to his house in Soiron, said the letter was included with a package you sent to him and his wife Giselle. Because the letter was addressed just to Lily, Comet Line, it took several weeks for me to get it at my home in Paris. I was happy to know that you are well and planning a trip to Belgium soon. You were a very special person to me when you were hurt and during the two months we were together. I will never forget our moment in Bayonne the night before I took you across the Pyrenees to Spain with Florentino. I mentioned your letter to Elvire last week, you would remember her as Tante Go, and she was pleased to hear you are well.
Gerard, the night we were together back then, you said you would come back to me, and I wanted so much to believe that one day you would return from America. America is so far away and many things can happen when two people are so far apart.
Before the war ended, I was betrayed in the Comet Line and had to go to Spain and then to London to avoid the Germans. In 1944, I met Pierre Ugeux, an officer in the Belgian army who was also assigned to British Intelligence (MI9) like me. He was nice. I did not know that you would ever contact me or return to Europe anytime soon.
Pierre and I fell in love and are now married and living in Paris as we still help MI9, but for only a short while longer. We will be leaving Paris soon to raise a family in a more quiet part of France. The activities of the last four years have tired me and I am glad the days of the Comet Line are over. So many of my friends were killed, along with my father also. It was a horrible war.
If you do get to France or Belgium, Pierre and I would welcome you to our home. I will send you our new address when we have it.
I wish you well, Cher Gerard, and hope you find a good woman to make you happy.
Mon amour pour toi pour toujours!
Michou
Micheline Dumon-Ugeux (Lily)
“They were in love. My dad loved this woman Lily before he met my mom. She must have been quite a woman. And to my knowledge, Dad never got back to Europe before he died in 1953. For all these years, I hardly ever thought about my father, because there wasn’t anything that stood out about him. From what I’ve heard about guys in World War II, they don’t talk about it much. And I guess if you have cancer just a few years later, it’s pretty hard to want to play with your kids. Back then, there was no chemo, no radiation treatment, not much of anything to ease the pain, was there?”
“I wonder if your sister Lillian knew about your dad’s military years. She’s a couple years older than you and might remember any stories from him or your mother. She was two when you were born in 1948. So, she would have lived on Little Pond for almost seven years before you moved to Cranston,” Marge asked.
“I’ll take a ride to Brookdale in Cumberland tomorrow and see what she knows. Bill said the same thing about Lillian. The shock of seeing me might kill her! All of a sudden, I feel guilty in not talking to her more. I thought we would see her more after Blanche died, but instead, we’ve drifted further apart.”
“When Blanche’s husband died last year, and she moved into Brookdale with Lillian, I was glad they would keep each other company. It must be lonely for Lillian these days now that Blanche’s gone too?” Marge asked.
Lillian, Blanche and Tony were each born a year apart in 1946, 1947, and 1948. Blanche’s death in 2017 came just six months after she had buried her husband. The Honorable Tom Rowell had suffered a fatal heart attack while sitting on the bench in Superior Court in Providence. His judgeship had been for life, or until he chose to retire, and Tom had shown no inclination of slowing down. And because they had chosen not to have children during their marriage, Blanche suddenly found herself alone in their waterfront home in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. The thought of staying there alone was out of the question, and the staircase to the bedroom level made it impossible for her to ask Lillian to live with her there. So, she did the next best thing in her mind, she moved in with Lillian in Cumberland. Little did she realize her stay at Brookdale would be short-lived.
In late 2017, Blanche was struck by a car crossing the street on Diamond Hill Road as she walked from Brookdale to the CVS drugstore at the corner of Bear Hill Road. The driver, a construction worker in a pickup truck was not held liable as Blanche was not in the crosswalk leading to the store, although he was cited for being on his cell phone. Blanche’s head injuries were severe and she never regained consciousness. Ironically, Rhode Island prohibited drivers from using hand-held cell phones while driving as of the following June in 2018.
* * *
“Since when does a big sister discuss much of anything with her kid brother?” Lillian blurted to Tony when he posed the question about their father’s past.
“Of course I knew about his military service. Mom always told me though not to ever ask him about it. She said he didn’t want to talk about it, and so, I never said anything. After he died, Mom told me I had been his favorite, because I reminded him of someone far away who was special to him. She never told me more than that, but to me, I was glad to hear it. I wish we had had more time with him.”
“He had a journal, Lillian, and the guy who owns our old house on Little Pond found it in a metal box behind a wall off their bedroom closet. You won’t believe what was in the box.”
Lillian Papineau, at age seventy-two, had never married. She had been engaged to a lieutenant in the Army in 1965, but he was killed in action in Vietnam two weeks before his tour was to end. After that tragedy, she focused her whole life around her real estate brokerage business, and it consumed her life almost seven days a week. By the time she was sixty, she had amassed enough money to retire comfortably. But she was always hesitant to enter into a real meaningful relationship, overly suspicious that suitors were dating her strictly for her money. So, life passed her by with no one to share her good fortune with.
Blanche had been married to the love of her life for over forty years, but they had no children. Tony, and his brother Bill, were both successful and raised their own families. Lillian, although financially successful in her own way, was the loner in the family. She was tall, had no gray hair on her head, and was very attractive and fashionable. She socialized extensively, but never got too close to her male friends.
Tony related the story about the escape from Belgium in 1943, and the two military medals their father had received.
“He said in the journal that he would not have survived the war were it not for a Belgian woman named Lily, who personally helped him escape the Germans into France and then to Spain. Marge and I then found a letter Dad had received in 1947 from a woman named Michou, whose code name in the underground was Lily. The letter made it quite clear that they had fallen in love, and then were separated after he escaped to Spain and was sent home. He met Mom after that, and they were married in 1946. The letter from this Belgian woman was dated in June 1947. She, too, had married and was living in Paris when she wrote the letter to Dad. Now I think I know why you were named Lillian. Funny though, how no one ever called you Lily.”
“I didn’t know that. I wonder if Mom ever knew about the letter you’re referring to. I’d like to see it.”
“Marge is planning a big dinner for everybody in the family, and I’ll have copies of everything for everybody then.”
“Does this mean maybe we’ll be seeing each other a little more often from now on?”
“You can count on it, sister. Who knows how much time we have left? Look at how fast Blanche and Tom went.”