The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys
ISBN: 979-8857183489
by Preston Lewis
A Call to Duty
The greatest conflict in human history started brothers Ray F. and John B. Lewis on a journey that they never imagined as farm boys picking cotton in the dusty fields of West Texas during the Great Depression. World War II took them across the Atlantic to places they had only read about in books or seen on movie screens when they could afford theater tickets. By the time they returned to the States, they had lost their country-boy naivete.
In To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis explores the wartime exploits of his uncle Ray and his father John. Ray saw combat in the 552nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion, but John never heard a shot fired in anger while a merchant mariner at the end of the conflict.
To War and Back is the sequel to Cotton-Picking Folks: Eulogy for a Texas Depression Era Farm Family. Enthralled by his family's stories of West Texas life in the 1930s and 1940s, Lewis in the 1970s collected the written and oral histories of his grandfather’s five daughters and two sons. Fascinated by his uncle's and father's accounts of World War II, he extracted them from those oral histories and added background and context on their European adventures, some sad, many poignant and others humorous.
Ray and John were both bit players in the events of the war, although John rides to the rescue of a downed Women Airforce Service Pilot as an anonymous cowboy in several books on female aviation history. Even though they played minor roles in the war, their stories provide a glimpse into tough times by men committed to serving their country.
The 44,000-word memoir provides a poignant glimpse into the lives of two brothers of the Greatest Generation. With only an estimated 300,000 WWII veterans remaining in the United States, the living memory of World War II is gradually fading away. To War and Back: The World War II Journey of Two West Texas Farm Boys saves for posterity the stories of these two young men who grew to maturity during the troubled war years.
No. 1:
I’ll never forget when we got within sight of the beaches of France what it looked like. There must have been, I just wouldn’t guess how many battleships out in the gulf, and they were firing the big guns just continually. They [the army] had not been able to get their heavy field artillery in, and the battleships out in the channel were giving the heavy artillery support for the troops that had already landed.
We dropped anchor probably a mile from the beach sometime around midnight. It’d taken a couple hours to get our guns off the Liberty ship onto a flat marine barge and, of course, the first platoon of B Battery was the only one on this particular Liberty ship. So, we were talking about four gun crews and their equipment.
It was somewhere around 2 a.m. on the morning of D+8 after we’d climbed down the rope ladders of the Liberty ship onto the flat barge with our trucks and guns already loaded that we started toward the beach. As I say, it was a time I’ll never forget….
I’ve got to say here that without a doubt that first night on the beach was the most frightening night I ever spent in my life. We spent most of the balance of the night in foxholes. I remember laying in this foxhole. I was laying on my stomach, and I was so scared it literally felt like I was shaking so bad I was bouncing on the ground.
No.
2:
On a November afternoon perfect for flying, Chicago-area native Lorraine Zillner lifted off from Avenger Field just west of Sweetwater, Texas. At the controls of a BT-13 or basic trainer, Zillner had enlisted in the Women’s Airforce Service Pilots program to assist the nation’s war effort in World War II and to earn her wings as a WASP.
As the trainer taxied down the runway of the Sweetwater Army Airfield, one of the forty airfields in Texas during World War II, Zillner had no idea that someone had sabotaged her aircraft. She would never bring back home her BT-13, a plane officially named the “Valiant” by the military but more commonly referred to as the “Bucket of Bolts” or “Vultee Vibrator” by the trainees. Everything seemed normal that afternoon of November 14, 1943, until Zillner started doing aerial acrobatics. Suddenly, the plane lurched groundward and went into an inverted spin.
Barely twelve miles from the end of the runway where the plane had taken off, Zillner fought desperately and vainly to stop the fall of her BT-13. Failing to correct its dive to the ground, she fought her way from the cockpit of the belly-up plane and bailed out mere moments before it crashed into a cotton field near the Fisher County community of Busby, where two local farm boys were enjoying an afternoon horseback ride.
The unknown vandal who damaged the Valiant’s rudder cables transformed those two Busby farm boys—Herman Graves Jr. and John Bracken Lewis—into Texas cowboys and turned them into anonymous footnotes in women’s aviation history.
A Heartfelt Ode to
Patriotism and Honor
In To War
and Back, award-winning author Preston Lewis offers something
truly special. He gives us the reminisces of two family members who
served during World War II—his father and his uncle—two farm boys
from West Texas. Neither had ever seen much of the world before the
war, but neither would be the same after it. Lewis’s uncle, Ray,
the older of the two brothers, joined the army, was assigned to an
artillery unit, and fought in Europe. John, the younger brother,
Lewis’s father, was blind in his left eye making him unfit for
military service, but in the waning days of the war joined the
Merchant Marine because he believed it was his duty. During his
voyages, they delivered livestock to Poland and Greece, then
brought war veterans back home.
There is humor, like his Uncle Ray recalling traveling down a dirt road with the lieutenant in a vehicle to find the best the gun positions for the unit, and as they went around a corner they came across a German Tiger tank, its crew on top of it eating their lunch. The American driver turned their vehicle around fast and Ray saw the Germans disappear down the turret of their tank so fast “it reminded me of prairie dogs going in a hole.” And there is terror when he recalled anytime he would hear German shells coming overhead at night. There are also unexpected moments, like Lewis’s father and a friend helping Lorraine Zillner, a pilot in the Women Airforce Service Pilot program who had crashed her BT-13 Valiant in a field near Sweetwater, Texas. She later said a “couple of cowboys” had rescued her.
But most of all, the book is a heartfelt ode to patriotism and honor, particularly in the final chapter where the author visits the Normandy beach where his uncle landed. Preston’s story is every bit as moving as those told by his father and uncle. Recommended. — Award-winning Author Thomas D. Clagett