Jack Rau navigated a B-24 in World War II. Jack didn’t bring anything home. The objects of war his son Bill holds onto are documents regarding Jack’s death — a “Missing in Action” notice, a military life insurance policy for ten thousand dollars, and a letter from the Army about what to do with Jack’s body.
In January 1945, Jack’s plane was shot down over what is now Croatia. He was confirmed dead in December the same year. Bill was two years old at the time, and has no memory of his father — only pictures of his father holding him. As an adult, Bill set out to learn more about him, researching, going through archives, and speaking to men who were in the 450th Bomb Group Jack was in.
Bill wrote a history relating to his father and his family’s experience with loss. He reads the following excerpts from his writings.
BILL RAU: My mother could hardly face the death of my father. She was allowed a minimal time for grieving. Her father, especially an unemotional man as I remember, would have had little patience with her not getting on with life.
My mother eventually remarried in 1947. I think she was not deeply happy with her new husband, perhaps comparing the two men. But when her second husband died in 1960, the unresolved grief and the fantasy she had carried of what might have been came back in psychotic waves over a period of 20 or 30 years.
I remember getting a phone call when in college from my mother. She told me that my father was still alive. She had glimpsed him while shopping. I was stunned. I told her, no, he was dead, killed in the war. She said that she could understand that maybe he didn't want to come back to her. But she was sure he'd want to see me, his son. I didn't know what was going on with her, and I had no experience or background in offering support or knowing where to turn.
In subsequent years she would send flowers to Veterans Administration hospitals, where she was convinced my father was or she would leave home and drive for hours to such a facility to ask about him. She felt that others in both her and his family knew he was alive. She could not understand why they were keeping the truth from her.
She wrote letters to the Department of Defense asking for the details on my father's death, saying she didn't believe he was dead. The responses always affirmed that forensic evidence had confirmed his identity. She even wrote to presidents Truman and Ford asking them to look into Jack's status. Research has shown that in many cases where relatives do not view a body, the imagination can fill in.
In my mother's case, even though my father's remains were eventually returned to the US, and a burial service was held at his neighborhood church. It was obviously a closed casket. When the remains were returned to the United States in 1949, extensive decompensation would have occurred. Personal recognition would have been impossible.
But not seeing meant over time not believing. My mother's imagination turn to fantasy and she acted on the fantasy. For her, war continued long after Germany surrendered.
Men who die are often referred to as heroes, and their bravery is commemorated. To me, my father was not a hero, nor did he seem a particularly brave man. He and others in the crew did what they were told to do by planners and policy makers.
In talking with other men, fliers and ground crew members who had served in the 450th, the word hero was rarely mentioned nor applied to those who died. Some voiced a pride in having served to help defeat the Germans. But they too, knew that the military imposed no choice but to fly, whatever the consequences.
When we refer to my father and his crew members as heroes, we perpetuate the myth of war as honorable or glorious. Of course, to dead men it was none of those things. It was the end. For them, nothing followed.
Support for Bringing War Home comes from Utah State University, the National Endowment for the Humanities Dialogues on the Experience of War, and Utah Humanities.
