Barton: A hero's final flight | savannahnow.com

Barton: A hero's final flight.

"By Tom Barton
Posted Aug 17, 2011 at 1:22 AM

Want to know what sheer terror feels like?
It feels like falling.
It feels like one long blast of cold air rushing against you. It feels like you don’t have a prayer, as the ground that’s thousands of feet below you is coming up fast.
Your only hope of salvation is a tenuous one - a jumbled up wad of nylon and rope. But it’s all you’ve got. So you give it your biggest bear hug possible.
This pile of fabric and string was once a neatly folded parachute, Not anymore.
As you crawled through the fuselage of your crippled B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber, where you served as a ball turret gunner in missions over Germany during World War II, the chute pack had worked itself open. About 20 feet of parachute had unraveled inside the doomed aircraft.
Several of your buddies had already jumped. Now it’s your turn. But you can’t repack your chute. There’s no time.
So you do the next best thing. You gather it up in front of you, much like grabbing a big armful of heavy linen from the ground. But you can’t push yourself through the tornado that’s rushing through the open door. You don’t have extra hands. So you ask one of the last guys on board to give you the boot.
Then you’re falling into the abyss. You’re wondering whether your handful of chute will sprout into angel wings when you finally let go.
“At about 10,000 feet, I decided, let’s have done with it,” Frank Barry said.
“I threw up my hands. It blossomed like a balloon. It was the prettiest thing I ever saw.”
I hadn’t heard Frank’s war story until Tuesday. That’s when I finally listened to the DVD he gave me several months ago. The disk contained interviews that Barry and another World War II vet from Savannah, George DeLoach, a former B-24 pilot, had given at the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum in Pooler as part of its oral history program.
God bless the museum for this project. Stories of bravery, service and sacrifice never grow old. But if you don’t write them down or record them, they’re gone forever. A terrible loss.
I came to know Frank through Blessed Sacrament Church, where he was a member. He always sat in a back pew, usually at the 8 a.m. Sunday Mass. He was small in stature, walked slowly with the aid of a cane and typically was by himself. In the winter, he kept his head warm with a jaunty tam-o’-shanter. A flat-top haircut didn’t do the trick.
We’d occasionally meet for early coffee at the McDonald’s on DeRenne Avenue near his house. We’d talk college football (he was a huge Georgia Tech fan, his only failing), current events (he devoured the newspaper) and family (he knew my daughter through one of his grandsons). But he seldom talked about himself. Or the war. He was that kind of guy. Humble. Unassuming. Gracious.
As it turned out, his dullest stories trumped my best every time.
I did learn from Frank that he was a Depression-era child who grew up in an orphanage in Washington, Ga., then moved to Savannah to live with a sister when he was 14. He joined the Army National Guard in 1939 when he was 17. The few extra dollars were a godsend. After Pearl Harbor, he tried to become a pilot and washed out, but was sent to gunnery school to learn how to shoot from a ball turret. He had the perfect build for that cramped and dangerous quarters.
What I didn’t learn from Frank I picked up Tuesday on the DVD. I learned he shot down a German fighter on his first mission. I learned his own plane was shot down on his third mission after the bomber dropped its payload on Berlin. I learned he landed in a pig pen on a farm somewhere in northern Germany, and angry civilians carrying shotguns, axes and pitch forks captured him.
This may be the scariest part.
I learned he and hundreds of other allied prisoners spent 86 days on a forced march from one prisoner-of-war camp to another during the dead of winter with no food. The only thing they had to eat was what the guards would let them scrounge from roadside farms. Barry said his weight plunged - from 165 pounds to a skeletal 85.
“I was never so cold, so hungry in all my life,” he told his interviewer.
He was liberated from the camps after 15 months. But when his saviors offered him a sandwich, he couldn’t eat it. The same went for cereal. “I was so hungry I was nauseated. I gave it away.”
Like many servicemen who returned after the war, Frank went to college on the G.I. bill. He earned a degree in industrial management at Georgia Tech and went on to a long, successful career at the Union Camp plant in Savannah. He got married and had kids. He retired from his job in 1986.
Last November, Frank attended the dedication ceremony for the World War II monument on River Street. It wasn’t easy for a slow-moving, 89-year-old man with a cane to negotiate the cobblestones. But he had to be there. It was a proud moment.
Francis Ignatius Barry died Saturday. He will be buried with full military honors today in the Greenwich section of Bonaventure Cemetery.
It’s a pretty place. A much better landing than a pig pen. I’m guessing his soul was again snagged by an angel.

Tom Barton is the editorial page editor of the Savannah Morning News and blogs on savannahnow.com. tom.barton@savannahnow.com."

I had heard these stories from Frank's lips, so I know them well.
Still, it's good to see them in print and know that his words, and his voice, will carry on.
A balm to my aching heart, as was the graveside military entourage and salute yesterday.
My gratitude to all.