Letter from Gene Lorig
World War II – October 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear Martha & Ed,
Here is $40 for two more years. Next time I will be eighty. Does that mean a geezer rate?
Thought you might be interested in the enclosed. Regardless, please return them. They are family history. You don’t often see yellow Western Union telegrams anymore, and, in the Bushes’ Oil Wars, at least MIAs are rarities.
Mike was l9, drafted right out of Telluride High School, when this happened. He was a gunner and radio operator on a B-17. The first telegram relates to the clipping. I don’t know exactly when it happened. It would have been about the first of 1945. The second, the MIA one, probably came in early March, and the last one sometime around May 6, 1945, his 20th birthday and just before the end of the European war.
As I remember it, he was on his 24th mission when they went down. The plane was not shot down, but flipped and broke in two when the green pilot got in the slipstream of another plane. Mike put on his chute on the way down, and he and two other crewman made it out alive. He was beaten by the citizenry when he landed, and put in a prison camp until liberated. He didn’t tell me much about it – that was in the days when we still spoke – but the worst thing was hunger. There was no point in trying to escape — the Germans weren’t eating either.
It was hell on our folks. I left college to be home a few days before being inducted into the Army on April 25
On April 16 we had a big snowstorm and on April 17 I went skiing for a last time, and ended up in the hospital with a broken leg. When Doc Parker called to tell the folks, Mom’s first word was “Good!”
That wasn’t my feeling. At that time, while the war was going, I wanted to go. But in January 1946, when I had recovered, the war was over but the draft wasn’t, and I went. Such is life.
Mike came home, stayed in the Air Force until retirement, married and had a daughter. No fault of our parents, but we grew up in rough places in rough times. His war experiences didn’t help, and the whiskey and cigarettes got Mike when he was 63. I lucked out.
Regards,
Gene Lorig
Paonia
