God Bless You Uncle John

I don't quite know where to begin so I'll start when I was a young boy. My grandmother affectionately known as "Nana" lived some 60 miles away. We would visit her on occasion maybe once or twice a month. It was a time to meet aunts and uncles, cousins and long lost relatives. My Aunt Marie (my mom's sister) & Uncle Fred moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Arlington, MA and bought a triple decker home. For some odd reason my Nana lived on the third floor. We would quietly go up to visit her. She was so wonderful to us. She always had something hidden away for us, candy or a toy. We would get nothing less than the royal treatment from her. My mother had two older brothers Tom & Frank, and an older sister Marie. One day we heard whispers about John Riley. When we inquired my mother politely told us that he was her younger brother and that he died in World War II. Years later when we were older we found out that he was shot down in a B-17 bomber over Italy. They said he was a tail gunner. One thing for sure Nana never spoke of John. There was too much pain in the memory of him. Flash forward to February 2007. One afternoon was I was "surfing" the internet, the thought struck me. I wonder if I could find out anything about my Uncle John. I had no clue how I was going to start but after only a few minutes I found a website within the National Archives website that displayed Army enlistments for World War II. I knew he was from Suffix County and I knew he was in the Army Air Corp, so I plug in his name John Riley. I got plenty of John Rileys but the combination of the Army Air Corp and Suffix County registered one hit. The enlistment date was 1941. I called my mother and confirmed that it was the correct year. With that I began my journey to discover just what happened to my Uncle John. I searched to see if there was a website that could give me the names of any serviceman buried in a foreign cemetery. I discovered a database at American Battle Monuments Commission. I plugged in his name and to my disappointment I got zero - no results. No John Riley, from Massachusetts buried overseas in any Italian cemetery. Then it occurred to me, what if his name was misspelled. I plugged in John Reilly and there was a John Reilly from Massachusetts buried at the Florence American Cemetery, Florence, Italy. When I clicked on his name up came the information on him, his unit and grave location. The most important information however was his service#. I ran to find the original enlistment record and to my joy and excitement the service numbers matched! This was in fact the John Riley from Suffix County. From there the information exploded I found a website of survivors and children of the 334th Bomber Squadron, 95th Bomber Group. I inquired about Uncle John and a wonderful lady sent me a CD with pictures of earlier B17's that my uncle had been a crew member of. I sent away for the Air Force Official Accident reports, and while waiting for them to arrive I discovered shocking news. John's flight and crew was mentioned in a book " The Schweinfort-Regensburg Mission" by Martin Middlebrook. I had already discovered all the names of the crew members and the pilot's name Lt. Robert Hayden, when I read on page 274 " Lieutenant Robert Hayden's plane in the 95th Bomb Group went down. There should have been plenty of time for its crew to parachute safely but the tail gunner opened his parachute too early and was caught on the tail. Three other gunners were presumably unnerved by the sight and refused to jump. All four were killed when the plane crashed." Unbelievable but there was more to the story. When the official accident reports arrived I was able to piece together what happened by testimony by the survivors. My Uncle John was not a tail gunner that was Earl Moorer. After seeing their fellow gunner dangling and being smashed to death bouncing off the tail of the aircraft, they decided to take their chances and go down with the plane, the four perished. But I discovered yet another fact, several eye witnesses gave testimony that my uncle shot down a Focke-Wulf FW- 190 German fighter during the mission. He truly was a hero having saved the plane before it eventually crashed! After many years I had discovered the truth about my Uncle John who died August 17, 1943 in Parma, Italy. On April 8, 2008 while visiting Florence, Italy my wife and I paid a visit to Uncle John Riley's grave site, along with his fellow gunners, Earl J. Moorer, Charles Hill, Jr., and Kenneth J. Mears. On that day I swore that I would keep his memory alive. What about the name mistakenly misspelled? My grandmother when informed of his death realized the spelling error in the documents presented to her, she had been too distraught to tell them to change it. She did not want his body returned and thus he remained in Italy. Today is exactly 66 years from that fateful day. Requiem in Pacem, Uncle John Riley.