Distant rumblings

There's a full-sized fighter jet, painted bright orange, in the square in front of police headquarters. I learned from one of the friendly and efficient people at the coffee shop in my building that the factory of Aer Macchi was in our very same block. Aer Macchi has a long history of making world class planes and builds them to this day in Varese, though no longer on this block.

On a hunch, I checked on line and learned that the B24s and B17s of the 450th and 463rd Bomb Groups (www.463rd.com, www.450thbg.com), based in southern Italy, bombed this plant on April 25th and 30th, 1944, the latter with "Good" results. Remember the single bombing mission success criterion fromCatch 22: a tight bomb pattern.

On both missions one bomber was lost. The names of the crew from the B24 lost on April 25 sound like the contrived-sounding diverse squad rosters from war movies from Wake Island to Saving Private Ryan: pilot Barry, co-pilot Proctor, navigator Dier, bombadier Miller, gunners Camera, Green, Gorel, Ramus, Kenyon, Leonowicz (let's see, WASPs, Italian, Jew, German, Polish. . .). And it was probably considered a "milk run" compared to missions to the Ploesti oil refineries in Romania, which the same groups attacked earlier that month. I strongly recommend A Missing Plane, by Susan Sheehan, the heartbreaking story of group of kids on another B24 on the other side of the world.

Of course the older people here remember. "Right here. On this very block. Many people killed." Airplane factory workers. Anti-aircraft gunners. Grandmas. 16 month old babies. . . And the kids in the B24.

I visited Italy for the first time forty years ago, in April, just twenty-one years after the bombing of Varese. I was stationed here in the Air Forece just four years later, flying a teletype machine, being and acting nineteen. It's strange to think that my block, with its coffee shops and pizza parlors and apartment buildings and beauty parlors, was, for a few minutes in April, 1944, the most dangerous place on earth.