,
14 tweets,
3 min read
Read on Twitter
1) Memorial Day thread on my mother’s cousin, Murray Lebowitz, written because those who remember him grow fewer with every year. There isn’t much truly unique within this tale — there are hundreds of thousands of deaths like it — but this one still lives within our family. 
2) When Pearl Harbor was bombed, Murray was a senior at the University of North Carolina, chasing a degree in forestry. I love that small detail, given that he was a Bensonhurst kid. Forestry, of all things. Anyway, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was trained...
3) on B-24 Liberators as a turret gunner. As an older cousin, he was so idolized by my mother’s brother that Irving too enlisted in the Air Corps and was in training in Louisiana when the war ended. But in 1943, Murray was flying missions against Rabaul and other targets....
4) ...in Japanese-held New Guinea. His bomb wing was based at on the Seabee-built bomber fields built on Guadalcanal, captured from the Japanese the year before. Having read the unit history, I can sense the horrifying attrition of these missions; one plane after the next....
5) ....disappearing either en route to New Guinea or on the return voyage. And the Japanese fighters or anti-aircraft fire were the least of it. The rainy season in the South Pacific left everything rusted and rotted. Spare parts were precious; planes were cannibalized to keep...
6) ...enough planes viable to mount bombing runs. In March, the Japanese were able to strange the airfield damaging even more planes. Monsoons flooded the living quarters. Still, they continued to fly, often only managing to launch eight or nine planes. And again...
7) most of the casualties were not directly from combat but from mechanical failures. Often half the B-24s would feather an engine and be forced to turn back from the target or would be lost en route. In April, Murray wrote to my uncle in Louisiana; it was not a florid letter....
8)...of flag-waving. Murray was blunt about the attrition and the peculiar horror of losing one’s life not to Japanese fire but to engine failure or a crippled landing mechanism. In April, another plane in his squadron crashed on takeoff, killing the crew. And a week later...
9)...on April 29, Murray’s aircraft took off from Bomber Field #3 as part of a six-plane mission against New Guinea. His plane tumbled down the 6000-foot runway, cleared the shoreline at Koli Point and then arched into the Coral Sea about half a mile from shore. One crewmember...
10) ...was rescued from the water. The plane and the other bodies were not recovered, their lives unlived from that precise moment. That branch of the family has no survivors; my mother’s aunt and uncle had a daughter who gave them a grandchild, but she did not marry and all...
11)...have now passed on. Of Murray’s cousins on both sides of his family, all but four are gone. My mother, at 97, still remembers but not for so much longer. After that there will only be a name for Technical Sergeant Lebowitz on a marble wall somewhere in the Philippines....
12) ...and a plaque on the wall of the Jewish War Vererans Post in Flatbush, which is named in part for my cousin. My great aunt Tessie honored her son selling war bonds until the end in 1945. But she never got over it. Who the hell does? “You can tell me who won that war, but..”
14) “....only know that I lost it.” It’s just one family story. One of so very many for this day.
Strafe* not strange.
