The Price Of Freedom

A recovered account of World War II opens a grandson’s eyes to how the sacrifice of one altered the fate of many.

- Ben Montogomery

THE OTHER DAY I was searching for something behind my desk, and I found an envelope. My dad’s funeral, in November 2011, had been kind of a blur, but I remembered a teacher from Kellyville High School in the Ohio community where my dad grew up pushing an envelope into my hands that day. I must’ve taken it out of my briefcase when I got back, and somehow it had slipped into the crevice between my desk and the wall, unopened.

Now I read the teacher’s handwritten note on the outside. She explained that inside was a speech given by my grandfather about two decades before. He didn’t much like talking about the war, but he had agreed to be the school’s Veterans Day speaker. The teacher had loved my grandpa, who had died two weeks before my father, and she thought I should have his speech. Her kind note concluded: He received an awesome standing ovation, and many tears were shed by guests and students. In loving memory of your grandpa.

I began reading my grandfather’s war story, which I had never heard.

IN MY SENIOR YEAR, in 1941, I was seated about where you are seated. I was 17. Your history books will tell you that on December 7 of that year, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was commissioned a second lieutenant. I began training to fly the B-29 bomber, and I was stationed in the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, bombing targets on the mainland of Japan, 1,500 miles away.

On July 19, 1945, we made a bombing run on the Mitsubishi aircraft factory in Osaka, Japan. My good friend Bob Johnson from Minnesota was on another crew, and he was flying on the plane behind us as our wingman. There were 42 planes in the formation, each carrying three 4,000-pound bombs. As we neared the target, the Japanese attack on us began in earnest. It was so heavy I believed you could get out and walk on it.