Jack Merrill’s vision is virtually gone, but he still sees things from a long time ago.
Horrible things. Painful things. Historic things.
He was a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II after his plane, a B-24, was shot down in 1945. He’s 94, uses a walker and recognizes shades of color more than actual figures, yet he’ll tell you he was a prisoner for 93 days without skipping a beat.
He was honored Saturday, when a service at the New Hampshire State Veterans Cemetery paid tribute to former prisoners of war and those who simply disappeared.
It’s an annual event, held in September. There are stories each year in that cemetery, sometimes missing bits and pieces because of the passage of time, but always compelling nonetheless.
They usually involve fear, uncertainty, loss and newspaper clippings, photos and letters in a scrapbook.
Sometimes, like in this case, the story involves broken bones and bad food. I pulled up a chair and got to know Merrill and his wife, Genevieve, who’s four days older than her husband and goes by the name of Gene. They got married in 1946, just one year after Jack came home from Europe, finally a free man.
We sat in the home they’ve lived in for 62 years, out in a section beyond the kitchen with lots of windows and lots of light.
Jack used a walker to move around, Gene a cane. They were hard of hearing, but speaking loudly did the trick. They were gracious and affable, and they seemed to enjoy moving back in time, to the start of their love and the horror of war.
They went to high school together in Worcester, Mass., and began dating, casually at first. Gene loved to dance. Jack, the president of his high school fraternity, did not. He’d bring Gene to frat parties.
“He did the hat and coat checking because he did not like to dance,” Gene recalled. “But every once in a while he’d come out to dance with me.”
They held hands, went on walks and cracked open coconuts on fire hydrants. Jack enlisted in the Air Force late in 1942, six months after graduating from high school.
“I wanted to learn how to fly,” Jack told me. “There were exams to see if you could make it. I knew I could, because I knew what kind of person I was.”
He had busted his butt at 10 years old, riding his bike in a one-mile area to deliver 100 papers. He had done shipping and been an office boy by 13, building a foundation of toughness and independence that he knew would serve him well later, for any job.
And it did, in this case the toughest job imaginable. Jack was trained in places like New York State and Tennessee and Missouri and Arkansas. He finished training in England and flew his first mission over Germany on Nov. 1, 1943. He was 20.
He described his routine before take off: up at 4 a.m., get dressed, eat breakfast, urinate, inspect your B-24, get in line on the runway, take off, bomb the German cities you’ve been told to bomb.
Then do it again, on another day.
Those details came rushing back, but Jack had trouble with the pilots he’d met. “Names don’t come after 70 years,” he said. “Some names pop up, some don’t.”
Two bombers’ names did. On his 18th and final mission, after the B-24 called “Miss America” had returned to base because of technical problems, the crew boarded “Delectable Doris” and went back out to join the planes that had already left.
Jack was part of the 389th bomb group, 566th squadron. Those numbers came easily.
He was flying over the German city of Magdeburg when anti-aircraft artillery slammed into the front of his plane, killing some in the nine-man crew immediately.
Jack woke up after a lack of oxygen had rendered him unconscious. He parachuted through smoke and fire and falling debris.
With his left arm broken, cut and useless, Jack said he landed hard and then got pushed across the farming landscape by a strong wind, inflicting more damage to his already broken body and terrified mind.
“Hey God,” Jack remembered thinking, “You got me this far, but if you don’t stop the wind I ain’t gonna make it.”
The wind stopped, his parachute came to rest and Jack was surrounded by townspeople before a Nazi soldier “dressed in black” socked him in the chin and looked at his dog tags.
Jack was taken by horse-driven cart to the nearest town. He moved to Frankfurt and finally to Stalag IX-C, where he was held for the remainder of the war. He said he had 17 pieces of flak embedded under his left arm and still has a piece in his chin to this day. He had a broken arm and leg. The food – POWs were fed one meal a day – was awful. Jack said he lost about 70 pounds.
“We called the food tree trunk soup,” Jack said. “It looked like it came from a raked garden and they put some chips in and then boiled it.”
Through it all, as often is the case, a woman in the States wondered, worried and wrote letters. Gene said her letters from Jack were stored somewhere in the house, but it would have taken too long to find them.
Instead, she brought out a scrapbook with little black-and-white photos glued to black pages. One showed Jack in his uniform, prompting his wife to say, “That’s a hot pilot.”
One page had two small newspaper clippings announcing Jack’s capture. One headline read, “Pilot Missing,” the other, “Held by Nazis.”
“I was very, very worried,” Gene said. “My brother was missing in action at the same time. He got home safely.”
So did Jack, who was released after the Germans surrendered in May of 1945. He flew to Paris and then spent time at Cushing General Hospital in Framingham, Mass., where Gene visited often. Jack pointed to his shin, above his tan Khaki pants.
“I needed bone grafts from ankle to knee,” Jack told me. “I have three big stainless steel screws holding it together.”
But he made it. He and Gene were married on July 6, 1946. Jack graduated from the University of New Hampshire and worked for a large corporation for 30 years. Gene finished three years of college before getting married and raising their two daughters. There are four grandkids and four great-grandchildren.
Looking back, Gene said her husband got through because “he has a positive attitude about things. He’s not a negative person.”
Jack showed pride in his inner self, telling me, “I think I earned it,” when asked if he felt lucky to have survived.
He also said he’s pushed some of the hardships from his mind. Not all of them, of course.
“I lived through that day and night,” Jack said. “Some of the things I’ll never forget.”