LIEUTENANT ROBERT F. BARNA
Ed Barna
As we approach the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th year—when the armistice ending World War I took effect in 1918—I want my readers to know about a man who was born on February 28, 1918. He was my father, and he was my English teacher for my sophomore and junior years at Otter Valley Union High School. By the time those two years ended, I knew I wanted to become a writer.
When Robert Francis Barna was two years old, he climbed over a Jersey City second-story porch railing, fell, and hit his head. After that, no one expected much from him.
Certainly his father Albert Barna was bright enough. Though he came to America from Hungary at three, and only went to school through fourth grade, he studied on his own to take the examination for becoming a railroad engineer—a much-prized occupation at the time—and passed. With his earnings, he bought a small farm in northwestern Pennsylvania, and the family—with five boys and one girl—moved there.
In Girard’s one-room schoolhouse, Bob was put in the back with others considered impossible to educate. In fourth grade, he raised his hand: “Teacher, I know how to read now.” In fifth grade, he won a schoolwide spelldown.
They lost the farm in the Depression, and had to move back to New Jersey, where Al got a job as a truck driver. At Woodbridge High School, Bob did not stand out, in large part because he had a hernia that kept him from playing sports. His parents, Old World in their beliefs, did not trust doctors, and refused to let him go “under the knife.” He realized that if he was to get operated on, he would have to get a job and save the money and pay for it himself. But how could he pass a physical examination to get a job?
He did sit-ups, hundreds and hundreds of sit-ups, until he was able to close the hernia so tightly that the doctor at Calco Chemical did not find it. He saved his money, went to the best surgeon he could find, and got the problem fixed. The doctor said afterward that he had never seen anything like it: he had to sew through an inch of stomach muscle.
The big star at Woodbridge High School was a fellow Hungarian, Lillian Kapellari. She lettered in three sports, was the first girl president of the athletic association, and was so gifted in mathematics that one of her teachers lent her the money to go to college at Ursinus in Pennsylvania. She lettered in three sports there, too, and had been “pinned” by the captain of the hockey team (given his fraternity pin) as his intended.
Meanwhile, Bob’s younger brother Francis was courting Lillian’s younger sister Mae. One day, Francis needed a ride to the tiny Kapellari homestead down by the railroad tracks (horse, cow, chickens, garden, fruit trees, spring house for water; oil storage tanks are there now). The father, too, had been a railroad engineer, so after his early illness and death, the trainmen would sometimes open the chute at the bottom of a coal car and leave the family a strip of fuel for the kids to pick up along the tracks.
It so happened that Lillian was home from college, and while Francis and Mae went off to talk, Bob and Lil got to talking, too.
She handed back the hockey captain’s pin. She and Bob would be married in 1943, at Langley Field in Virginia, before his B-24 took off for air service in China; their honeymoon was in a hotel near the sea in nearby Hampton Roads, where they could see warships being readied for their next campaigns.
The war had intensified to the point where men in their 20s were being called up, so Bob had enlisted in the air force. Unable to become a pilot due to flight sickness, he expected to be sent to Germany as a gunner.
But he returned to base after a personal leave to find his entire outfit had flown to Germany, except for him and one other guy. As part of his basic training, he had taken the Alpha Speed, the IQ test of its day. “No,” they told him, “you’re going to navigator school.”
Much later, one of his sons would take the Alpha Speed. Nothing will be said here about the score, except to note that the three sons went to Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
There are many ways to die in wartime, and physical strength sometimes makes all the difference. To reach China, a B-24 had to fly to Brazil, then to Dakar in Senegal, then through Africa to India and the main staging area for flights to China, in Assam.
Having some time off in Senegal, Bob went for a swim in the ocean, and was immediately carried out to sea by an undertow. He knew enough to swim parallel to shore then swim back in, but that he that meant swimming half a mile.
On his way back, he came to a fruitselling stand. The three women there started singing something and swaying and stepping to its beat.
He came over afterward and asked, “What was that dance you were doing?” “Dance?” they said, “What dance? Us, dance?” A culture in which rhythm was so much a part of life there was nothing special to moving with it.
He was like that, always inquisitive about the people where he went, and perceptive and responsive. The airmen had a chance to go see the Taj Mahal, but most said, “Aaa, we’d rather stay here and play cards.” At the Taj, his guide realized this was not a casual tourist, and invited him to see the sacred turtles fed at a nearby fort.
“What are they fed?” “Poor women’s dead babies.” He declined the invitation.
On another occasion, he snuck away from the base at Assam to attend an Indian festival. Watching, he realized that although this culture was far more explicit about things sexual, it was a healthy celebration, not prurience.
In China, based at Kweilin (now Guilin), he spent some of his time off from duties roaming the landscape, which he said later looked just as it did in Sung Dynasty paintings. Once he came upon a woman working in a field, and she ran in fear.
As
she watched from a distance, he put beneath one of the plants his week’s pay—in
Chinese money--and went to a hillside to watch. The expression on her face when
she found the treasure—which would let her survive for months—was better than
anything he could have bought, he said.
It was
nothing for him to walk 15 miles in a day on such expeditions. Farmboy
strength: when he arrived in Assam, he and another crewman discovered that
others there like to pitch horseshoes, too. They beat a pair from the base, who
went and found a better team, and they beat that one, too.
By then they were hot. Team by team, level by level, they went through the best the massive airbase had.
His style was unique: rather than holding the horseshoe by the iron and throwing it underhanded, he would put it on his fingertips like a waiter holding a tray, then loft it to the stake with a three-quarter turn. No one, even at the New England championships, was using it.
At one point his eldest son, as an adult, took a serious interest in the game, and first tried his father’s style—but couldn’t do it at all, let alone do it well. It took phenomenal hand strength.
But it wartime, luck mattered, too, or fate. Flying “Over the Hump” of the Himalayas to China was no joke: on one trip. 21 of 22 planes iced up and crashed.
Over Hangkow, 17 searchlights and “the biggest, reddest ack-ack I ever saw” all missed. One time they found a Japanese destroyer, dropped bombs, missed, then turned around and made another pass, and got it.
The
Distinguished Flying Cross is a medal awarded to any officer or enlisted member
of the United States armed forces who distinguishes himself or herself in
support of operations by "heroism or extraordinary achievement while
participating in an aerial flight, subsequent to November 11, 1918." By the
end of his tour of duty, he had been awarded two of them, along with two Air
Medals, for particularly meritorious service.
He
spoke little of these honors, but probably one of the DFC’s came from mining
Hong Kong harbor. Two planes had been sent out to do the job, and neither had
returned.
They
reached a place along the coast that looked like the entrance to the harbor, as
it had been described to them. “No,” said the navigator, “it isn’t far enough.”
They went on, mined the harbor, and were rewarded for their achievement by
being sent back to do it again.
Had
they turned into the first “entrance,” they would have found themselves in a
cul-de-sac, with cliffs too steep to rise over on all sides and no room to turn
around. The speculation was that the other two planes crashed there.
On
another mission, he had to take five celestial fixes to get back. Not only was
there no GPS then, there were no radio signals—not even lights at the runway
until a plane arrived.
Reckoning
their position meant calculating on the basis of where the stars were located.
In years afterward, he would point to Arcturus, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and
others, as if saluting old friends.
Another
mission that demanded precise navigation had its target in Tonkin China—what we
know today as Vietnam. En route, one engine died and another began smoking, and
had to be run at half strength.
At
that point the two-and-a-half engine Liberator was living up to its unofficial
name, The Vibrator. They were at low altitude, and didn’t have the power to
climb higher—and between Vietnam and China there is a mountain range about
6,000 feet high.
So
they jettisoned everything: the bombs, the radio, the guns and ammo to ward off
Japanese fighters (one of which they outdueled on another mission), anything
that wasn’t bolted down. In a written account, Bob wrote, “The architecture of
the ancient imperial city of Hue
is very beautiful—especially at the height we were flying.”
They
rose higher and higher, realizing that was mainly because the fuel tanks were
getting lighter. They cleared the
mountains, though as he wrote, “An enemy soldier with a rifle could have
brought us down.”
Then
it was a matter of aiming for the base. In due time, they arrived, landed, and
went to the debriefing room.
While
the pilot was describing what had happened, someone came in from the airfield.
My father asked, “How much gas was left in the tanks?” and got the reply, “What
gas?”
Eventually
Shadrach did crash, but with a different crew on board.
As the war went on, the number of missions required before returning home kept increasing, Catch-22 style, to 50, then 55. Realizing these crews were under a lot of stress and were getting so close they might not take risks, air command tried to give them easier jobs.
Like hauling gasoline. Like the time they were hauling a full load of the stuff and the panel board started burning, and they got chewed out for returning to base.
Like reconnaissance. Out over the South China Sea, they flew right up on an aircraft carrier--certain death, had any planes been on the flight deck.
Much has been said about The Greatest Generation, but if this was true, it was only true of the entirety of the war effort, not of all those who took part. On one mission, clouds covered the target, so they had to return to base, which meant they had to drop their bombs before landing.
“Let’s drop them there,” said the pilot, pointing to a Chinese village at the bend of a river.
“Do you realize how many people live in those river villages?” protested my father. “Those are the Chinese! Those are the people we’re fighting WITH!”
“Aaa, they’re all the same,” agreed the pilot and bombardier. So the Greatest Generation proceeded to perpetrate a massacre perhaps greater than My Lai—but amidst all the carnage of that era, no one in authority would have cared.
The Japanese would bomb their airfield, my father said, and as soon as they were gone, a swarm of Chinese workers would repair it. If you wanted to know when the next Japanese air raid was, all you had to do was ask any of those laborers.
“Twentee meeneet.” Sure enough, 20 minutes later, over would come the Japanese bombers. My father said he never figured out how they did it.
During those raids, the Americans would take shelter in one of the natural caves common in the limestone rock of the area. One time, a Chinese infantry officer came in as well.
The men began one of their favorite games: delivering vicious and filthy insults in English while bowing and smiling as if they were offering compliments. The Chinese man kept smiling and bowing back. Barna sat to the side, reading.
When the air raid ended, the officer went to the entrance of the cave, turned around, and said in perfect British English, “Gentlemen: the next time we meet, I hope we can have a philosophical discussion of the relative merits of the philosophies of Karl Marx and Thomas Jefferson.”
Then he spun on his heel and left, to lead his men to almost certain death on the coastal front. Barna sat to the side, clutching the book he had been reading: a biography of Jefferson.
Finally, it was time to come home, and to be discharged with the nominal rank of captain. Home to Lillian, who instead of being Rosie the Riveter had been the one helping Rosie to work at maximum efficiency, as a time management specialist in the Merck pharmaceutical company’s human relations department.
Merck wanted her to stay, badly, and offered her $500 a week—phenomenal pay at the time—to do so. But she gave up the job so Bob could follow his dream of studying languages on the G. I. Bill, at Middlebury College in far-off Vermont.
He earned a master’s degree in German, learned enough French so he could have taught that, too, but couldn’t teach anything in the public schools because he hadn’t taken enough teaching courses. So for three years he became Captain Barna at the Massanutten Military Academy in Woodstock, Virginia, where she taught as well.
They were rescued by a fellow Middlebury graduate, Thomas Whalen, who had become principal at Brandon High School. She taught math and science, he taught physics and chemistry then finally English—classes in which the students would try to “get him going” telling stories about World War II—and coached the cross-country team.
He wanted to be a writer, too, and would have been a fine folklorist, having being friends with people like Fred Wyman, Doris Eddy, Charlie Mraz, Alphonse Quesnel (who gave his kids their first plane rides), Charlie Sanderson, Bobo Sheehan, Arthur Healey, and more. But it was too late.
His eldest son had him as an English teacher for two years, and by the end had learned the key lesson—always have an inner world going on—and had determined to be a writer. Bob tried to capitalize on his friendship with Rutland Herald photographer Aldo Merusi to wangle a summer internship for his son, but the idea was rejected.
It is now more than 12 years since Bob Barna died, more than 25 since his son became a Rutland Herald reporter, and 43 since he became a published poet. A motheaten woolen dress uniform remains in storage, and despite its condition will not be discarded, if only because of the patch that says “Flying Tigers.”
Ed;
I was blessed to have both your parents as teachers at Brandon High School, Mrs. Barna for Biology, Mr. Barna for an unforgettable English class and a chemistry class, at which I certainly did not excell.
After school and marriage I occasionally encountered them in the A&P in Brandon. Your father had encouraged my writing skills and once asked if I was still writing. I could only point to many letters and journals, not "writing" in a successful sense. Blogging gives many of us a chance to "publish" that wouldn't have otherwise been possible.
Thank you for this back-story of your parents. They were remarkable individuals.
Sharon Desjadon Whitehurst
http://wwwmorningsminion.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Sharon Whitehurst | November 12, 2009 at 02:54 PM
Great Story. We need more stories like these
Posted by: Jason | December 15, 2009 at 06:12 PM
That was an excellent story. Thanks
Posted by: Vapor King | January 19, 2010 at 12:30 PM