Free Tom Brokaw by The Greatest Generation

Smithtown until the Depression hit. At home the electricity was often shut off. So was the telephone. But what James remembers is that no one gave up. His father took odd jobs and always gave a portion of what he earned to creditors until he paid most of them off. Mrs. Conklin took in sewing. They avoided bankruptcy. It wasn’t easy, but at that time in small towns bankruptcy was a disgrace to be avoided at all costs.
    Besides, James and the others in the family didn’t feel deprived. Everyone they knew was going through similar experiences. The family stayed together and made the best of it. The boys spent their days fishing and clamming, getting what jobs they could.
    James was fascinated by the relatively new field of aviation. The Conklins lived not too far from where Charles Lindbergh had lifted off for Paris in
The Spirit of St. Louis.
The skies over Long Island were beginning to fill with the new airplanes coming off the production lines at the nearby Grumman plant.
    So when war broke out and James was drafted in 1943, at age nineteen, he immediately volunteered for the U.S. Army Air Corps and qualified for bombardier-navigator training. He promised his hometown sweetheart, Dorothy Owen, that when he returned they’d be married. She had no doubt he’d be back, recalling more than a half century later, “He was a cheerful Irishman with blazing red hair. I knew he’d be okay.”
    Dowling was assigned to the 445th Air Wing of the 8th Air Force and shipped to England, where in 1944 he began bombing runs over Germany, striking at the heart of the German military-industrial complex. By his eighth mission he was lead bombardier-navigator, and on his eleventh mission he was in a world of trouble—a long, long way from the innocence of those summer days back on Long Island.
    His squadron was involved in a massive bombing attack on an industrial center near the German town of Kassel in September 1944. There were thirty-seven B-24s on the raid when they came under attack from above and below: antiaircraft fire and Luftwaffe fighter planes. Thirty of the B-24s were lost, including Dowling’s. He managed to bail out before it crashed, but as soon as he hit the ground he was captured by German troops and loaded onto one of many boxcars for a three-hundred-mile ride. Their journey, like Dr. Van Gorder’s, was often interrupted by strafing attacks from American planes unaware that those German trains were loaded with Americans.
    Back in New York, Dowling’s family and his sweetheart, Dorothy, were notified he was missing in action.
    Dowling spent the next eight months in a German POW camp, Stalag Luft One, near Barth, Germany. Shortly before Christmas 1944, English-speaking German broadcasters read over shortwave radio holiday greetings from American prisoners of war. It was a compassionate act on the part of the Third Reich, wholly at odds with what it was doing on the battlefield and in places such as Dachau and Buchenwald.
    Two housewives who heard Dowling’s name and message to Dorothy didn’t get all the details, so they each sent a postcard on December 22 to Dorothy at her home in Ballston Lake, New York. One postcard was addressed, simply, “Dorothy?” Dorothy’s sister had heard the broadcast as well. It was the first message from Dowling since his capture. “Dearest Dorothy, I am all right, sweetheart. I didn’t get a scratch or anything. Please tell Mom and Dad. Don’t worry about me. We’ll get married as soon as I get home again. I love you and miss you terribly, sweetheart, and wish that I could be with you soon. I have lots to tell you when I get back.”
    A military telegram with the same message arrived five days later, after Christmas. The military message added: “Pending further confirmation, this report does not establish his status as a prisoner of war.” A cautionary note to go with the first word that James was still