The Lost Airman
Page 26
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While the candy clerk was trying to find Rose, David, and Esther, Seymour thanked Mrs. Baden and the downstairs neighbor profusely. Now he needed to get out to Rockaway. He dashed back upstairs to lock the apartment and then ran back down and out the front door of the building. He sprinted several blocks to his uncle Max’s building and, his breaths coming in ragged gulps, half staggered to Max’s door. When his uncle opened it, the sweating teenager blurted out, “Artie is safe! You need to get me to Rockaway!” 9
Max grabbed his car keys.
When Seymour and Max pulled up to the Loews’ beach bungalow a few hours later, they waded into what Seymour called “a sea of relatives.” Everyone was crying, laughing, hugging, and kissing, the news that “Artie” was alive making the night “emotional beyond belief.” 10
On June 29, 1944, another Western Union message arrived at the door of the Meyerowitz family. The Office of the Adjutant General officially confirmed that Arthur was safe:
AM PLEASED TO INFORM YOU YOUR SON STAFF SERGEANT ARTHUR S MEYEROWITZ RETURNED TO DUTY SEVENTEENTH JUNE UNDOUBTEDLY HE WILL COMMUNICATE WITH YOU AT AN EARLY DATE CONCERNING HIS WELFARE AND WHEREABOUTS 11
Rose Meyerowitz had somehow known. She knew her son Arthur and believed that he would be just the one to beat the odds.
Staff Sergeant Arthur S. Meyerowitz had beaten odds that neither Rose, his family, nor Esther could ever fully comprehend and would never know the details of. Seymour would be the only one to learn the full extent of Arthur’s ordeal, some seventy years later. Arthur should have been dead several times over, and he understood that. As with most veterans of the Greatest Generation, he grasped that he was one of the fortunate ones. He was coming home—but the war was coming back within him.
In late July 1944, Arthur was sent to a hospital to recover from his injuries. “His back was bad,” Seymour said decades later. “He could not do a lot physically.” 12
Typical of the men who returned from World War II, Arthur “never complained or whined about anything.” 13
When he limped out of a New Jersey military hospital in late July 1944 and hailed a cab, he instructed the driver to take him to 1205 Findlay Avenue. It would be the first time he had seen his family since a brief furlough in the early fall of 1943. He had the driver circle the apartment building three times before finally stepping from the cab. He was afraid that his mother was not all right because of her worry about him. The moment he knocked on the door and was swarmed by his parents, his brother, and Esther, his fears evaporated.
Seymour caught a glimpse of just how much his older brother had suffered overseas and just how much he wanted to talk about it, but could not yet do so. He had signed a pledge to secrecy until such time as the Army declassified his debrief and written accounts. Overhearing a late-night conversation between Arthur and his father, Seymour heard Arthur say that he “wished he could get a pistol and kill both pilots.”
“Dad,” Arthur related, “they were the first two guys out of the plane . . .” 14
There were also the nightmares. Arthur slept fitfully, the faces of McNamara and Dunham, Gisèle and Pierre, Taillandier, Cleaver, and all the others always with him. Although his cablegram home had assured his family “Everything Okay Here,” the memories he brought back with him were never to be fully “okay.”
Arthur Meyerowitz had indeed come home, but part of him remained in France—and always would.
EPILOGUE
Awarded the Purple Heart for the severe back injury he suffered on his parachute jump into France, Arthur S. Meyerowitz spent nearly a year in various military hospitals. He longed to rejoin the 715th Bomber Squadron, but the Army Air Corps did not allow men to return to combat if they had been shot down and managed to escape from the enemy. Even without that policy, military doctors would have deemed Arthur’s injuries too severe for a return to combat. He was offered administrative jobs if he opted to remain in the Army Air Corps as a career, his superiors recognizing his courage, his initiative, his toughness, and his intelligence. Few airmen or pilots could have fooled the Gestapo, the police, and collaborators in Vichy France into believing that “Georges Lambert” was the deaf mute he claimed to be. Arthur was awarded the Purple Heart and promoted to tech sergeant.
Even if he had wanted to remain in the military, he knew he could not put his mother and Esther through such an ordeal again. He was honorably discharged in the fall of 1945, and that same year he married Esther Loew. They raised a family, a daughter, Carole, and a son, Mark.
Letters from Arthur’s French friends began to arrive in 1945 after the liberation of the nation and the final defeat of the Nazis. In all likelihood, Arthur learned of the death of Taillandier from Madame Rigal and Mademoiselle Thoulouse. On December 16, 1945, Madame Rigal wrote: “Well, darling, the man who has done so much for you, who was called Marcel Taillandier and was really the commandant Morhange has been killed by the German Gestapo. It has been a terrible loss for us. He was killed near Toulouse.”
Mademoiselle Thoulouse wrote on March 28, 1945: “Taillandier died, and LEO and GINOUX (Jeno), cleaned [killed] by the Gestapo . . . This is unfortunate and the death of Taillandier did great harm to our entire team, which is now almost completely disorganized.”
The news of Taillandier’s death undoubtedly had a profound impact on Arthur.
He corresponded with his French friends throughout 1945 and 1946, and the letters that he received, as well as one Madame Rigal sent to Rose Meyerowitz, brimmed with love, respect, and admiration for the airman.
On January 21, 1945, Madame Rigal wrote to Rose from Beaumont-de-Lomagne: “[Arthur] is such a nice young man. I considered him as my son. Poor dear, we were obliged to hide him and I did my best so he could have the most comfort we could offer him. It has been a great trial for him but he was so courageous and a real soldier. I admired him so much you must be so proud.”
Charlotte Michel, from Lesparre, wrote on May 5, 1945: “My Dear Arthur, I have just received your letter written on the 27th of March.
“Arthur, do you remember your departure from Bordeaux to Moissac . . . with all the police around you? It was cold but you were very hot . . . and the crossing of demarcation line . . . ? The control of the identity cards by the police captain? So you remember, Monsieur Georges Lambert? . . . we speak very often of those things . . . we hope to see you again in France one day. All your friends would be happy to see you paying a visit to them.”
Charlotte was delighted to hear of Arthur’s engagement to Esther, writing on June 3, 1945: “We have heard of your [engagement] with a real pleasure. We wish you to be very happy and all your friends from France are sending you their best wishes. With our wishes I am sending too a little gift for your [fiancée] and yourself. I should have liked to send you a case of old wines, but we are not allowed to do it now. I wonder when all those things are going to go normally again?”
In a July 17, 1945, postcard from teenage Christiane Michel, the deep bond between Arthur and all the friends who helped him escape from France was apparent: “Dear Arthur, Now I must tell you that from all the parachutors [sic] we had at Lesparre you are the only one to send us news. So, please go on in being charming and do write to us, we are waiting for a long letter, soon followed by your arrival in France.”
Sadly, Arthur never returned to France. As the demands of his own life and family took center stage and the postwar years passed, the correspondence between New York and France dwindled and eventually stopped. Perhaps the death of Taillandier weighed so heavily on Arthur that the thought of visiting was simply too painful. In January 1945, he had requested that the Army return “the small gun which is a very highly prized possession of mine.” It was the pistol that Taillandier had given him in the maquis: “If you [Captain Dorothy Smith, an administrative officer, WAC—Woman’s Army Corps] can send it to me it would be very much appreciated a
nd if not would you tell me how I could go about claiming it in the near future?
“As you no doubt remember, it holds very fond memories and I would like to have it when [the war] is all over so that I can look back upon those days when it came in handy.”
Captain Smith replied on March 13, 1945: “We can’t send a gun through the mail. We don’t know how or when it will get to you, but don’t worry about it because we fully appreciate your attachment to it.”
The Meyerowitz family does not know if Arthur’s pistol from Taillandier was ever returned.
Along with the crushing reports of Taillandier’s death, Arthur was certainly affected by the disturbing news in the spring of 1945 about Gisèle Chauvin. Arthur’s Bordeaux friend and helper Robert J. Ardichen and Charlotte Michel told Arthur that Gisèle had not yet come home to her family. Ardichen wrote, “Mrs. Chauvin of Lesparre has also been deported [sent to a concentration camp] in June 1944.”
Charlotte Michel informed Arthur that “Mrs. Chauvin (Dr. Chauvin’s wife) was arrested by the Gestapo one year ago and deported in Germany. Nobody heard from [her] since . . .”
Rose Meyerowitz passed away in September 1962, and David almost a year later, in August 1963. They knew how fortunate they were that their son Arthur had defied the longest of odds to come back to them.
Seymour Meyerowitz married, raised a family, and is now retired after a long career as a chiropractor. Of Arthur, he says, “He was my brother, my idol . . .” 1
In January 1968, Esther died, and Arthur, the dashing airman who had won her heart shortly before he was shipped to England in 1943, followed her in March 1971. Their two children, Mark and Carole, have three and two children respectively. Arthur worked hard to support his family the best he could, fighting to make a good life for them. Always, he remembered how lucky he was to even have that opportunity.
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Shortly after the liberation of Toulouse from the Nazis in the fall of 1944, the body of Marcel Taillandier was exhumed from the shallow mass grave where the Gestapo had so ignominiously buried him. His grateful nation would reinter his remains beneath a graceful monument in Toulouse, the city he had loved and fought for so fiercely and so valiantly.
Survived by his wife and two daughters, Taillandier would be posthumously made a Knight of the Legion of Honor and a Companion of the Liberation and was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Palm—France’s highest military honor—the Military Medal, the Medal of the Resistance, and the U.S. Medal of Liberty. He is revered today as one of France’s greatest World War II heroes and stands as a symbol of the Resistance.
Arthur Meyerowitz revered him not only as a benefactor, but as a friend.
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Richard Frank Wharton Cleaver returned to his unit after his escape with Arthur Meyerowitz and went on to cement his reputation as one of the RAF’s finest and most courageous pilots of World War II. Having already earned the Distinguished Service Order (DSO) for his “gallantry and devotion to duty” during the invasion of Sicily, in 1943, Cleaver was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross on October 3, 1944, for staying at the controls of his burning Halifax bomber in April 1944 near Cognac, France. His “skill, courage, and devotion to duty of the highest order” saved all but one of his crew that night. All except one made it back home to Great Britain. 2
Like Arthur, Cleaver married his sweetheart, Dorothy, in 1946. He remained in the RAF after the war and became one of his nation’s first jet test pilots. In 1953, Cleaver was killed in the crash of an experimental and highly unstable jet fighter. The accident was front-page news throughout the United Kingdom. The oldest of his three children was four years old at the time of his death.
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Gisèle Chauvin miraculously returned to Lesparre from the “Road of Death,” surviving torture and deprivation at three concentration camps in Germany: Neubrem, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen, where she was liberated by Allied troops in 1945. She came back a virtual scarecrow to Pierre and their children and never fully regained her strength. Her survival testified to her courage and her indomitable will to see her family again and to see France a free nation.
Her son Patrick, an infant at the time when Arthur ended up in the Chauvin home, remembers his mother as a heroine of the Resistance. So, too, does France.
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Except for Sergeant Thomas McNamara and Sergeant William Dunham, the other crewmen of Harmful Lil Armful survived the conflict. The pilot, Second Lieutenant Philip J. Chase, was debriefed after his liberation from a German stalag (prison camp). His account of the day that his B-24 went down presents a matter-of-fact portrait of a steady pilot doing everything he could to keep his crippled bomber aloft and everything he could to make sure his entire crew had a chance to parachute from the plane.
Harmful Lil Armful’s top-turret gunner and flight engineer knew differently. To his dying day, Arthur S. Meyerowitz never wavered in his certainty that Chase and his copilot had jumped first from the bomber and abandoned their crew. Nightmares of that horrible mission above Occupied France tormented him for the rest of his life. Arthur wished he had told everything he knew in his debrief, and he carried the regret for not doing so to his grave. Some forty years after his death, his grandson Seth Meyerowitz, whom Arthur never had the chance to meet, uncovered the full, long-hidden saga and became Arthur’s voice to tell the story.
Arthur Meyerowitz in New York before World War II.
Courtesy of Meyerowitz Family
David Meyerowitz, Arthur’s father.
Courtesy of Meyerowitz Family
Sergeant Arthur Meyerowitz, aviation cadet, 1942.
Courtesy of Meyerowitz Family
B-24 Harmful Lil’ Armful, shot down over France on December 31, 1943.
National Archives
The 448th Bomb Group’s commander, Colonel James M. Thompson. Arthur Meyerowitz served in the unit’s 715th Bomb Squad.
National Archives
A crippled B-24 that made it back to Seething Airfield, England.
National Archives
Gisèle and Dr. Pierre Chauvin trained Arthur Meyerowitz to portray deaf-mute Georges Lambert to fool the Gestapo.
Courtesy of Archives Nationales de France
Forged French I.D. depicting Arthur Meyerowitz as deaf-mute Georges Lambert.
Courtesy of Meyerowitz Family
Forged letter presenting Arthur Meyerowitz as Georges Lambert, a French-Algerian resident of Soulac-sur-Mer.
Courtesy of Meyerowitz Family
Marcel Taillandier, founder of Resistance network Morhange, planned the escape of Arthur Meyerowitz and Lieutenant R.F.W. Cleaver. 1940.
Conseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne Musée de la Resistance et de la Déportation
Identity-card photo of Marcel Taillandier, 1942.
Conseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne Musée de la Resistance et de la Déportation
Andrés Fontes, a tough, trusted Morhange operative who helped save Arthur Meyerowitz.
Conseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne Musée de la Resistance et de la Déportation
Lilli Camboville, Morhange agent and close friend of Marcel Taillandier.
Conseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne Musée de la Resistance et de la Déportation
A Nazi stop and search, July 1944. Arthur Meyerowitz faced searches such as these numerous times in occupied France.
Courtesy of Bundesarchiv, Berlin
German tanks rolling through Toulouse, a familiar sight for Arthur Meyerowitz.
Conseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne Musée de la Resistance et de la Déportation
Chateau de Brax, outside Toulouse. Morhange Resistance held secret trials and executions of Nazi collaborators here.
Co
nseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne Musée de la Resistance et de la Déportation
Near Bordeaux, a maquis, a Resistance hideout similar to the one where Arthur was hidden from the Gestapo.
Photo by Seth Meyerowitz
Interior of maquis, with inscription by a Resistance fighter on the wall.
Photo by Seth Meyerowitz
One of the Gestapo’s torture chambers in Toulouse.
Conseil départemental de la Haute-Garonne Musée de la Resistance et de la Déportation
Highly decorated RAF pilot Lieutenant R.F.W. Cleaver escaped the Nazis with Arthur Meyerowitz.
Courtesy of National Archives, UK
Halifax Bomber like the one Lieutenant R.F.W. Cleaver used to drop supplies to the French Resistance in 1944.
Courtesy of National Archives, UK
Halifax Bomber shot down over France, like that of Lieutenant R.F.W. Cleaver in April 1944.
Courtesy of National Archives, UK
A Resistance fighter facing a Nazi firing squad.
Courtesy of Archives Nationales de France
Marie-Louise Dissard, second from left, ran an escape network for downed Allied airmen.
Photo by Francoise Jean Dieuzaide, 1944. Courtesy of Archives Nationales de France