Opinion
OPINION: Remembering my Uncle Paul on Memorial Day
I recently inherited some files and photos from my parents, Dale and Carma Price, who passed away last year. They included some material on my father’s brother, Paul Price, who was killed in the final days of World War II. My grandmother had been severely injured in an auto-pedestrian accident earlier that year and was unable to be present for her son’s funeral, so my grandfather arranged for the proceedings to be recorded in shorthand and subsequently typed. That transcript, along with a signed register of those who attended, was carefully preserved in my father’s files.
My Uncle Paul was a tail gunner on a B-29 Superfortress, the bomber that did such heavy damage to Germany and Japan in World War II. At the time, the Allies were preparing for the invasion of Japan, where it was expected casualties would be heavy. B-29s were prone to overheating engines and mechanical failures, and in that event, it was very difficult for the tail gunner to crawl back into the fuselage and bail out. That is what appears to have happened during Paul’s training flight on August 4, 1945; problems developed, and Paul was unable to bail out. In retrospect, I can see why he told some of his friends he was not sure he would ever be returning home again.
Reading the transcript of Paul’s funeral, one gets a sense of the beating heart of the community and family, mourning the loss of young man barely out of high school with so much potential. The list of participants and attendees reads like a “Who’s Who List” of Lehi in 1945. The speakers were all Paul’s high school teachers, and friends and family provided music. Many of these I knew personally as a boy, or I grew up with their children and grandchildren. The whole town felt the loss.
My grandparents received notification of Paul’s death on August 5, 1945. On August 6, the Army Air Corps dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima – from another one of those B-29s. Japan surrendered on August 14, just four days after Paul’s funeral. Paul died a little over a day before the unforeseen events of August 6 that changed everything, and I wonder how different things might have been if those events had happened just a fewdays earlier.
My grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles did not talk muchabout Paul. I believe, even after many years, it was just too painful for them. Occasionally my grandmother would talk to me about his death; it was then the 1960s when I was a young boy. By then, Paul had been gone for over twenty years, which seemed like a very long time to me; yet I noted that when she talked about it, it was as if she was talking about something that had happened just yesterday. Suddenly it was August 1945 once more, she was a newly minted gold star mother, and time had not erased or healed anything.
Sadly, my family’s story is not unique, but in my father’s files I came face to face not with just a fallen soldier, but with a talented, athletic young man, full of life and potential, just out of high school, a leader, proud to serve his country, missing his family and friends, and worried that he would not ever see them again.
As we approach Memorial Day, I reflect on the precious gifts of home, family, opportunity, freedom and abundance we all enjoytoday – things that my Uncle Paul never got to see. I am also more personally aware than ever of what those gifts cost. To my Uncle Paul, and hundreds of thousands of young men and women like him, we owe them a lot.
Tracy Price
Lehi, Utah
