Harold Downes

By: Richard Downes

 

 

 

            It is easy to glorify a father we never really got to know. Especially when he goes off to war and is never heard from again. We’re told wonderful things about him, and add our own fantasies to fill holes … the void.

           

By January 13, 1952, Hal Downes had been in Kunsan, South Korea for only a few months. He was the navigator on a B-26, had flown seven missions, and already been to Tokyo for R&R. A lot had happened in a short while. Many long letters of love, extremely cold weather, and guidance from a husband and father for a young wife and their children were sent home. His wife Lee was taking care of the family alone ... their young son, and a little girl on the way.

           

On that night in January, Hal sat down for the mission briefing in Kunsan, and learned the man scheduled to fly as SHORAN operator on the flight couldn’t go. Hal had been teaching the new, difficult technology to others, so he switched with the less experienced replacement. In doing so, he switched places on the plane.

           

The mission went well. Hal sat in the back of the plane, a small compartment behind the bomb bay, and used the SHORAN equipment to guide the pilot over a North Korean train yard. The bombs were dropped, and as the plane pulled away from the target, both engines stopped. For no apparent reason, they just stopped. The pilot tried everything he could think of at the time to get the engines going but they remained silent. So did the three other members of the crew. Their lives were in his hands … a man Hal had never met before that night. Talking to the pilot would do no good. Like the others, Hal had to sit, wait, hope, pray.

           

He should never have been asked to do that. Hal had finished World War II in training. A part of him missed the adventure he’d signed up for. He was twenty then, and chose signing on for the Air Force reserves to help pay for college. He was also in love with Lee. Marriage came, then a son named Ricky, the University of Michigan, then a daughter on-the-way. Her name was Donna.

           

At 26, Hal had packed a lot into a short life. So much of it had changed dramatically by the night of January 13th, 1952. One would have good reason to say he should never have been asked to be on the plane that night.

           

There he was, though, in the rear compartment, behind the bomb bay. The worse place on the plane to get out of. All of that short life, the short lives of his family, all of their futures were in the hands of a stranger Hal couldn’t even see.

           

The war went on for another year and a half. The telegram had come to Lee, telling the young wife and mother that her husband was missing. Only a woman going through such an experience knows what that may be like. There was no word of Hal. The prisoner exchanges passed, with no word of Hal. The pilot and navigator returned. The navigator ... who Hal had switched positions with … he came home.

           

They had finally bailed out of the B-26, and been captured by separate units of the Chinese army that night. The pilot believed he had signaled for everyone in the crew to abandon the plane, but wasn’t completely sure. There had been complications in the cockpit. The Chinese showed both men possessions of the gunner on the plane. He had died. The Chinese didn’t say anything about Hal Downes. They didn’t know anything about Hal.

           

There had been an interview printed during the war, in which the pilot, as a POW, had told an Austrian reporter for a communist newspaper that Hal Downes had survived the mission. This was later recanted by both parties but it was considered substantive enough to put Hal on the first list of missing Americans that the Chinese may have had knowledge of … the “944 List”. That was enough to qualify a lifetime of doubt for Hal’s family.

           

What happened that night? There are a lot of questions. Did Hal Downes ride that metal cylinder quietly to his grave? Would a twenty-six year old husband and father of two do that? Maybe. Probably not. Did he panic? Would the MVP goalie on the University of Michigan’s NCAA championship team of 1951 panic … a graduate with a degree in Business, who had worked multiple jobs to support his wife and children, who had helped raise his own three sisters when his mother died in child birth? Maybe. Probably not. Did Hal try to get out of the worse position on the plane and fail? Maybe. The Chinese didn’t say anything to indicate that had happened. Yet they did say they’d found the gunner. The gunner didn’t work the latest guidance technology on the plane, though. Did Hal get out of the plane successfully? Was he captured by independent Russian patrols on the lookout for American Air Force personnel with technical expertise? Maybe. Was he taken back to Russia, interrogated, then survive for all or some of the past forty-eight years? Part of us hopes not. Part of us hopes so.

           

What did happen that night?  All the nights and days thereafter?  That’s what Hal’s family was left with … the same as all the families of missing men. Hal was remembered by his wife, and glorified by his children, who never got to know their dad. He was replaced by a new husband. That didn’t work out. A new father. That didn’t work out, either. Eventually, to some degree, Hal was remembered only as a fantasy; forgotten as a man.

           

Things have changed, of course. Hal Downes is real again … for the first time, in many ways. He is a man, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and so many things we’ll never know. There are still too many questions. One day, we’ll get answers. That’s a promise, Dad.