I heard stories. I met people who would look at me with sad eyes. I watched as my mom would work each day and take care of me, but she always seemed to be dreaming of other things.

We had a nice house. We would visit family. I would play with my friends and go to school, but there were so many things that seemed to be missing. I didn’t know why, but something was missing.

In school, they would teach us about the wars that Americans had fought in Europe. They talked about heroes. They taught us to be grateful to the people that went to war for all of us. One of those people was my Dad. He left before I was born to go to fight against Germany in World War II, but I never thought of him as a hero while I was growing up. He was my Dad, not a hero.

My mom would talk about him once in a while, but it seemed to make her so sad that I wouldn’t ask her to tell me much. I know he had been a worker before he left. He was good at business and he and my mom loved to walk in the parks of town and greet people who knew him. But when the war broke out, he wanted to help. He wanted to go and fight with the other soldiers.

He did. He went to England and became a pilot. He was very smart and brave! My mom missed him very much!  She stayed at home and then I was born.  She and my dad had agreed on names before he left and she sent him a note one day saying… Patricia Lee has arrived!  She told me that he had my name painted on his plane so that I could fly with him.  

The rest of his story was never talked about.  I did get to read about it in a paper that I found.  It said:

After two months of training, they began flying combat missions against the German Luftwaffe in September 1943, a time when Nazi Germany still occupied all of France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.

A typical mission was to protect B-17 Flying Fortress bombers against Luftwaffe fighter attacks as they bombed targets in the occupied countries or Germany. Almost as commonly, the 352nd would be ordered to carry two 500-pound bombs each and drop them on a German airfield, then fly across the field, firing their machine guns at enemy planes on the ground.

1 LT Meagher and four other young Thunderbolt pilots — lieutenants Harold Nussman of Salisbury, N.C., flying a plane named “Dixie Boy”; Raymond Phillips of Newton, Iowa, in a plane named “Hildegarde”; and John Walker Jr. of Los Angeles and Lothar Fieg of Oneonta, N.Y., made up what was called “Red Flight” that day.

As they flew over Mons, Belgium, they heard a radioed plea for help from a B-17 bomber that had been forced to drop out of its formation because of damage and was being attacked by a  German fighter. Red Flight winged toward the bomber.

Suddenly, from the direction of the sun, where pilots are blinded, four German FW-190 fighters came diving at the five Thunderbolts, each firing four 20 millimeter cannons and two machine-guns.

Lt. Nussman tried desperately to warn the others they were under attack even though an enemy fighter had perfect aim on him.

Phillips and Fieg managed to break away from the fight, their planes shot up. They never saw what happened to Meagher, Nussman and Walker. But when those three failed to come home, they were declared missing in action. When the Germans failed to report that they had been captured, suspicion grew that they had been killed. But no one knew for sure.