No one saw the planes. They were too busy looking at the carnage below, where the payload of their B-24 had reduced segments of a German tank factory to ruins. Then …
Messerschmitts, 10 of them. They spat bullets at the larger, slower bomber. Gunfire boomed in the skies over Linz, Austria.
Eight planes peeled off, leaving two swarming the American aircraft. Bullets riddled the olive-drab bomber, bound for its home base in Italy. Two bullets hit 2nd Lt. Paul Koshewa in the lower left leg, shattering his fibula. Koshewa, sitting a cramped navigator's bubble in the nose of the plane, reached for a syretteof morphine. A quick stab and the pain faded.
He dragged himself to the rear to check on his crew mates. One man stood firing .50-caliber rounds at the enemy plane. Koshewa heard a boom, and the Messerschmitt plummeted to earth. The second plane plane fled.
Koshewa turned to his buddies, patching them as best he could, then returned to his tiny post to guide the battered plane home.
For the Atlanta resident, that July 1944 run, for which he was awarded a Purple Heart and the Distinguished Flying Cross, would be his last aerial mission. When his wounds healed he returned to the airfield as a gunnery officer, overseeing the bombers’ armament. In 1945, Koshewa came home from World War II.
But war wasn’t finished with him. Koshewa, 90, is a veteran of World War II, Korea and Vietnam. He is, by any measure, the sort of guy for whom Veterans Day was created. The national holiday, which honors all U.S. vets, is Sunday.
He’s a relatively rare breed. According to federal statistics, fewer than 2,000 Georgia veterans, out of more than 360,000, fought in all three conflicts.
On a recent morning, Koshewa, a retired teacher and coach at The Westminster Schools, dug through the memorabilia of conflict – dog tags, old photos, wartime correspondence.
Did he ever worry that he wouldn’t make it home? Koshewa, his blue eyes alight in a lined faced, laughed. “It went through my mind a few times.”
He enlisted in 1943 while attending Centre College in Danville, Ky., with the understanding he’d graduate before joining the next year. Three months later, he got the call: join now or else. Koshewa signed on with the Army Air Corps, the precursor to the U.S. Air Force.
“I decided I didn’t want to be in a foxhole somewhere.”
He chose to be a navigator. The Army schooled him in how to navigate by sight, by dead reckoning, and how to use a sextent to find a plane's place in the heavens. Training finished, he flew to Lincoln, Neb., where he and nine others picked up a new bomber, an olive-drab B-24 Liberator. They flew the machine to an airfield near Foggia, Italy, home of the 455th Bomb Group. They were hardly out of the plane before mechanics swarmed it.
“We said, ‘Hey! That’s our plane!’” Koshewa recalled. “They said, ‘Not anymore it’s not. We lost nine today.’” Koshewa and his crewmates never were assigned their own plane.
Koshewa hardly had the chance to familiarize himself with any of the 455th’s bombers. He was injured on just his sixth bombing run and was back home in the fall of 1945. Koshewa, by then a lieutenant, joined the reserves — a choice that would help shape his life in coming decades.
He returned to Centre College, got a degree in mathematics and wound up in Charleston as an assistant football coach at The Citadel. He asked a player – like him, a veteran – if he knew any local girls. He did, and introduced the young coach to Nancy Deas of nearby Mount Pleasant. They were wed in August 1950.
The next month, he got a telegram: Lt. Koshewa’s services were needed again. By 1952, he was in Korea, navigating C-47 cargo planes. He was a solider in the front line in a propaganda war, guiding planes that littered enemy encampments with leaflets urging North Korean troops to surrender. On other occasions, he made runs at night to drop saboteurs behind enemy lines.
“We only flew on moonlit nights,” said Koshewa. “That was the only way we could see the mountains.”
For that, the Army awarded Koshewa his second medal for distinguished flying. His tenure in Korea was short – 88 days — and Koshewa was soon back home.
In 1955, he moved to Atlanta to teach and coach at Westminster. He also joined the reserve unit at Dobbins Air Reserve Base. For 13 years, he kept his navigational skills sharp with weekend drills and spent weekdays at Westminster High.
One January morning in 1968, the school’s secretary knocked on his classroom door. “You got a call from the military,” she said.
“The next day,” he said., “I was on a plane headed for Vietnam.”
He stayed overseas for 18 months, guiding C-124s from Manila to Danang, Phuket, Saigon and other spots where U.S. forces needed supplies in an escalating jungle war. Once, landing during a mortar attack in Danang, crew members unloaded their plane in record time – 20 minutes – and were soon winging back toward Manila.
Koshewa came home in 1969 and retired from military duty as a colonel in 1976. He’d spent 34 years in active and reserve forces.
Koshewa focused on coaching, establishing cross-country boys’ and girls’ teams at Westminster. The girls’ squad dominated cross-country meets in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s. In 1988, the National High School Athletic Coaches Association named him coach of the year.
Two years later, he retired from Westminster, though he and the schools never truly parted ways. In October, the high school hosted his 90th birthday party.
Nancy, his first wife, died in 1996, and Koshawa remarried seven years later. He’s the father of three and step-dad to two more.
Koshewa is an avid cyclist. After relentless hounding from his granddaughters, he even agreed to wear a helmet on pedaling excursions in his Buckhead neighborhood.
He’s a happy man who figures he got some breaks along the way.
“I just considered that I was fortunate. You know, it’s like that song — ” Koshewa tilted his head and sang with what-the-hell gusto — “Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be…”
Yes, he was off-key. No, he’d never be mistaken for Sinatra.
So what? Sinatra would never be mistaken for him, either.
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