During the early days/years of writing Our Duty, my daughter, Kristine, told me that I really needed to include Father John McHugh, a priest she had met over the weekend. I explained that the book was about people who I knew and their contributions during WW II; it was mainly honoring family members. Anyone who knows Kristine is aware that she is pretty adamant in her convictions, and also pretty persuasive. (If for no other reason than she just wears you down.) Because of her story concerning a man I knew nothing about, a priest who had lived thirty years of his life helping the poor of Belize began inching his way into my book.
I really needed to include Father John McHugh,
By this time Father was ministering to Native Americans in Mora, New Mexico. Through phone calls at first, which entailed much yelling due to Father’s hearing impairment, (He would rather the money for hearing aids be spent helping the poor.) and later through “turtle mail,” a total stranger was also inching into my heart, and becoming better known than many family members.
John McHugh was just a twenty year-old farm boy from Oklahoma when he, like millions of others, joined the military to fight the Nazis and the “Japs.” He became part of the new Army-Air Corps because he was enthralled with the idea of flying. After extensive testing, both physical and mental, John was selected for officer training as a bombardier. In this precarious place, aptly called the “greenhouse” he had a bird’s eye view of the sky and the earth around him. This was not a great place to be on a bomber when other planes are attempting to shoot you from the skies.
Looking at the front of the B-24 in the WW II museum
When my husband Paul and I visited the WW II museum in New Orleans, LA, one of the first things I saw was the front end of a B-24. I suddenly realized what an awful position the bombardier had—even more so than the ball turret gunners. The area was cramped and the airman inside was a sitting duck, visible from all but the back side. It was definitely like sitting in a flying greenhouse.
In her award-winning book Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand detailed the critical job of the bombardier. The main character of the book Louis Zamperini told her, “For flat runs he (the bombardier) used the Norden bombsight, an extremely sophisticated analog computer that, at $8,000,cost more than twice the price of the average American home [at that time]. On a straight bombing run …[the bombardier] would visually locate the target, make calculations, and feed information on speed, altitude, wind, and other factors into the device. The bombsight would then take over flying the plane, follow a precise path to the target, calculate the drop angle, and release the bombs at the optimal moment. Once the bombs were gone, [the bombardier] would yell, ‘Bombs away!’ and the pilot would take control again.” After the bombs had been dropped, he would climb out of the cramped greenhouse and man a machine gun to fight off attacking enemy fighters.
Looking at the front of the B-24 in the WW II museum, I could finally understand Father John’s description of how he, the navigator and nose gunner were cut off from the rest of the plane, and miraculously survived when it exploded in midair killing the rest of the crew in March of 1945. It was only the hand of God that allowed those three men to parachute into the hands of the Germans and to a POW camp. But, they were alive, even though the military thought all on the bomber were killed.
When Father John told me that he was a bombardier, I had never heard of that job and definitely had no idea what he did on the plane. In fact, talking with Father John, I was surprised to learn that bomber crews were comprised of 8-12 men.
My visits with this wonderful priest were both educational and entertaining. However, upon meeting him in person, I was also struck by his humility, of both his time during the war and his life helping the poor. Father John will be the topic of more posts.
Father John certainly seems worthy of being in your blog. Really enjoyed reading about him!
Father John was a great humanitarian. When I lived with him at his mission in Belize, Central America (1988-1989, as an ex-army paratrooper medic volunteering in his San Jose Succotz medical clinic), I came to know he had bailed out of the B-24 twice during the war…once over Arizona, and again when his aircraft was shot down over Germany. During some of the worst fighting in Guatemala in 1988, Father John asked me to accompany him: the two of us went over the border without papers, and rode many miles to a remote Guatemalan village (Santa Anna) on horseback… where 15 people had “disappeared” during a night Raid made by government “Hey-Dose” forces earlier that week, never to be seen again. For the survivors, Father John was their shining hope, a man without fear and an inspiration to all of us who knew him.