Daily Event for July 10, 2012

Over the many years I have operated this website I have received a large number of emails from people who wanted to confirm a family story, this in most cases concerns a relative who was either lost or has since passed away who was supposedly on a famous ship so the story goes... The family story is that grandpa an uncle or another relative was on this or that ship during this or that event and they want to know is the story true, can it be confirmed? Were they were actually there? Many times it turns out that the "family story" is in error.

One might say what they have been told is a fable, but more than likely over the years the story has been embellished or the details have been confused after being related through so many people, people who may or may not have a real understanding of the events concerned. In the case of a relative who was lost in combat many times the family never really knew what happened to them, and so there may have been some speculation that turned into the "family story" as it is known.

These "family stories" seem to swirl around a number of rather famous ships and the story related to the various family members are sometimes quite detailed. The relative who was on the Carpathia when they rescued the survivors of the Titanic for instance is one I have heard several times. The problem is that they always remember, quite vividly, that they were told that the relative was on Carpathia on the way to New York when they stopped and picked them up, of course if you check the story you know that Carpathia was outbound from New York at the time. There are also the stories of the relative who was supposed to have had a ticket on the Titanic (which can no longer be found,) but they missed the ship for some reason and therefore survived. It has been said that if all these people really had tickets they overbooked the ship by several thousand persons.

Other such tales are of the relative lost during the attack on Pearl Harbor, or in some famous warship that met a tragic but heroic end at the hands of a superior enemy force. However when they try to locate the name it does not appear, they wonder why the name is not there, but they know their relative was there because they were always told they were. Sometimes the name does not appear due to an error, but many times the story is just wrong. I have even had cases of families not even knowing the spelling of their relatives name, so many times details are forgotten, and as those who were closest to the event pass away the story told to the later generations changes with almost no way of confirming what really happened.

Sometimes though the story has a different twist, the family has always been told that their relation was on a particular ship, but they have never been able to prove it because an error occurred and had been repeated over and over by historians. Such a case can be seen on the pages of this very site, the story of Edward Michael Hand, a crewman on the Belgian Prince, not exactly a household name like the aforementioned Titanic or Carpathia. In this case his name had been misspelled for ninety-five years, even on the Tower Hill Memorial, and it was not until it was investigated was it confirmed that he was indeed lost in the ship and the "family story" was confirmed.
(To read more about this example see this page: July 31, 2008 Daily Event.)

Of course sometimes the story is just a complete falsehood, a vain attempt to link ones family with a famous event. In this case I don't think those asking the questions are glory hounds, just people wanting the life of their relative to have been lost for some grand reason rather than for something that has been forgotten. Many families have such stories...including mine.

I am rapidly approaching my 50th year of life and since I was a child I have been told of my distant "cousins" who were lost in the war. I never questioned the fact that they were lost (or even if they were really my cousins,) nor did I question how they were lost, I just accepted the "family story" and passed it on to my children. It was not until a couple of months ago when I was talking with my mother that I began to look into what really happened to them.

The family story was that they had both been killed by the Japanese in the Pacific, one was said to have been shot down by a Zero and then machine-gunned in the water by the Japanese pilot. The other had been on a transport and was shot down by the Japanese a few days before the war ended. Not the most dramatic circumstances considering the scope of the war, but indeed both stories have the same common thread, a tragic end.

After spending almost ten years building a casualty database I did a search of my own records and found the name of one of them. Robert N. "Bobby" Zern, killed July 10, 1945. I had his service number and knew that he was in an aircraft, but that was it. It took several days of checking resources before I finally learned the true story.

Bobby was a gunner in a TBM Avenger assigned to VT-16 on USS Randolph CV-15, on that day his aircraft took off to bomb airfields near Tokyo, somewhere over Japan the aircraft was hit by ground fire and damaged. Due to an oil leak the pilot was forced to ditch in the sea. All three men got out of the aircraft before it sank and were seen in their liferafts by other aircraft. A search was carried out the next day (as darkness prevented an earlier search,) but they could not be located. The search lasted for two days before they were declared lost. Nothing was ever found of them, no bodies, no rafts and nobody knows what really happened to them.

It is possible that they were picked up by a Japanese ship as many downed air crews were, but if they were their fate was one that no family member would care to think of, and what the Japanese routinely did to downed Allied airmen is something I will not relate here. Of course other possibilities are equally plausible. Three tiny men in liferafts on a vast ocean would be difficult to spot, consider that hundreds of survivors from the USS Indianapolis in the water were flown over more than once before they were noticed. It is a sad possibility that they just drifted away and died alone on the ocean, there is of course the ever present possibility of shark attack, another fate relatives would rather not envision. What really happened to them after they crashed into the sea is still unknown and probably will remain unknown forever, but now the "family story" can be corrected for future generations.

The other "family story" was about Colonel Edward F. Shepherd, USAAF, he was my grandmother's cousin and both he and Bobbie were quite close to her. She never spoke of them to me as it made her quite sad, even after so many years. My grandmother is now gone and there seems to be nobody left who can remember if Bobby was even really related to us, but Eddie certainly was. Finding out what happened to him was a little more challenging as the information I had was very limited. I have almost no resources on U.S. Army casualties so I had no database to rely on, and several searches conducted on the internet proved to be fruitless. However from time to time I would have a go and see what I could find. It was not until this very evening (July 9) that I finally found out about Eddie's fate.

He was lost in the crash of a B-24 Liberator bomber (Alley Oop) at Fenton Airfield, Northern Territory, Australia. During a landing in the dark the pilot came in to low, hit the trees and crashed, four men on board were killed, no Japanese attack, just a sad and terrible accident. The crash occurred on Aug. 25, 1943 rather than just "a few days before the wars end" as the story was told. According to the "family story" Eddie was posthumously promoted to the rank of Brigadier General, but his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery does not reflect this.

It was an interesting journey learning the truth of my family story, it was not exactly what I was expecting to find, but then again I now know the truth and the truth does not take away anything from Bobbie and Eddie, two heroes who gave their lives defending the world from Imperialist tyranny.

But the story does not end there....

On June 2, 2013 I received this email; "Hi, I saw your website. Are you saying that you are related to Mr. Zern? Please get back to me either way. Thank you." I have to say I was quite puzzled to receive such a note, especially since there was no explanation as to why the question was being asked. I answered the email; "It is not clear if we are related or if he was just a good family friend. Are you related to him?"

The reply was as follows; "No, my dad was WWII NAVY, I am 43 (he and my mom had me late in life), but he told me that the War changed everyone's life. He often spoke of the fighter pilots and had a lot of respect for them. I sometimes go up and down alleys, I came across a bunch of old photos and a few other things. That is when I looked him up, and found your story. It really brought back memories of dad's war stories. I think I have a picture of Mr. Zern as his name is on the back."

I thought that this must explain it, her dad must have been on the US Randolph with Bobby and that is how she came to have the photo. I asked her this and she said no, in fact the part about going down alleys turned out to be the key line. Her and her husband had in fact been in an alley and found the photos in the trash, she recovered them because she likes old photos and thought it was a shame that they would be lost forever if left there.

Over the next few days she sent me scans of the photos, one was Bobby in uniform (shown below), confirmed by my mother, the other photos were of several women, one was Bobby's mother and another was of a cousin of his. My mother could not identify any of the other ladies in the photos. I asked the lady if she would be willing to send me the photos and she agreed, she wanted them to be in the hands of family. This nice lady had recovered photos of people she did not know and then spent time trying to locate any information on the people in them in order to return them to the family, if not for her diligence the photos would have been lost forever.

We still don't know how they ended up in the trash, but she told me that the home they were found near was being renovated after a sale and that who ever bought it must have just tossed them out. What I did find out is that one of the ladies in the photos lived in the town where the house was located, however she had died many years ago so we assume one of her relatives had sold the house and left the photos when they moved out. Of course there could be other explanations.

On Friday June 7, 2013 at 07:58 I received this email from a third party; "Thought you might be interested in this on Ebay concerning Robert Zern." It was a link to an Ebay auction, three medals and a set of dog tags, one of the medals had the name Robert N. Zern engraved on the back. There was also an empty Purple Heart box included with the lot. I was at work and could see that the auction was scheduled to end shortly after 8 p.m. my time. I assumed I would be home in plenty of time to place a bid. I thought it was very strange that suddenly, out of the blue, I was getting all these emails about Bobby from unrelated sources, but things like this have happened before. This gentleman had found the medals while looking for something else, he told me that was a collector, but the medals were not what he was interested in. He took the time to research the name of the airman the medals belonged to and he also found this page.

As it turned out I had to work late and I did not get home until 8:15 p.m. and I was sure the auction had ended and I had lost the medals. I was pretty down and my wife asked if I had checked the auction yet, I told her no because there was no use in checking as I was sure it had closed. She asked several more times and I agreed to go and check. I clicked on the link and as it turned out the auction had one minute and nine seconds remaining. I was now in a state of excitement, but because I rarely use Ebay I did not know my log in information. I looked it up and signed in, down to 35 seconds. I placed a bid $25 higher and clicked place bid, nothing seemed to happen. My wife (standing over my shoulder counting off the seconds...30.....25...20) said click confirm bid, this I did, and right away it told me I was out bid by $5. I hurried to place another bid, hit enter and the auction closed...I had lost. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement, my wife said I looked devastated. I was so furious I threw my glassed across my desk (and chipped them, pity as they are my favorite pair.)

I then looked for a way to contact the buyer or seller, but all I found a way to leave a message and did so. Feeling like this would do no good I continued to try and find the sellers info, this was when I noticed that the last name of the seller was the same last name as the lady who had the photos! These must have been the "few other things" she had found in the trash. I immediately sent her an email asking if she had just sold Bobby's medals on Ebay? I heard nothing back that night.

When I checked my email in the morning she had responded, from reading her email you could almost hear her crying, she was so apologetic and explained that her husband had put the medals on Ebay and that he was not aware that she had contacted a relative. She was apparently not aware that the medals were Bobby's, they did not connect the dots and now the medals had been sold.

I pleaded with her to give me the buyers email address so I could buy them from him, but she would not release his info. She however sent the buyer this message; "These items were listed on June 2. My husband and I had found these and pictures going through a box headed for the trash. Evidently after the items were listed by my husband, while I was doing research on the pictures, I found a cousin of the soldiers. My husband had no idea that I was doing this, because it's a hobby. I had no idea the medals he listed belonged to the same family. This morning I received emails from the cousin who would like to purchase them from you. Would you be willing to either do that or retract the bid at buyers remorse? I am so sorry for the mix up. It's up to you. Had I known these went up, I would've removed the listing. Please let me know, and again my apologies."

All I could do was wait to see what the buyer would do. At 0853 the buyer responded and he was not happy to say the least. She forwarded me the email he sent, but I will not publish it here. He was suspicious of the "lost relative" suddenly wanting the medals at the last minute and believed that it was only money that was motivating me. I can't say that I blame him after all who would believe such a story. At one point I sent the lady a link to this very page to send to the buyer so he would understand why I wanted the medals.

The buyer said if he obtained the medals he would not resell them to me, in his email he said "I carefully
preserve and document our nation's military service and share the information with other collectors and historians. I am a collector, not a dealer."
He also told the lady if she wished to cancel the auction he would agree to this and let the medals go. Even though he was terribly disappointed to loose the medals, as a man of honor he did what he agreed to do. She cancelled the auction and he approved it. I received the confirmation email at 09:52. I sent the lady an email asking for the email address she used for Paypal so I could pay her for the medals one minute later, but received no reply.

Our emails had started around 0800 and the two hours between then and when I received the email showing that the auction had been cancelled had been two very long hours, but the next hour and a half would be even longer.

I waited for her to send me her info and the minutes ticked by. I could not figure out why she did not respond, then my mind went into overdrive thinking the worst. Perhaps she had reconsidered, perhaps asking for her Paypal info had spooked her, after all she did not know me from Adam. As time went on I began to worry more so I called my mother and told her what I was doing. I asked her that if the lady responded if she could send my brother to pick up the medals straight away, I did not want to take any chances of letting them slip out of my hands. She agreed, but I told her to have him cover up his tattoos as he might frighten the nice lady.

As more time went by I called dear old mom again and asked if she could get cash and pay the lady for the medals as it seemed to me that she did not want to give me her Paypal info. Mother agreed to this as well. After sending several emails to the lady telling her that she would have cash shortly I finally heard from her at 11:13. She had gone to the store!!! I was so relieved I can not put it into words. She sent me her phone number and I called her immediately. We talked for over half an hour and I found her to be quite lovely to speak to. I told her I would have someone come and collect the medals, but when I told her where my parents lived she said she would just take them over to them.

Apparently when they met they had a great conversation and the medals were given to my mother. I had offered the lady more than what the medals sold for because I was so greatful for all that she had done to get them to me, but she would not take a penny more than the sale price.

Perhaps it was providence or some other force which made all these pieces fall into place, but what ever it was I am greatful to everyone involved. The medals are now in my possession and will be preserved in Bobby's memory.
© 2012 Michael W. Pocock
MaritimeQuest.com


The photo of Robert N. Zern recovered by the lady.



AMM2 Robert N. Zern, USNR (gunner) first on left, Lt. William N. Holmes, USNR (pilot) second from left,
ARM3 Neil J. Hanley, USNR (radioman) first on right.
(Photo courtesy of Virginia Hanley)



The medals, purple heart box and dog tags belonging to AMM2 Robert Niel Zern. Sadly the Purple Heart was not in the box, it may have been lost years ago. In an attempt to replace it I went to a military exposition the same weekend, I came across a Purple Heart for sale at from on of the dealers there. I opened the box and saw the award, along with the citation. The citation had the name, rank and date of death of the man who it was awarded to, it also had a set of oak leaves which means he was wounded twice. At that moment I knew I could not take another Purple Heart in place of the one that was lost. To take another medal and discard the citation would be to erase what that man had earned, this would have been as wrong as it was to throw Robert's medals away. It is my intention to apply for a lost medal and if that does not work I will buy a replica to replace it.



The medals that Robert never saw. From left to right; Good Conduct Medal, World War II Victory Medal and the American Campaign Medal. All awarded posthumously, probably to his mother.



The back side of the Good Conduct Medal.



Robert's dog tags. Just holding these makes me feel a strong connection to the man I never met.



August 27, 1943: Burial ceremony for the four crewmen of B-24 Alley Oop at Adelaide River Cemetery, Adelaide, Northern Territory, Australia. In the coffins from left to right Cater, Poor, Shepherd and Siple.
(Photo courtesy of Peter Dunn and www.ozatwar.com)



The grave of Colonel Edward F. Shepherd, USAAF at Arlington National Cemetery.
(Photo courtesy of Elva M. Pocock)




Roll of Honor
In memory of those who lost their lives in
TBM Avenger (69415)
VT-16
USS Randolph CV-15
July 10, 1945
"As long as we embrace them in our memory, their spirit will always be with us"

Name
Rate
Holmes, William N.
Lieutenant (USNR)
Hanley, Neil J.
Aviation Radioman 3rd Class (USNR)
Zern, Robert N.
Aviation Machinist's Mate 2nd Class (USNR)



Roll of Honor
In memory of those who lost their lives in
B-24D Liberator "Alley Oop" (41-24248)
530th Bomb Squadron
380th Bomb Group
Aug. 25, 1943
"As long as we embrace them in our memory, their spirit will always be with us"

Name
Rate
Cater, Clifford D.
Technical Sergeant (USAAF)
Poor, Jr., Samuel S.
Captain (USAAF)
Shepherd, Edward F.
Colonel (USAAF)
Siple, Raymond E.
Flight Officer (USAAF)


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