My grandfather John Patrick Hirsch (1924-2009) had a favorite catch-phrase above all others, and it wasn’t particularly close: “That’s Big!” He used it often, cackling it from behind his Cheshire Cat grin while loosely holding a Pall Mall cigarette as smoke curled lazily towards the ceiling.

The phrase foreshadowed the bigger-than-big, mind-bogglingly complex undertaking that became the most memorable research project of my life; one that made my graduate degree feel like a milk run by comparison.

The project, of course, was about him.

For a while after we lost him, I was gripped by a recurring fear that I’d forget what he looked like. But even 15 years later, my grandfather is still right there: barefoot in dress slacks, bursting with joy at Christmas time. In my mind’s eye, a glass ashtray sits atop his paperbacks of Robert Frost poetry and French mystery pulp fiction, so well-read that the pages are falling out.

I can still picture the happy tears he often blinked away, eyes swollen with gratitude at being surrounded by family in his old age: an outcome he must have known was anything but guaranteed back in 1945.

It’s impossible to imagine this gregarious, kind man wielding a .50 caliber machine gun in the frigid upper atmosphere, hanging onto a glorified tin can for dear life at 25,000 feet as thick black clouds of deadly flak exploded deafeningly around him.

It’s also hard to believe that 2024 marks 100 years since my grandfather, a native of Queens, NY, came into this world. This milestone felt like the right time to tackle something that had long been on my to-do list: to peel back the historical record and uncover concrete details about his time in the Second World War, and the many missions he flew over Europe in a B-17 Flying Fortress.

And maybe, by getting to know John as a young man in 1945 through my archival research — by discovering the exact role he played up there and carefully poking thumbtacks into a map to trace each one of his flights — I could borrow just a few hours more with him, under the convenient guise of researching family history.

Like most combat veterans of World War 2, he didn’t mention the war very much while he was alive. But I want to know.

MISSING IN ACTION

Although I recognize the incredible difficulty of cataloging and properly memorializing the 2.2 million airmen who served in the Second World War, I wasn’t emotionally prepared for how sadly incomplete the publicly-available databases and resources still are. For every WW2 airman’s story that’s told in pristine detail, it seems ten more are absent entirely.

A portion of WW2 Army Air Force veterans have extant records that are reasonably complete and well-kept in robust website databases like The American Air Museum in Britain, 8af.org, the National Archives, and others.

These airmen, eternally preserved in the amber of the internet, remain unobscured and discoverable by all who might wander past for centuries to come. But hundreds of thousands more, equally deserving of recognition and remembrance, have been left behind in an unintentional — but significant — digital culling of their memory.

So it goes.

SEARCHING FOR MY GRANDFATHER’S WAR

As I began what would unfold into an epic months-long quest to research and document my grandfather’s WW2 story, I was greeted on Day 1 of my search with… well, nothing. Total absence from all publicly searchable databases, save for John’s basic enlistment data in the National Archives — which featured such exciting bombshell revelations as his date of birth and the county he lived in.

Even worse, I learned that a 1973 fire cruelly and devastatingly wiped out over 80% of WW2 Official Military Personnel Files at the NPRC (National Personnel Records Center). These OMPF records are priceless and critical for family histories — they contain vital details about servicemen’s units, medals, timelines, and more. Without either an OMPF or knowledge of the specific unit the veteran served in, a would-be family researcher is faced with the stomach-churning prospect of looking for a needle in a 2.2 million piece US Army Air Forces haystack.

My first few hours as a fledgling detective ended with bleak silence and a blinking cursor. No records found. I was already out of sites to search.

A strange feeling took root inside of me; disbelief turned to anger, and then despair. This was my grandfather. Invisible. But in my mind, he couldn’t be more visible — drinking Irish Mist on Christmas Eve with a twinkle in his eye.

Sure, I didn’t expect to discover epic poems celebrating his glory, but I figured I’d find the basic presence of his name on a list; some kind of tangible, however small, affirmation that he too contributed on the right side of history to the most important conflict the world has ever seen.

Fairly or not, it struck me as the digital equivalent of a grave without a tombstone. My grandfather’s record, which was known (somewhere), had been essentially relegated to the Online Tomb of the Unknown Airman. It was a painful thing to realize.

Even the most modest headstone lends dignity and recognition to the departed. The fact that John wasn’t listed — at all — in posterity’s collective electronic consciousness of World War 2 felt like a grave wrong that needed to be set right.

I concluded that relying on others to keep my grandfather’s torch lit was not only unrealistic, it was an abdication of something that could reasonably be my own responsibility.

Just keep searching.

While NO RESULTS FOUND flashed again and again on my monitor, memories of my grandfather bubbled up kaleidoscopically.

Eating cookies together in his living room, crumbs tumbling down our faces to the parquet floors as we laughed. Playing family board games at the kitchen table, followed by clandestine blackjack lessons after everyone else went to bed. On my 16th birthday, he bought me my first car: a jet black stick-shift Mustang. “A wise investment,” he said, winking. Now that’s big!

Snapping back to 2024, I was convinced that John was definitely unsearchable, at least by name. To be clear, I wasn’t just throwing unsophisticated Google haymakers here. I bobbed and weaved with intentional misspellings of “Hirsch,” query string tricks, and boolean logic acrobatics. All failed. He was absent from obscure historian archives he should be in — purpose-built WW2 databases that contain millions of records.

Two months went by: still no dice. I was by now a reluctant super-expert on WW2-era military document shorthand, B-17 arcana, and the organizational superstructure of the 8th Air Force. I had begun searching the other way around, using as my entry point the oceanic document trail left behind by individual B-17 units (bomb groups), hoping to work backwards into a mention of his name.

Weekends and evenings evaporated in a sepia time warp of mission reports, MACRs, and declassified special orders briefings. Many of the thousands of documents I read described circumstances where young airmen just like my grandfather had met a terrifying and violent end in the skies above France and Germany. It stayed with me.

After all, had it been Sergeant Hirsch’s straw pulled — perhaps if a flak shell had detonated a few feet to the left one day — I would never have existed at all.

During one memorable two-week stretch, I fruitlessly read through every single line of a crumbling microfilm box containing 700 pages of “load lists” (crew rosters). Never mind that I had no clue if my grandfather was even assigned to the units featured in the box (he wasn’t), or had been actively flying during the months represented (also no). For the coup de grâce, this particular set of files had a charming quirk where every tenth page had been scanned upside-down.

I will check every last piece of hay in the stack. I will find you, Grandpa.

Just keep searching.

If I could somehow identify which bomb group he belonged to, and reduce my search from an ocean to a lake, I knew that the remaining dominoes would fall in short order. Yes, then I’d be able to find the rest of… the rest of… well, what exactly?

I was becoming increasingly aware of the absurdity of the minutiae I’d been so desperately seeking (“did he sit in this seat on the plane, or that one?”), but I had also begun a quiet realization that the destination had never really been the point.

By collecting forgotten scraps of his biography, like an archaeologist gently brushing away layers of dust to uncover tiny bones, I knew my excavated artifacts could be displayed together to help bring my grandfather’s living memory out from shadow and into the light — for both my family, as well as posterity.

A wise investment.

Ironically, John wouldn’t have cared a single lick if his wartime service was preserved on a website or not. Not one.

Still, I know that he’d have flashed that Cheshire Cat grin if he saw how excited his grandson was to correct and complete his public record. And how when I finally did, for a few brief but shining moments, I would feel connected to him again across space and time — in a place where there is no more departing.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

— Robert Frost

© 2024 Tim Herscovitch. All rights reserved.