The Archbishop Wore Combat Boots. Nancy A. Collins

pilots, and pilots for special bombing targets. I was given an assistant, Tom Getty, an excellent Catholic who was likable and very popular with all the men.

      I hit it off immediately with the commanding officer, Colonel Harris, a solid, practicing Baptist from Montgomery, Alabama. Colonel Harris was a member of the old breed. He was extremely worried that his soldiers would become engaged to the local ladies. When he learned I demanded solid proof from the men of the prospects for an indissoluble marriage by both parties, he appointed me the investigator for all marriage applications. Army regulations required that permission for marriage be given by the commanding officer of the unit. I insisted on genuine proof from the men that they had prudently thought out their decision, and I devised a simple test that would indicate how well the soldier knew his fiancèe. I had the soldier fill out a marriage application in triplicate, and often he would spell the name of his fiancèe differently on each copy. That was an immediate red flag. If that happened, I would present the three copies to Colonel Harris and note the disparity. That was the end of that application.

      One nineteen-year-old soldier was so convinced his rights were being infringed by these regulations that he bugged the Colonel for days about the supposed injustice. But the Colonel remained firm. Three weeks later, the soldier came back with an application to marry another girl!

      The Catholic men regularly practiced their faith, and the Baptist colonel certainly encouraged them. “You can stop your work any time to go to religious services,” he told his men. That standing order paid off in the soldiers being even more dedicated to their work.

      The lack of immediate danger for our men at the airfield could have created a lethargic attitude among the troops. I decided to give the men lectures on the Catholic faith and encouraged them to get involved in helping a local beleaguered Catholic pastor. He had only a storefront for a church, and he needed help. As a preliminary step, I took up a collection of money among the men for his parish. It was a godsend to him and to his parish, as well as for our men. One week’s collection by our soldiers was equal to a year’s collection in his small parish.

      Part of my duty was addressing the spiritual needs of the men when there was a plane wreck, and there were plenty of those. The airmen and aircrews had a Catholic chaplain at the airbase, but wrecks happened all over the area because of the frequently impenetrable fog conditions.

      On my first night on duty, I was baptized into the life of an air chaplain. I received word that a bomber had crashed in pea soup fog while making an airfield approach. It was so foggy we couldn’t even find the crash site. My jeep driver, Tommy Getty, and I started out on an invisible road. I took a flashlight and held the light just a few inches from the ground to keep the wheels on the road. We followed the road until we thought we were directly across from the crash site. I left Tom in the jeep — no jeep, not even in the fog, was ever left unattended — and trudged into the darkness.

      I had plenty of time to pray for guidance. I coursed up and down the field and then slipped on a piece of metal. I smelled some acrid smoke and went in the direction of the smoke. Through the fog, not far away, I could see a macabre sight of crushed metal, with smoke swirling up to the sky. A terrific fire had engulfed the remains of the engines and part of the fuselage. I circled the remains, looking for any signs of the crew. I prayed earnestly, “God, Our Father, into your hands I commend all who were in this plane. Be merciful to them. They were sacrificing their lives for the cause of freedom you have given us.”

      I was hoping that somehow some of the bodies had been thrown from the plane by the force of the crash. I rummaged through the metal, looking for bodies or uniforms. I finally found a lone eagle insignia, completely torn away from the pilot’s uniform by the force of the crash. I picked it up as though it were a relic — it was all that remained of the brave crew. I said a prayer and gave conditional absolution, hoping that perhaps in the fog there was a body that I had not discovered — knowing that only the good Lord knew for certain.

      As I returned to the jeep, holding only the eagle insignia, I just shook my head at Tom, confirming his sad premonition that we would find only a grave with nothing in it. We turned over the insignia to the officer responsible for it and glumly walked over to the mess hall as the dawn brought another day of war.

      There was no “getting used to” this grim price of war. Even when occasionally a whole flight would return, with some of the pilots waggling their planes’ wings up and down as a sign of triumph as they landed, there was always the thought of what the next flight might bring — more victims, especially the civilians, left at the site of the bombing.

      A less troublesome duty I took on was serving as the officer for the base dances. The colonel said he just hated doing it, and he asked me to take over as his delegate. I soon found out why he couldn’t stand it. The dances were open to all the noncommissioned officers and privates in the area, including the soldiers from the nearby truck company. The girls were all English from the surrounding area. The colonel always dispatched a personnel carrier for my use. If any girl desired to leave the dance hall and return home because things got too rowdy, I could send her home in the personnel carrier, manned by a dependable sergeant. It gave the girls a sense of security to use it if needed.

      Most of my time chaperoning dances was spent answering questions from the English girls. A favorite question was, “I’ve known this soldier for several months now, and he wants me to marry him. He says he comes from a nice town in Texas. Is it really like one of our English villages?” I would reply, “I don’t know that town. My advice is for you to wait to get married after the war and for you to travel to take a look at the town and his family before you get married. Make him pay for the ticket, and be sure it’s a two-way ticket, just in case. If he really loves you, he’ll agree to do that.”

      I knew of one case in which a GI in England changed the final words of his marriage promise from “until death do us part” to “for the length of the duration”!

      D-Day Invasion

      D-Day — June 6, 1944 — changed the whole atmosphere in England. The Brits were liberated from bombing attacks and no longer had to hide under tables when the warning sirens for bombs went off. The Allied forces were on the attack, and the English people were eager for any bit of news from the Western Front. A new spirit swept the camp. The end of the war could not be far off.

      I heard the news about D-Day over the radio in England, and I was praying hard because I knew the stakes were as high as they could be. My brother Frank, who was in the invasion, said everyone prayed crossing the Channel. A Ukrainian American prayed in his mother tongue. Italian Americans did the same.

      Much later when I came to New Orleans, I met engineer Frank Walk, who was a green soldier of only twenty-two when he landed on the beach in the Normandy invasion. His commanding officer was supposed to be in charge of beach traffic, but he psychologically broke down. Undaunted, Frank took over and coordinated the traffic to save the day. It was acts of heroism such as his that won the war. Frank, by the way, much later designed the papal altar we used for the great outdoor Mass by Pope John Paul II in 1987 at the University of New Orleans. He is one of the true unsung heroes.

      In July 1944 we received word we were being transferred to an airfield in France to service the planes attacking Germany. The airfield was near Melun, a pleasant town about thirty miles southeast of Paris. Incredibly, our movements were held up for a few days because we had run out of typing paper, and everything had to be recorded in quintuplicate. The most serious difficulty was the theft of a package that contained the warm-weather flying gear for the pilots.

      Moving to France brought us closer to the war and increased our rapport with both the pilots and the French citizens. Despite the catastrophic impact of the war, the French civilians retained their Gallic sparkle. The new post also brought more duties for me.

      Our camp was near a large convent with an attached boarding school for girls in elementary grades. Because the French population was predominantly Catholic, I naturally had more contact with the local residents, the local pastor, and the civil authorities. The sisters were the first to make a request — that I celebrate Mass occasionally for them and their students. After the Mass, celebrated in a beautiful chapel (a rare treat), the Sister Superior had a list of questions. In