The navy pilot had been
flying a mission from the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise against the Japanese somewhere in the Pacific thirteen
days earlier in an engagement that became known as the Battle of Midway, a
smashing and needed triumph for American forces. While the grief felt by the
parents of the Franklin College graduate was still fresh, they received a
second dispatch informing them that the first telegram has been mistaken; their
son was not dead, but instead had been listed as missing in action.
The scrambled communications
from Washington, D.C., had the pilot’s frantic parents searching for answers
from anyone they could find who knew their son. Following up on a letter from Lieutenant
L. A. Smith, the commanding officer of Bombing Squadron 6 (the group in which
Norman flew), which had confirmed that Norman had been forced down at sea, Fred
Vandivier wrote Smith on June 29 noting that “this uncertainty and anxiety of
waiting is very distressing.”
Fred wrote that his wife, who
suffered with a stomach ulcer, “has so reacted to this news that she is
seriously ill.” Norman had not been home for a visit since Christmas 1940, so
his father sought some personal information from his squadron mates in order to
ease the pain felt by him and his wife. “Did he fit in?” Fred asked about his
son. “Was he happy? Did he have ability? Did he have confidence in himself?
Does anyone know of his last flight? Did he fly alone? If he doesn’t show up within
the next few days, what do you think was his most probable fate?”
The anxious Hoosier father
had to wait some time for answers to his questions. What has emerged over the
many years since the end of the war is a picture of a young man who had a talent
for his chosen profession, especially the difficult task of flying the navy’s
Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bomber against the enemy’s ships and shore
installations. What he had little use for, however, was the navy’s
spit-and-polish traditions. He wrote his sister, Rosemary, a Rushville teacher,
during his training that he had become tired of what he called “this ‘Yes,
Sir,’ business.”
In the sheaf of letters he wrote
to his family, now part of the Indiana Historical Society’s William Henry Smith
Library’s collection, another aspect of his character shines through—a sincere
desire to spare his parents from the real danger he faced, even while
undergoing training at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida. He
went as far as hiding from them the death of a classmate, who went into a spin
while in the air and never recovered, slamming into the ground. Much later,
while serving in combat, he broke down and admitted to his mother and father,
after the death in a crash of a friend from Johnson County, that he, too,
preferred to be killed instantly in such a manner. “When the time comes, I
really think that is the best way there is to go,” he wrote on May 27, 1942, just
a week before his own disappearance. “Of course, we all hate to think about it,
and we all want to put it off as long as possible, but when the time comes, I’m
sure that is the way I’d choose.”
Born on March 10, 1916, in
Edwards, Mississippi, Norman Francis Vandivier spent little time in that state,
as his father left his position as superintendent of the Southern Christian Institute,
a school for African American students, to move to Franklin in Johnson County,
Indiana, running a farm located about six miles southwest of the city.
Graduating from high school in 1934, Vandivier attended Franklin College, where
he joined the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity and starred as an end on the
football squad and first baseman, pitcher, and captain for the baseball team.
During his time at the college, Vandivier also displayed an interest in the
military, serving with the Indiana National Guard as a member of Battery A,
139th Field Artillery. Mary Vandivier said her son had a longtime interest in
the military, as well as airplanes—an interest he followed after graduating
from Franklin by enlisting with the U.S. Navy in the summer of 1939.
The five-foot, ten-inch, 174-pound
Vandivier reported for elimination flight training as a seaman, second class,
at the U.S. Naval Air Reserve Base at Grosse Ile, Michigan, on July 15, 1939. He
received from the navy its standard allotment to aviation recruits of four
pairs of underwear, three shirts, three pairs of pants, three pairs of socks,
one new pair of shoes, a flight jacket, a helmet, and goggles. After just a few
hours of instruction, Vandivier expressed his confidence that he had the
necessary aptitude and skills for flying. “I believe I could take one (plane)
up and land it by myself,” he boasted in a letter to his parents, “although I
haven’t ever done it yet. I have had all the controls on a flight or two but
the instructor would join in once in awhile when he thought he was needed. I
don’t think I’m going to have any trouble and I sure do like flying.”
In addition to getting used
to being in the air, Vandivier and his other classmates endured learning Morse
code and the tedious task of cleaning all the airplanes after flights, using
gasoline “to take off the oil and bug spots.” Every third night, he had to go
on watch from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., staying in the hanger to answer the telephone
that, thankfully, seldom rang. On August 4 he successfully soloed and received
the ritual dunking in a nearby lake to mark the occasion. “You now have an
aviator in the family. Boy! Do I feel good,” Vandivier wrote.
After surviving his initial
training regimen, Vandivier received orders to report to the Naval Air Station
at Pensacola, Florida, for further training as an aviation cadet with the U.S.
Naval Reserve. His orders came shortly after Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland
on September 1, 1939, which had sparked declarations of war from the allied
powers, Great Britain and France, starting World War II. As American opinion
vacillated from aiding Great Britain to remaining neutral in the conflict,
Vandivier arrived at the Florida base in late October 1939 to be greeted with
an unusual welcome. When Vandivier and other cadets walked up to the barracks
that served as their home for the next several months, suitcases in their hands,
someone opened a window on the third floor, beat on the screens with his fists,
and screamed: “Let me out of here! I want out of here! I’m starved!” Other faces
appeared at various windows to yell at the newcomers “sucker,” “so you want to be
a birdy,” and other choice expressions.
In addition to the harassment
from his more experienced classmates, Vandivier had to suffer through a long
day of lectures on seamanship, naval leadership, fundamentals of the naval
service, and naval command and procedure. His day started at 5 a.m. and ended
at 9 p.m. “That’s about as long as it is on the farm,” he noted. “There is a
lot of pressure on you all the time, too.”
The pace never seemed to let
up over the next few months, as Vandivier practiced his marksmanship with
machine guns, learned how to fly a variety of maneuvers (snap rolls, loops,
wing-overs, cartwheels, and figure eights) in a Stearman built NS1 airplane,
developed a knack for formation flying, took to the skies in actual combat
aircraft used by the navy, and had his normal flying senses challenged by
learning to fly only by instruments in a blacked-out cockpit. “Their speedy program
has made it really a case of survival of the fittest,” Vandivier wrote to his
parents on November 19, 1939, “and fellows keep busting out [failing] every few
days. I still have plenty of confidence that I’ll get along all right, but I
see how a few members of the class could break out and not be missed, at least
by the standards that I judge by.”
As Vandivier progressed
further and further into his training, his schedule tightened. In May 1940 he
outlined a typical day’s schedule as part of the advanced training in Squadron
5. Roused out of sleep at five in the morning, Vandivier had to eat, bathe, and
shave before reporting to work at his squadron at 6:30 a.m. He and his
classmates pushed their airplanes out of their hangers to warm up their engines.
For about two hours he flew his low-wing aircraft by instruments, before
returning to the station for an hour solo flying in a North American Texan T-6
advanced trainer (an SNJ in navy parlance), which Vandivier called “the best
kind of airplane they have down here,” with retractable landing gear, flaps,
and a closed cockpit. At 12:15 p.m. he spent an hour of flight simulation on
the ground in a Link Flight Trainer before another hour of solo flying in the
SNJ followed by an additional hour in the Link Trainer. During this time, he
was also supposed to sandwich in a radio operations exam, with eight minutes of
sending and eight minutes of receiving without more than five mistakes.
Although his day’s work ended at 4:30 p.m., Vandivier said he much preferred an
“easy day down on the farm digging ditches or pitching wheat. It wouldn’t be
nearly the strain.”
In June 1940 Vandivier
received a commission as an ensign and the navy assigned him to become a member
of Bombing Squadron 6 on the USS Enterprise,
a 19,800-ton Yorktown-class aircraft
carrier originally commissioned by the navy in May 1938 and a ship that provided
stellar service in Pacific battles throughout World War II. To reach his new assignment,
Vandivier had to travel to San Diego, California, and from there ship out on the
battleship USS Utah for a two-week
cruise to the Hawaiian Islands, where the Enterprise,
known lovingly by its crew as the “Big E,”
was then stationed. “I get a big kick out of standing on deck and just
looking at the water, with the snow-white foam about the boat and the water
that looks exactly like ink, it is so dark blue” said Vandivier, who also told
his parents he had not suffered yet from any sea sickness on the voyage.
By August Vandivier had joined the Enterprise’s more than two thousand-member
crew and had begun one of the most difficult aspects of his training as a naval
aviator—learning the intricacies of landing and taking off of a ship underway
at sea. At first, he practiced with a landing signal officer (the crewman who guided
pilots to their landings using reflective paddles) at a small airfield. The first
time he witnessed a landing on his new ship, Vandivier expressed amazement at
how much a ten-thousand-pound aircraft could bounce (six feet in the air)
before finally coming to a halt, snagged by the ship’s arrester cables. “You
bring the plane in on full power at a very low speed, about two miles per hour
above stalling speed,” he explained the proper procedure in a letter to his
parents. “Then, when the signal officer gives you the cut, you cut the gun and
practically fall through the deck. There are nine wires stretched across the
deck at 10 [foot] intervals, each about a foot above the deck, and fastened to
a hydraulic cylinder, so that they will give when your hook catches. There is a
hook about four feet long in the tail of the plane which we let down to catch
the wire. It usually catches before any other part of the plane touches the
deck and it just stops it in mid-air.”
To qualify, Vandivier had to make seven landings and
takeoffs on a deck made of Douglas fir from the Pacific Northwest and measuring
approximately sixty feet wide and 180 feet long. “I made a fairly good approach,”
Vandivier said of his first landing, “got the cut [signal from the LSO], and
started to settle towards the deck without any idea of what was going to happen
next. I was a little too high; and got a cross wind which drifted me across the
deck straight towards the tower.” While only forty feet away from the tower,
and traveling at seventy miles per hour, Vandivier thought he might be headed
for a crash when the tailhook on his plane caught the cable “and really jerked
me to a stop. Boy, was that a relief.” Just a few weeks later, Vandivier had
sixty-five hours of flight time and twenty carrier landings to his credit.
As a member of Bombing
Squadron 6, Vandivier also had to learn how to control his plane when dive
bombing, practicing this specialized skill on a target raft towed by another
ship. In an October 14, 1940, letter to his parents, he outlined the
“interesting problem” of targeting a bomb on a moving object. “You have to
allow for the trail of the bomb, depending on the steepness of the dive and the
altitude at which you release,” he said. “You also allow for the distance the
raft will travel after the bomb is released and the amount and direction of the
wind, with its effect on the path of the bomb. All in all, you are fairly busy
as you travel down at 300 miles per hour. We start our dives at 10,000 [feet]
and pull out at 1,000.” He called such training “fun, and an interesting game.
Of course I’m glad it’s just a game instead of something more serious.”
To Vandivier, that something
more serious that might bring him into combat involved what was going on in the
Atlantic Ocean, where the American navy had established a Neutrality Patrol in
the Caribbean and 200 miles off the coasts of North and South America to deter
German U-boats from interfering with shipping. If called into action there,
however, Vandivier expressed doubts about the navy’s chances. “As for us, we
would be out of luck trying to compete with any of the modern planes being used
in Europe with the planes we have,” he wrote. “The U.S. has sold all of its
modern planes to England and let the Navy use planes from four to ten years
old. We expect to get some modern planes pretty soon.” As for the threat of a
possible attack by the Japanese in the Pacific, Vandivier believed that once
the United States called “the Japs bluff they will back down again. They seem to
be scavengers who will take whatever they don’t have to fight to get.”
Throughout 1941 the Enterprise and its crew ferried men and
material from the West Coast of the United States to the Hawaiian Islands. By that
spring, Vandivier’s squadron had begun training and getting the bugs out of the
aircraft they would take to war—the Douglas SBD Dauntless, which could be used
as a scout plane or dive-bomber. The Dauntless became “the most successful and
beloved by aviators of all our carrier types,” according to naval historian
Samuel Eliot Morison, as the plane sank more Japanese shipping than any other
aircraft in World War II. The two-man SBDs (aircrews said the letters stood for
“slow but deadly) were equipped with two fixed, forward-firing .50-caliber machine
guns in the cowling and a twin .30-caliber machine gun operated by the rear
gunner/radioman. “The new planes are really much easier to handle . . . and they
will be a much nicer carrier plane,” said Vandivier. “They will also carry a
1000 lb [pound] bomb and 310 gallons of gasoline. In fact, I could probably fly
from here [San Diego] home with only one stop for gas, and could probably do it
in the daylight hours of one day.” The Dauntless proved to be a dependable
combat aircraft, able to sustain considerable damage yet still bring its
aircrew home safely to their ship.
Vandivier did have some trouble with his new plane. In
a May 21, 1941, letter he outlined an “interesting experience” he had during a
landing on the Enterprise at sea off
of Oahu. When he was only 250 feet from the ship’s stern, his engine cut out
while flying seventy-five feet above the water. “Under the circumstances,”
Vandivier said, “I couldn’t do much to get it running again before it hit the
water.” Calling it “an embarrassing predicament,” he had to make a crash
landing in the water, wrecking his new plane (which he estimated cost the
American taxpayers $30,000); it sank within three minutes. His crew member
managed to make it into a life raft, but Vandivier had to inflate his Mae West
life jacket and dogpaddle in the warm water while waiting to be picked up by a
nearby destroyer. Despite his crash, Vandiver tried to minimize the dangers he
faced. Writing from Pearl Harbor, the main navy base in the Hawaiian Islands,
he noted that if war came “this is the safest place I can imagine to be. It is
so well fortified and guarded that it would be almost impossible to take it,
and it would be practically worthless to another power anyhow. The Atlantic
side of the U.S. is the bad spot now.”
Vandivier proved to be very
wrong in his prediction. Early in the morning of Sunday, December 7, 1941, nine-year-old Joan
Zuber, the daughter of a U.S. Marine officer stationed at Pearl Harbor, started
her day by opening the pages of a favorite book. She had just settled back to
begin her reading when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw a “grayish-black
column of smoke. Something was burning.”
Zuber dropped her book and ran outside to see
what was happening. Looking over the bushes in her yard toward Luke Field, the
navy’s airbase on Ford Island located in the center of the harbor, she could
see smoke and flames rising into the sky, filling it with a large, black cloud.
Although her first thought was to run back inside the house to tell her mother
what was happening, she instead remained outside. “Just then a strange plane
with red balls on the sides of its body swooped low over my head, diving toward
the masts of the [battleships] West
Virginia and Tennessee,” Zuber
remembered. “What plane was that? What was it doing flying so low?”
The
plane Zuber saw streaking toward the American ships was part of a force unleashed
in two waves from six aircraft carriers from the Empire of Japan. The surprise
attack—undertaken without a formal declaration of war—by the enemy aircraft
aimed to quickly swoop down and destroy the 130 vessels of the United States’s
Pacific fleet—ships that Japanese Fleet Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, in charge of
planning the strike, called “a dagger pointed at our [Japan’s] throat.” That “dagger” Yamamoto had been so worried about suffered horribly from
the enemy onslaught on December 7. An armor-piercing bomb slammed into the battleship
USS Arizona. The bomb sliced through
the ship and ignited its forward ammunition magazine, setting off a huge
explosion, killing 1,177 crew members. Although unprepared for the onslaught,
American forces shot down twenty-nine Japanese aircraft. They suffered,
however, the loss of two battleships (the Arizona
and Oklahoma) and severe damage
to another six battleships, as well as having approximately two hundred
airplanes destroyed on the ground and approximately 3,500 servicemen either
killed or wounded.
For Vandivier’s family, some of the first
words about their son’s safety came from a Globe Wireless telegram from
Honolulu, which read: “SAFE AND SOUND LETTER FOLLOWING LOVE NORMAN VANDIVIER.”
In a December 18 letter Vandivier said that due to “unforeseen incidents,”
there had been a delay in his letter writing and warned that there might be
periods in the future where it would be impossible for him to send any mail home
for months at a time. He also warned them to expect “disaster rumors of all kinds
floating around, almost all of which die when any attempt is made to verify
them. Mothers worrying about me bothers me a lot more than any of the things
that have happened or are going to happen out here.” Even if he had wanted to
pass along information on his experiences, he could not do so because mail had
to be scrutinized by navy censors and “must contain no reference to what I am
doing, where I am going, nor what I have seen. That doesn’t leave me a lot to
write about.”
What
Vandivier could not tell his family was that the Enterprise had been involved in the tail end of the Pearl Harbor
attack. The carrier had been on its way back to its base after delivering
Marine Fighter Squadron 211 and its complement of Grumman F4F Wildcats to Wake
Island. Although scheduled to arrive at Pearl Harbor on Saturday, December 6,
bad weather delayed the Enterprise’s
return until Sunday, December 7. The ship’s Dauntless scout planes were soon
under fire by Japanese Zero fighters. “Pearl Harbor is under attack by the Japanese.
This is no shit!” Lieutenant Earl Gallaher radioed back to the Enterprise, which lost eleven pilots and nine aircraft, some brought down by
panicked American anti-aircraft crews. “Before we’re through with ’em, the
Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” vowed Vice Admiral William
“Bull” Halsey Jr., who had selected the Enterprise
as his flagship.
The
men of the Enterprise made good on
Halsey’s threat, hitting back at Japanese installations in the Marshall
Islands, while the USS Yorktown struck
enemy positions in the Gilbert Islands on February 1, 1942. The mission marked
the first time many of the young American pilots had been in combat. Over a
fourteen-hour period during the Marshall Islands mission, the Enterprise launched 158 sorties against
the Japanese, sinking one ship and damaging eight others, including a submarine.
In addition, a navy pilot had dropped a bomb that killed Rear Admiral
Yatsushiro Sukeyoshi—the first member of the Imperial Navy’s flag staff to be
killed in the war.
During
an attack with Bombing Squadron 6 against Kwajalein Island, Vandivier, despite
heavy antiaircraft fire, was credited with scoring a near-miss on a cargo
vessel and a direct hit on a small Japanese barracks, winning an Air Medal for
his efforts. Vandivier and his crewmates almost ran out of luck as their ship
started to steam away from the danger zone. The Enterprise came under attack from five Japanese twin-engine
bombers, one of which, heavily damaged, attempted a suicide dive into a deck
crowded with planes, only to barely miss the ship.
The
Enterprise’s aircrews continued to hone
their combat skills with raids against Japanese bases on Wake and Marcus
Island. In April the carrier provided air support for a secret strike against
the Japanese home islands. On April 18 a
force of sixteen normally land-based North American B-25 Mitchell bombers led
by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle flew off the pitching deck of the USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo, Japan’s capital
city. Although the bombers did little damage, the raid boosted morale in the
United States and shocked Japanese citizens, who started to doubt, as one of
them remembered, that “we were invincible.”
Vandivier could relate little
about his combat experiences in his letters to his parents. In a March 14
letter, he noted that the job of the Enterprise
involved keeping the Japanese from “running wild” in the Pacific. “At
present the odds are a little in favor of the enemy,” he wrote, “but the odds
are continually swinging to our favor. . . . When we finally get this new army
into the field to stop them on land, the navy will complete wiping up their
navy and the war will be over. Sounds easy, doesn’t it.” He appeared proud of
the navy’s early work against the enemy, and wondered why his service chose to
keep reports of these actions under wraps from the American public. “I guess it
is really our job to make the news rather than to publish it,” Vandivier
admitted.
On May 27, 1942, in one of
the last letters he ever sent, Vandivier wrote to his college friend and
Franklin neighbor Harold E. Van Antwerp, who was stationed at Fort Benning in
Georgia. Again, Vandivier could not give any details about his exploits in the
air against the Japanese but did tell his friend that even though he had yet to
fill his quota, he could claim “a few in the old game bag. It’s even more fun,
and much more interesting than shooting rabbits, cause these little rascals can
shoot back at you.” He added that he had approximately 1,250 hours in the air
and had made 175 carrier landings. The Dauntless had proven to be a “very good
carrier” plane, but Vandivier lamented its limited bomb load that necessitated
additional sorties against the enemy. “I would much rather make only a few trips,
and really drop something when I unload,” he told Van Antwerp. “We have found
that these Japs are nothing to be sneezed at, but they are really not very good
shots. But even knowing that the guy is a poor shot, you still get nervous when
the party lasts too long.”
Incensed by the Doolittle
raid, the Japanese sent a large fleet to capture Midway Island, an American
possession located about a thousand miles northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. In
addition to capturing Midway, Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto hoped to draw out the American fleet for a
decisive battle. On May 30 the American fleet responded to the threat, sending the
Yorktown to sea to join the Enterprise and Hornet, on station about 235 miles northeast of Midway. A PBY
Catalina flying boat spotted the Japanese invasion force about 700 miles from
Midway on the morning of June 3.
The next morning, the
Japanese carriers, including four of the six that had attacked Pearl Harbor,
were discovered. At about 7 a.m., the Enterprise
launched its planes, including that of Vandivier and his crewman, Seaman
First Class Lee Edward John Keaney. Led the carrier’s group commander, Lieutenant
Commander Wade McClusky, the attack formation began with thirty-three Dauntlesses;
fifteen from Bombing Squadron 6, loaded with one thousand-pound bomb each, and
eighteen from Scouting Squadron 6, loaded with one 500-pound bomb and two 100-pound
bombs. A few hours later, the American planes had yet to find the enemy
carriers. Although low on fuel, McClusky made the momentous decision to turn
his group northwest to hunt down the enemy, finding the Japanese at about 10
a.m. “I knew, and most everybody knew,” said Ensign Lew Hopkins, who flew in
the squadron’s second division, “that we didn’t have enough fuel to get back.”
Vandivier, who flew in the
third division, and other pilots from the Enterprise
screamed down in dives to drop their bombs onto the Japanese carrier, Kaga, while a smaller group targeted the
flagship for the Pearl Harbor attack, the Akagi.
The Japanese fleet’s air cover of Zero fighters had just decimated an attack by
American Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo bombers and were at a low altitude,
unprepared to tackle the dive-bombers as they hurtled downward. Watching the
attack, American fighter pilot Jimmy Thach described the sight as looking “like
a beautiful silver waterfall, those dive-bombers coming down.” It is unknown if
Vandivier managed to hit the carrier, or if his bomb missed the target that
day.
The Dauntless dive-bombers
from the Enterprise proved their
worth, however, blasting the Akagi and
Kaga with their ordnance, leaving
them burning wrecks that had to be abandoned by their crews. Meanwhile
dive-bombers from the USS Yorktown hit
a third carrier, the Soryu, dooming
it as well. “Arizona, I remember you!”
cried Earl Gallaher, a member of Scouting Squadron 6. Later in the day, Dauntless aircraft from the Enterprise and Yorktown found
and crippled a fourth Japanese carrier, the Hiryu.
Japan had been put on the defensive and “the Americans had avenged Pearl
Harbor,” noted a Japanese government official.
The victory did not come without
a cost. After his attack run, Vandivier had joined up with other aircraft to
try make it back to the American fleet. Low on fuel, however, and perhaps
suffering from damage from the fierce Japanese anti-aircraft fire or relentless
attacks by Zero fighters, Vandivier radioed that he intended to put his plane
down at sea.
In an October 22 letter to
Fred Vandivier from Tony F. Schneider, a fellow member of Bombing Squadron 6,
the navy pilot said witnesses had seen Vandivier land his Dauntless in the ocean.
“Whether he was seen to get into his life raft I do not know,” wrote Schneider.
“But from that time on there has been no word so far as I know. I checked every
day for the first several weeks hoping for news.” Schneider, who enclosed $8 he
owed Vandivier in his letter, said the Hoosier had been his best friend and
roommate on the Enterprise. “I was
forced down at sea on that date myself,” he noted, “and though I was fortunate
enough to be rescued on the third day, the news I have been able to get about
other friends less fortunate than I has been very sketchy and incomplete. I’m
sorry I cannot relieve your mental anguish.”
Although his parents held out
hope, nothing was ever heard or seen of Vandivier or his gunner again. A year
and a day after his disappearance, Vandivier, posthumously promoted to
lieutenant junior grade and awarded the Navy Cross for his part in the Battle
of Midway, was declared officially dead by Navy Department officials. In
November 1943 the navy decided to name an escort destroyer then under
construction for Vandivier (the ship’s construction was delayed by the war’s
end, and finally commissioned on October 11, 1955). His parents refused to
accept the loss of their son. “Even this official status does not alter our
hopes that Norman is by some chance still alive today,” said Fred Vandivier.
“Our only hopes are that he either is marooned on a distant island or is a
prisoner of the Japanese. Improbable as either may be, they still enable Mrs.
Vandivier and myself to keep going in the face of our sorrow.”
No good news ever came, and
Fred Vandivier died on February 20, 1958. Mary Vandivier, a Gold Star mother,
soldiered on until her death, at age ninety-three, in 1987. For years, she
placed flowers every Memorial Day on her son’s grave marker at Franklin’s Greenlawn
Cemetery. She continued to cherish mementos from her son’s life, including the
Purple Heart and other medals he received for his service in the war, as well
as the silver champagne bottle holder the navy presented her after she
christened the ship named in his honor. “When we couldn’t have him, this kind
of took the place of him,” she said of her keepsakes.
No comments:
Post a Comment