Dave Lemal was a tail-gunner on a bombing mission over Japan the day the bomb fell that changed the world. He and the rest of the crew on his B-29 got the word crackling over the radio that another crew on another B-29 had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
Lemal said he doesn’t remember many other details about his mission on Aug. 6, 1945, including what city he and his crew bombed that day with conventional weapons. To find out what the 24-year-old U.S. Army Air Forces staff sergeant thought and felt 66 years ago, you’d have to read a letter he wrote home.
A second atomic bomb had been dropped, on Nagasaki, and the Japanese had surrendered by the time Lemal wrote on Aug. 22, 1945, from the air base on the island of Tinian, where for seven months the 9th Bombardment Group had launched devastating long-range fire-bombing attacks on Japan.
“Yes, the atom bomb is really a terrible weapon, but the city with the most damage done was one that was done with ‘the old fashioned bombs,’” Lemal wrote. “Of course it took hundreds of bombers, whereas the atom bomb was by itself. We flew past Hiroshima (one of the cities, that was atomized) after it was hit, and there wasn't much left of it.”
The letter is one of a remarkable trove of 150 letters Lemal wrote home during World War II. There’s another story attached to them, just about as remarkable: Lemal, 90, thought the letters were lost. But this summer they showed up for sale on eBay, where they were purchased for $57 by Trevor McIntyre of Morganton.
After McIntyre, who describes himself as a kind of B-29 buff, started reading Lemal’s letters, he decided there was a book to be written. He searched for Lemal’s obituary on the Internet. When he couldn’t find it, with the help of the 9th Bombardment Group Association he tracked the World War II veteran down and called him at his home in Rockledge, Pa., where Lemal was born and raised.
“He couldn’t believe this kid in Georgia had his letters,” McIntyre said.
The two met at a 9th Bombardment Group reunion in August. McIntyre, 30, made copies and returned the letters to their author, who said he never knew his mother saved them. Now McIntyre is writing a book on the B-29 and the men who flew them: "For Mother and Country: A B-29ers War."
The book is based on and inspired by Lemal and his letters, McIntyre said, but it's also a wider tribute to the veterans who fought a war a generation ago and are fast dying off. Only four members of Lemal’s 11-man crew on the B-29 known as "Limber Richard" are still alive. "We're losing upwards of 2,000 World War II vets a day, and their memories are irreplaceable," McIntyre said.
Lemal’s hand-scrawled letters stretch from his training camp days in November 1943 through December 1945, three months after the war ended. They are snatched moments from a soldier’s life, little scenes and observations that go untold in war histories, and they all start the same way: “Dear Mom & Pop.”
On May 25, 1945, Lemal wrote that he’d just completed his third bombing mission over Japan -- a 3,000 mile round trip that took about 14 hours -- and he read two letters from home on the way to the target.
“It was moonlight last night and Japan really looked beautiful (except in spots, where they resented our company),” he wrote. “We flew over quite a bit of it. The mountains were all snow capped.”
He wrote the letter in a hurry, it says, because he was “sitting out in front of the hut” and it was getting dark fast. He kidded his mom about the gifts she got for Mother’s Day. Then he reminded his parents that his soldier's pay, which they had come to rely on during the war since his dad’s retirement, was theirs for the taking.
"Don’t forget if you need any money, don’t hesitate to use it," he wrote. "You deserve it all. I don’t need any money here. There’s nothing to buy.”
On Aug. 31, 1945, two days before the Japanese signed the surrender on the deck of the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo harbor, Lemal wrote that he didn’t know when he would get home -- he probably would pull cargo duty -- but he hoped he’d be back by Christmas.
He’d flown 20 combat missions, not counting one the day before over Tokyo. He wasn't sure that one would count as combat since Japan had surrendered, though it wasn't yet official. "It was not a combat mission, however, as we had no opposition,” he wrote. “The only combat we gave, was to throw a couple of empty tin cans down on Tokyo and hoped they might hit the Emperor.”
Lemal said this week in a telephone interview from his home that he was stunned to discover his letters were not lost and had ended up for sale on eBay.
He has not read them since they were written; his mom bundled them up and stored them in a box in the attic. After her death they were accidentally included in an estate sale and that’s how they got to eBay and then McIntyre.
His mom wrote back to him, but he didn’t save those letters, Lemal said. “We were always on the move and you couldn’t carry them around.”
He has stayed in touch with fellow crew members since the war, but their numbers are dwindling fast.
“I think next year will be our last reunion,” he said.
McIntyre is still researching and writing the book and hopes to have something to pitch to publishers by next year.
Lemal said he hasn't talked about the war much since he came home 66 years ago, and the once-lost letters have brought back a lot of forgotten memories, some painful.
“When I read what I wrote it reminds me of the things I left out,” he said. At some points that has brought him to tears.
“There were things I didn’t want my parents to know,” he said. “They were worried about me, and I didn’t want them to be afraid. So I just didn't tell them anything that would scare them.”
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