We Came to Fight a War

By Jack Flynn

M.W.S.A (Military Writers Society of America)

A wartime injustice is righted in this crisp, succinctly written memoir of a B 17 flight crew member who tells of the heroism, and tragedy of his pilot of more than 25 combat missions flown out of Italy during World War Two. Written by the brother of that pilot, the reader is given a chilling glimpse into the rigors, and horrors of those young men who flew the big bombers deep into enemy territory, on lengthy, harrowing missions.

1LT Bill Flynn was a professional, dependable, and much trusted pilot whose war time record was exemplary, if not magnificent. Shortly after the war ended he was wrongfully, disgracefully accused of deeds of which he was entirely innocent, and he paid a terrible professional, and personal price. As told to Flynn's brother Jack, crew member Al Kotler, recounts the story of 1LT Flynn, his war time valor, and the final betrayal by the army air corps that he so proudly served. The result is this magnificent little gem of a book that does not waste a single word in telling it like it was. The proud, and honorable way that 1LT Flynn lived the remainder of his life after his betrayal, is redeeming, but the reader is left with a smoldering anger that something like this could have, and did happen. That is what makes the book so believable, and real.
Review by Bob Flournoy, MWSA Reviewer (October 2010)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jack Flynn
• Release date: Mar 21, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452455020

Jack Flynn

Jack Flynn is a lawyer in Boston and has worked pro bono on behalf of wrongly convicted individuals. He lives south of the city and writes on his daily commute across Boston Harbor. Blood in the Water is his gripping Boston thriller.

Book preview

Prologue

My name is Jack Flynn. In February, 1954, I was fifteen. One Sunday morning while my parents were at church, I was rummaging in the back of a closet in our house in Stoneham, Massachusetts and found a batch of letters. They were mailed from a Federal Prison in New York and were dated 1945 and 1946. They were addressed to my Dad. I read them. I was in the eighth grade. I stayed back that year.

I first met my brother, Bill, in 1947. I was eight. He was twenty-one. Until then, my immediate family had consisted of my father, my mother and my sister Bette who was two years older and engaged in things that held little interest for me. But when this smiling, six-foot guy in khaki clothes walked into the kitchen at Plum Island where my Dad had rented a cottage for the summer, and was introduced as my brother, the kettle of my life was upended and never quite set on the stove the same way again.

My only boy status in the family could have been threatened by this newcomer, but Bill didn’t give me the chance to make him an enemy. Instead, he laughed, tussled my hair and shoved a package into my hands. I pulled out a small glass car full of orange bead-like candies and a lariat which I had dreamed of possessing for as long as I could remember.

At the time there was low, whispering talk in the cottage—something about a trial, judges and lawyers—something about a guy who was killed, but it was all over my head, and I wasn’t listening anyway. I had a big brother who gave me candy and a lasso and that held priority over any adult stuff.

I wondered why, whenever I called Bill my brother, my mother would correct me, saying he was my half brother. Eventually, I learned through her that my Dad’s first wife, Mary, Bill’s mother, had died of TB when Bill was four. That made him my half brother, she said. So I shouldn’t call him my brother. That didn’t mean a thing to me. I had a big brother and wasn’t about to let his status in that role be diminished.

My mother told us that after Bill’s Mom died, she and Dad met and later got married. Mary’s parents, Tim and Mamie Mcauliffe, did not want to lose their grandson, so Bill stayed with them and was raised in their home. That was why he never lived with us, my mother said.

When Bill got married in 1948, he and his wife, Dorothy, moved into the house in Wakefield where Bill had grown up and where his Grandpa, whom we kids called Uncle Tim, had been living alone since his wife’s death. I would visit there on Sundays and some Saturdays with my Dad and play in the same backyard that Bill had played in when he was a boy.

Dad told me that one Sunday Bill saw a plane fly over the house. He told his Dad that he wanted to drive the airplane up in the sky. He was seven.

Bill and his Mother

Uncle Tim said that after school, instead of playing with the other kids, Bill would ride his bike over to Dad’s Chrysler Plymouth Dealership and hang around. Dad wasn’t the kind of guy to let anyone hang around for long—especially a kid. He soon had Bill putting air in tires, cleaning windshields and wiping the grease from the cars he had finished working on.

Bill transferred from parochial school to Wakefield High School in the ninth grade and my Dad said that he was over six feet tall by the tenth grade. He played football, joined the tennis team, and worked at Dad’s garage on weekends. By the time he was in his senior year, he had become a first rate mechanic. By then, the war was on and Bill told Dad that he was going to join the Army Air Corps. Dad hated to lose a good mechanic, but he was behind his son a hundred percent.

In early winter in 1943 Bill took the Army Air Corp exam in Boston, passed it, and was inducted into the Army Air Corp, where he trained and became a B-17 pilot.

1st Lieutenant William E. Flynn

My brother Bill passed away last March at the age of 83. At the wake, I observed an elderly man of small stature approach the coffin. He bent over and pinned a pair of silver wings on Bill’s lapel. Then he stepped back and saluted his Pilot—the man mainly responsible for keeping him and his fellow crew members alive over the course of multiple combat missions out of Foggia, Italy in ’44 and ’45. The man who pinned the wings on Bill’s lapel was Alvin (Al) Kotler, 84 years of age.

Bill’s five sons, two daughters and countless grandchildren semi-circled around Al as the stories poured from his memory—how they lived in tents in ankle deep mud, and survived bomb runs at twenty eight thousand feet through deadly fields of flak at 50 degrees below zero in un-pressurized aircraft—how they helped deal the finishing blow to Hitler’s war machine—and how he and Bill felt about the whole thing—the War—their Country—the enemy.

Later on, I managed to find some time alone with Al. I told him that their story needed to be told—that his might be one of the last voices, if not the last voice out of the air war in the European Theater, and that the world needed to hear it.

Screw the world, he said. Give me a better reason.

"For Bill, I said. The book will be dedicated to Bill Flynn."

There was a long pause. He looked me dead in the eye, and finally spoke.

"Do you mean you’ll be my ghost writer?"

Not unless you’re the ghost, I said. It’s your story. It’s Bill’s story. You tell me. I write it like you tell it—just like it happened.

This is that story.

Sgt. Al Kotler

Al’s Story:

The Italian Alps

Navigator to Pilot: With two inboards out we’ll never make the Alps. We’re losing altitude and number four is leaking oil. We’d better head for Switzerland.

Pilot to Navigator: We didn’t come here to go skiing, Dan. We came to fight a war. We’re going over. Get rid of everything in sight. If that’s not enough, throw Al out too.

I’m Al—Alvin Kotler. I was the Radio Gunner on Bill Flynn’s B-17 that day. It was one of the numerous life or death decisions Bill had to make during the course of our bombing missions out of Foggia Italy in ’44 and ’45.

We had flown through multiple walls of flak that morning over Austria. After dropping our payload, we got shot way off course and were limping back to Italy on our own. Once Bill made his decision, there was no more discussion. We jettisoned everything that wasn’t welded down out the bomb-bay—the .50 caliber machine guns, most of the radio equipment, flak suits, helmets, ammo—everything we could grab. The two outboards were still functioning so we had a chance—a slim one, but a chance.

The Italian Alps loomed before us like giant white sheets of death. If we were going to clear them it wouldn’t be by much. Looking down the open bomb-bay, I swore if I reached down I could have scooped up a handful of the purest snow on earth. Compared to the factory tainted snow in Malden, Massachusetts, it looked like heaven—or if we didn’t make it, hell

The Early Years

Like I said, my name is Al Kotler. My grandparents emigrated from Odessa, Russia to the West End of Boston before the First World War. They learned English, became citizens and opened up businesses. My mother’s mother was a caterer and my paternal grandmother ran a barbershop so she could send my father to medical school. He was to be the Doctor in the family. He married my mother, Anne, moved to Ferry Street in Malden, opened up a practice and took on the job as City Physician. His first name was Moses but the sign said, Dr. M. George Kotler.He was the kind of Doctor you don’t see today. I’ll give you an example. He’d be on a call. It was cold in the house. They were on welfare, which wasn’t very much in those days. My Dad went home—back to his office—called the coal company, sent them a ton of coal and said, Send me the bill. Stuff like that. He was that kind of a Doctor.

I’ll never forget. One night he came home about two o’clock in the morning. In those days they made house calls. No matter when the phone rang—one o clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, the Doctor went out. I can still see him in the dead of winter wearing pajamas, an overcoat, and boots, hand cranking the Franklin.

He came back that night—two o’clock in the morning, with a chicken under his arm.

You know how little kids have to listen when they hear a noise? I listened.

George, what are you going to do with the chicken?

Anne, you gotta cook it.

We don’t need it, George. Why did you have to take it?

Anne, I didn’t want to embarrass them. It was their way of paying me. They felt better giving me something for my services.

People couldn’t afford hospitals so my father did minor surgery at the house. There were a lot of injuries caused by the iron crank used to start car engines. If you didn’t make a complete turn of the crank, it would kick back with enormous force, resulting in a broken hand, wrist or forearm.

Dad did a tonsillectomy in the kitchen on my good friend Stanley Weiner—put him under and snipped them out just like that. In those days there was no such thing as a specialist. He’d put casts on right there in his office.

My Dad had come down with an infection and was supposed to go to bed and rest but he kept on working. One of his patients had spinal meningitis. His resistance was low and he picked it up. He was thirty eight years old when he died. They put up a memorial with a bronze plaque for him at the corner of Ferry and Cross Street, where the ball park is.

Tough on a kid—to lose your dad at the age of 10.

My mother tried to make me feel better. She said there were more people in heaven who needed Doctors than down here and that was why they called him up there. But I really didn’t believe it. What kind of heaven would it be if they needed doctors?

It became my job to watch over my brother, Ted, who was five at the time. My Mother’s father took care of us until my mother remarried six years later. He paid the mortgage and other bills, bought me a Roll Fast bicycle, a Keystone camera and a Flexible Flyer sled. I called him my Prince. I would take the elevator train to his house in Dorchester on Saturdays, stay overnight, and he would send me home on Sunday mornings with a fifty cent piece in my pocket (big money in those days for a kid). Like I said, he was my Prince. He gave me a life. He gave all of us a decent life during those difficult times.

Eventually, my mother met and married Doctor Samuel Edlestein (I called him Doc), and we moved to