by Bob Drury
Though it technically remained in reserve service until the end of the war, 18 months later, not long after V-J Day in August 1945, Old 666 was chopped up and melted for scrap.
THREE AND A HALF WEEKS after his final flight, while still bedridden in Australia, Jay was given a field promotion to major. Ten months later he was promoted again, to lieutenant colonel, while convalescing at the Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C. There he shared a hospital room with Capt. Ted Lawson, whose first-person account of Jimmy Doolittle’s dramatic raid, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, was an instant bestseller and was soon adapted into a movie starring Spencer Tracy as Doolittle and Van Johnson as Lawson.
It was the adventuresome Col. Merian C. Cooper—the cocreator of King Kong, who after the war went on to collaborate with John Ford on such classic films as The Quiet Man—who recommended that Jay Zeamer and Joe Sarnoski be nominated to receive the Medal of Honor. Cooper knew heroism. Following the armistice that ended World War I and before volunteering for Kosciuszko’s Squadron, Cooper had scoured the French countryside and finally located the grave of Lt. Frank Luke, America’s second-highest-scoring ace in the Great War. Luke was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.
Now, Cooper wrote of the final flight of Old 666, “I consider Captain Zeamer’s feat above and beyond the call of duty, comparable to that of Lieutenant Luke, who stands with Captain [Eddie] Rickenbacker as one of the leading flying officers of exceptional courage and daring.”
When Cooper’s narrative made its way up the chain of command, Gen. Kenney concurred, and personally wrote Jay’s citation. Jay was still recovering at Walter Reed when he received the telephone call informing him he had been awarded the Medal of Honor.
“At that point,” he later recalled, “I dropped the phone.”
Our nation’s highest military award was presented to Jay by Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces, on January 6, 1944, at a ceremony at the Pentagon. The citation reads in full:
On 16 June 1943, Maj. Zeamer (then Capt.) volunteered as pilot of a bomber on an important photographic mapping mission covering the formidably defended area in the vicinity of Buka, Solomon Islands. While photographing the Buka airdrome, his crew observed about 20 enemy fighters on the field, many of them taking off. Despite the certainty of a dangerous attack by this strong force, Maj. Zeamer proceeded with his mapping run, even after enemy attacks began. In the ensuing engagement, Maj. Zeamer sustained gunshot wounds in both arms and legs, 1 leg being broken. Despite his injuries, he maneuvered the damaged plane so skillfully that his gunners were able to fight off the enemy during a running fight which lasted 40 minutes. The crew destroyed at least five hostile planes, of which Maj. Zeamer himself shot down 1. Although weak from loss of blood, he refused medical aid until the enemy had broken combat. He then turned over the controls, but continued to exercise command despite lapses into unconsciousness, and directed the flight to a base 580 miles away. In this voluntary action, Maj. Zeamer, with superb skill, resolution, and courage, accomplished a mission of great value.
Seated in the front row for the awards ceremony were Jay Sr. and Marjorie Zeamer, who beamed when Gen. Arnold placed the medal around their son’s collar to complement his two Silver Stars, his Distinguished Flying Cross, his Air Medal with Oak Leaf Cluster, and his Purple Heart.
“This reminded me more and more that I represent many people,” Jay would say later about the awards ceremony. “My comrades who did something special but ended up dead and nobody noticed. In many cases there was no recognition at all. I received the award for all those who died, especially my own bombardier, Joe Sarnoski.”
Jay’s physicians had told him he would never walk again. Ever the renegade, he proved them wrong. Later that year he was released from Walter Reed and, though still in pain, returned to active duty as a field air officer in charge of inspecting training bases to ensure that Airmen heading into overseas combat were receiving the proper indoctrination and equipment.
JAY ZEAMER JR. WAS ONE of only nine Eagle Scouts to be awarded the Medal of Honor. When he finally made it home to Orange, New Jersey, he was naturally feted as a returning hero and awarded a gold medal from the Merchants Association of Orange. A year later he was named the town’s Outstanding Citizen for 1945. Jay, whose hair had turned prematurely gray, accepted both awards with his usual humility, telling the men and women who had gathered in his honor that any awards presented to him were emblematic of his community’s appreciation for the hard work of all men and women serving in the armed forces.
A local reporter who interviewed the 27-year-old Jay at the ceremony noted that his eyes bore “a seriousness generally not expected in men of his years.” It was also reported that though he walked with a noticeable limp, he moved through the adoring crowds briskly.
During his remarks at the many stateside dinners and receptions held in his honor upon his return, Jay consistently returned to his humble roots. That attitude had been encapsulated when, six months after his Medal of Honor flight, Jay sat for an interview with his hometown Newark News. “Do me a favor when you write this story,” he had implored the reporter. “Leave out the melodrama.”
In keeping with his aversion to melodrama, Jay rarely mentioned the painful trip he had undertaken to visit the Sarnoski homestead in Carbondale, Pennsylvania, shortly after his release from Walter Reed. It was late 1944, and after being dropped off at the closest paved road to the Sarnoski farm, with the help of a cane Jay trudged over a mile uphill to the family’s front yard, every step more agonizing than the previous one. When he reached the property one of the first things he noticed was the rows of carrots, tomatoes, beets, and peas in the beautifully tended victory garden the family had planted in Joe’s honor.
Joe’s father, John, was not home that day, but Josephine invited Jay into her parlor, poured him a glass of swojskie wino, the Polish sweet red wine she always had at the ready for visitors, and listened in silence as he told her the story of her son’s heroism in the Southwest Pacific Theater of War. “He was my best friend,” Jay told her, “and I’m sorry for your loss.”
What he did not tell her was how responsible he felt for her son’s death, a burden, however undeserved, he carried with him for the rest of his life.
Jay had brought along a few of Joe belongings to return to John and Josephine, including Joe’s bombardier’s trooper hat and his flight goggles. When he presented these to Josephine, she finally cried.
It was Cicero who observed that in peace, sons bury fathers; in war, fathers bury sons. So do mothers.
AT THE WAR’S END IN 1945, Jay was medically discharged from the United States Army Air Force. He returned to M.I.T. and, a year later, earned a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering. He proceeded to work for a string of aerospace companies—Pratt & Whitney, Hughes Aircraft, and Raytheon—designing test installations for new aircraft engines as well as new cockpit configurations.
In 1949, Jay married Barbara Ferner, whom he had met on a snowbound train to the Pacific Northwest. Together the couple raised five daughters—Marcia, Jacquie, Jayne, Susan, and Sandra. Nineteen years later, having lived for periods on both coasts, the Zeamers moved permanently to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, his family’s old summer vacation spot. There, as Jay put it, he “just lived the local life” until his retirement in 1975.
Although he enjoyed golf, tennis, and even skiing, Jay admitted that his injured left leg, pocked with holes “big enough to put your fist in” and hampered by only a 60-degree arc of flexibility, prevented him from chasing tennis balls very far and even from walking downstairs. “I have to skip, and people are always asking me what’s my hurry,” he told a reporter. Late in life Jay also lost the tops of both ears to skin cancer, which he attributed to the “wicked sunburns” he suffered in the Southwest Pacific.
EXACTLY ONE MONTH BEFORE GEN. Arnold placed the Medal of Honor around Jay’s neck at the Washington, D.C., ceremony, Second Lt. Joseph Raymond Sarnoski’s Medal of Honor
nomination was also approved. His posthumous award was presented to his wife, Marie, at Virginia’s Richmond Army Air Force base on June 7, 1944, a year nearly to the day after his heroic flight. Joe’s father was too ill to attend the ceremony, but Marie gave the medal to Joe’s mother, Josephine, who in turn bequeathed it to the Congressional Medal of Honor Society.
For their valor on that June 1943 flight over Buka and Bougainville, J. T. Britton, William Vaughan, Herbert “Pudge” Pugh, Forrest Dillman, Johnnie Able, Ruby Johnston, and George Kendrick were each awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest military commendation for heroism in armed conflict. This gave Old 666’s crew the distinction of becoming, as it still remains, the most highly decorated combat aircrew in the history of American military service.
Following their final flight in Old 666 the Eager Beavers scattered across the globe, some still flying missions.
The radioman Willy Vaughan spent two months recuperating from his wounds before being assigned to a new Flying Fortress. In October 1943, he took part in the Battle of Finschhafen, near Lae, as part of the ongoing Operation Cartwheel. When Vaughan’s bomber was caught in a hailstorm of anti-aircraft fire, the crew was forced to bail out over the Bismarck Sea. Vaughan and several crewmates washed up on the shores of Manus Island, the largest in the Admiralty chain, where they were rescued by sympathetic tribesmen. It took them two weeks to surreptitiously make their way from Manus to the Allied base at Buna, from which they were flown back to Port Moresby.
Soon thereafter Vaughan returned to the United States, having flown 73 missions over 22 months of service in the Pacific Theater. He was officially credited with shooting down nine Japanese fighter planes, with four more “probables.” Despite his harrowing war experiences he never shed his reticence and only reluctantly spoke to newspapermen clamoring to hear his story of the dogfight over Bougainville. Typical of Vaughan’s droll responses was his answer to a reporter who inquired about his Purple Heart with two clusters indicating not only the shrapnel wound he had received that day, but also the bayonet wound incurred during the hand-to-hand combat at Milne Bay: “I was always getting it in the neck,” he said.
Back in the States, Vaughan applied to and was accepted by the Army Air Corps’ bomber pilot flight school, and after the war he served in the Air Force Reserves, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel. By then he had returned to his hometown, Youngstown, and there he remained for the rest of his life. William Vaughan died in 1999 at the age of 79.
Following World War II, Old 666’s navigator Lt. Ruby Johnston also remained in the Army Air Corps and, later, the U.S. Air Force. He finished college and served during both the Korean and the Vietnam wars before leaving the service with the rank of colonel to become a high school guidance counselor and special education teacher in his home state, Florida. Along the way he married and had five children before retiring from his career in education in 1984. He died 11 years later at the age of 77.
Sergeant Johnnie Able was honorably discharged from the service after he recovered from the wounds he received over Bougainville. He returned to his hometown, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina; attended college and law school on the GI Bill; and married his high school sweetheart, with whom he had two daughters. Able became one of the most beloved attorneys in town, and he was known for offering his services pro bono to those in need of legal advice. He died when he was only in his late forties, and was deeply mourned by the community.
The waist gunner and the crew’s “Photo Joe,” Tech. Sgt. George Kendrick, seemed to fall off the map after the war. It is known that he returned to his Northern California home after his honorable discharge, but there Kendrick disappeared from any records despite efforts, including several by Jay Zeamer, to locate him. It is believed that Kendrick died in his fifties somewhere in the Berkeley area.
After his combat service the belly gunner Forrest Dillman returned to Nebraska and completed his college education. He remained in the Army Reserves and was recalled to active duty at the outbreak of the Korean conflict in 1950. He was honorably discharged three years later. Dillman worked as an insurance salesman and real estate broker, first in Nebraska and then, after moving west in 1959, in California. He died in 1975 at the age of 54, and is buried in the National Cemetery in Visalia, California.
A funny thing happened to Herbert “Pudge” Pugh one summer afternoon in 1973. It was hot that day, and after clocking out of his job at the Navy shipyard in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, he dropped by a corner bar in the nearby town of New Cumberland for a cold beer. The female bartender who served him looked awfully familiar, and Pudge told her so. Assuming this was one of the thousands of pickup lines she had heard too many times, the bartender nonetheless played along and introduced herself as Agnes Sarnoski Rembisz, from Carbondale. Pugh nearly fell off his bar stool.
Thirty years earlier, weeks after Pudge had sent his letter of condolence to John and Josephine Sarnoski, he received a letter back from Joe’s younger sister Agnes—the same Agnes to whom Joe had sent the poem “We Swoop at Dawn.” In her missive, Agnes had asked Pudge to tell her “all about my brother Joe.”
Pudge had written back to Agnes about how close he was with the bombardier, describing Joe’s heroic death over Bougainville in terms he felt would not overly upset a 25-year-old girl. “Agnes, I want you to know,” he’d written, “that even though Joe was seriously hit once and knocked away from his guns, he struggled back to his position and definitely disintegrated two Jap fighters.” In the same letter Pudge also promised Agnes that her big brother’s death would be “avenged many many times before this war is over.”
Now, three decades later, here he was face-to-face with his former correspondent. “We got misty-eyed, we choked up,” Pugh recalled to a newspaper reporter. “We could never stop talking about Joe.”
Joe Sarnoski’s younger sister invited Pugh back to her home, where over “great laughter and oven fresh cookies” the two reminisced about that June day in 1943. Pudge and Agnes remained in touch until Pugh’s death in 1997 at the age of 77. Herbert Pugh was survived by his wife, four daughters, and ten grandchildren.
Not long after his final flight in Old 666 as copilot, John “J. T.” Britton was transferred from the Southwest Pacific to the China-Burma-India Theater. There he served out the remainder of the war as, first, an Operations Officer and, later, the commander of a forward airbase in Burma overseeing transport planes ferrying troops and matériel into China.
Like Vaughan and Johnston, Britton made a career in the service, retiring from the U.S. Air Force in 1961 with the rank of colonel. After he and his first wife divorced, he returned to college at the age of 41; received degrees in forestry and veterinary studies from the University of Texas at El Paso; and purchased a farm in Midland, Texas, where he met and married his second wife, Josephine. Ever the gaming shark, when not farming and raising livestock, Britton crisscrossed the country playing in bridge tournaments and accruing master points.
In 1993, half a century after the Bougainville mission, Britton surprised Jay by arriving in Boothbay Harbor to take part in the festivities surrounding “Jay Zeamer Day.” Britton was the last of Old 666’s crew members to die, in 2011 at the age of 91.
* * *
I It was during the Bougainville invasion that a case of mistaken identity on a starless night provided one of the classic ripostes of the war. The destroyer USS Spence was mistakenly sideswiped by a sister destroyer, USS Thatcher, and was limping home under blackout conditions when the crew was rattled by a shower of shells that had been fired from the direction of the Spence’s own picket lines. Commander Bernard Austin, the skipper, raced for his TBS phone and shouted frantically to the commander of the picket line, Capt. Arleigh “31-Knot” Burke, “We’ve just had a close call. Hope you are not shooting at us.” To which Burke replied, “Sorry. But you’ll have to excuse the next four salvos already on their way.” Burke’s second bombardment narrowly missed the Spence.
AFTERWORD
IN SEPTEMBER 1995, WHEN JAY Zeamer was 77, he was among the hundreds of World War II veterans invited to Pearl Harbor to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of V-J Day. While there he visited the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, on the outskirts of Honolulu. In the Punchbowl can be found, nestled in the crater of an ancient volcano, the 33,143 graves and commemorations of American soldiers, sailors, Marines, and Airmen who gave their last full measure of devotion in the war against Japan.
By this time Jay was using a crutch, and the ceremonies at Pearl involved much standing for an elderly man with a frail leg. Still, during a break from the official events, Jay opted to forgo a rest back in his hotel room and instead walked among the cemetery’s headstones. Of the tens of thousands of men buried in the Punchbowl, he had known more than a few, and had flown with some of them. But it was the memory of Joe Sarnoski, left behind in a hastily dug grave in New Guinea, that so often occupied his mind, never more so than on this anniversary.
Family and friends had often admonished Jay for being too hard on himself, for thinking that he had been responsible for his best friend’s death. Yet even the passage of more than half a century had not changed his belief. As he once told his wife, “I got him promoted and I got him killed.”
That afternoon in Honolulu, Jay was accompanied on his slow walk through the graveyard by a small coterie of family and friends, as well as a reporter for the Air Force News. It was the reporter who led the limping Jay to Section A of the Punchbowl. There, in grave 582, was the final resting place of Second Lt. Joe Sarnoski.
Unbeknownst to Jay, Joe’s body had been disinterred from the makeshift grave in Port Moresby in 1945; briefly reburied in Ipswich, Australia; and in early 1949 flown to Hawaii, to be interred in American soil. Jay was stunned. “I didn’t know he was here,” Jay said, and he began to cry.