Chapter 6
"It was not until four years after the war that they finally identified Newell and said he definitely was killed in action. They still called it ‘killed in action.’ They didn’t call it murder."
Kay Brainard Hutchins
Red Cross girl, sister of Lt. Newell Brainard, who was killed on the Kassel Mission bombing raid of Sept. 27, 1944
April 26, 1999
West Palm Beach, Fla.
I found some papers in my mother’s desk after she died, and one of them was a newspaper article about a bombing raid dated Sept. 28, 1944. That was the day after the Kassel mission. Mother died in 1957. Could she have sensed correctly that Newell was killed that day? She never knew he was killed. She only knew that he was missing in action. She did say to my sister Betty, "I have a feeling Newell. …" We’d hear stories on the radio about some of the atrocities, dragging the prisoners along, and doing things that were very unkind, and Mother said she had a feeling Newell was being maltreated. She had also predicted when her sister died of pneumonia. We didn’t even know she was in the hospital, because she got sick on a Friday and died on Monday, and before we got the telegram, she had said, "I dreamed about Ruth last night. We haven’t seen her in so long," but she mentioned that before we received the telegram saying she had died, so it makes you wonder about, what is it they call it, ESP?
I worked first at Morrison Field when our local airport was taken over as a very busy Air Force base; in 1941 planes landed here before they went on over to Africa, in the early part of the war. Then I worked at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, which was turned into a military hospital.
Very few people know it, but the Breakers was a hospital, and then they made it back into a hotel. I was the commanding officer’s secretary. They closed it after two years, after spending millions to make it into a hospital; there was politics involved. Anyway, that’s one way I met so many soldiers. I was the right age at that time, and I wasn’t married as most of my friends already were. They had married at 21, 22, and I was 23 at the time. The number of boys around here was unbelievable, and then we had a Signal Corps base about 20 miles north of here, and in Fort Pierce was the Navy Seals they call them now, the underwater demolition group. I dated one of the officers there. Oh, there were so many I couldn’t go steady with anybody. I never had so much fun in my life.
I got a lot of proposals. Everybody wanted to get married before they went overseas. Fortunately, I didn’t take them too seriously, and remained friends with a lot of them through the years. Most of them are dead I’m sorry to say. But I’m 80 years old now. So I’ve seen a lot of years, and I’ve been going to our bomb group reunions. When I finally went overseas with the Red Cross I was with the 486th Bomb Group. I didn’t even know where my brother Newell’s base was, because he could only write "Somewhere in England" in his letters, and it wasn’t until after VE Day that you could say where you were. Even my own family didn’t know I was in Sudbury, Suffolk, until after VE Day.
When I came home I saw in the first 8th Air Force book they put out that there was a list of all the various groups, and I knew the number of his group, so that’s how I found out my brother had been in Tibenham, England.
After the Ream General Hospital [The Breakers] closed, I worked for a little while with intelligence. A friend of ours who was married and had two children had the Parade magazine that comes out Sundays. There was a picture of a Red Cross girl on it. And she said to a friend of mine, "Gee, if I were single and didn’t have these kids, that’s what I’d be doing."
The girl she told was a very good friend of mine. She said, "Mary says she’d go overseas with the Red Cross. I think I’d like that too."
And I said, "So would I.."
I had a very close friend who was a teacher, and she said, "I want to go too." So we all applied. And both of them had all the qualifications as far as the college education and everything was concerned. I had never gone to college, but I had worked since I got out of high school at some very interesting jobs – a travel bureau, for a bank, and then my war work at Morrison Field and the Breakers. So with all of that, I was the first one to hear from them.
They called us to come to Atlanta for physicals. Two of us – Grace the teacher and I – got selected immediately. The other one had some medical problem that had to be taken care of.
By this time the war was well along. Both of my brothers were missing in action. This is 1944, and we went into training in November. We were supposed to be in training in Washington, D.C., for about four weeks, but then the Battle of the Bulge broke out. It was more important that they got GIs over there to take the place of the GIs that were being killed, so there was no room on the ships for Red Cross girls until January, and late in January – I can always remember the date because you could say it 1-2-3-4-5, January 23rd, 1945; that and December were the only times you could ever do that – so I was very late getting into the war, but it hadn’t ended yet.
My first assignment in London was to be in a hospital, and I was very disappointed, because that wasn’t what I was interested in. Just because I had worked in a hospital they thought that was what I wanted to do. I said I’d really appreciate it if I could be with a clubmobile or something like that. And they were wonderful at headquarters, the Red Cross higher-ups. They wanted everybody to be happy and to be satisfied with where they were, so they rearranged things and said, "How would you like to be at an aeroclub on a bomber base?"
I said, "That would suit me fine. I’ve got two brothers in the Air Force. They’re both missing in action."
I was assigned to the Sudbury base near Bury St. Edmonds.
My father was a graduate of Cornell with a degree in engineering, and then, after a few years, he went back to school at Columbia and became a highway engineer; that was his title, highway engineer. And he was the first one in the country, I was told, because his name began with a B, and there wasn’t anyone who graduated with an A name.
He married my mother in 1915; he was 33 years old by this time, mother was 28, and the First World War started and he worked in Washington, D.C., as senior highway engineer. My sister and I were born in D.C. during the First World War. I know from my mother talking about it that he was very involved in the camps that they were building overnight to train soldiers.
But by the time they’d been married seven years, they had four children and my father had an illness that nobody could diagnose. He was working with Standard Oil of New Jersey, and we learned years later that he had multiple sclerosis. So he never worked again. My mother had a sister who was 12 years younger, and she and her husband were down here in Palm Beach and making money hand over fist in what was called the Boom in South Florida. Of course they were in the real estate business. They had two small children, and they said it’s so wonderful, the weather’s so good – at this time we didn’t know it was multiple sclerosis – why don’t you come down here; this is probably a good place for Albert to get well. So we sold our house in New Jersey. We had moved to East Orange when he was with Standard Oil, and both my brothers, Newell and Bill, were born in East Orange.
We moved the whole family down here, and brought all our furniture. I think we had a 13-room house, and we moved into a two-bedroom, one-bath house. And my mother went into the real estate business, too.
Those were the years of the flappers. Mother wasn’t a flapper because she was 12 years older than Ruth, who was a typical flapper, and my sister and I were both envious of her and remember her so well. But when the Boom collapsed, they, along with a lot of their friends, took off immediately for Havana. I think they’d been selling lots that were out in the swamps. And we were left high and dry, Mother with an invalid husband and four kids and no money.
The banks – it was sooner than when Wall Street crashed in 1929; we had it late in 1926. One Monday morning none of the banks opened. Period. The Boom didn’t last too long – it was in the early part of the 1920s; we came down here in 1925 and everything was in full bloom at the time, but it didn’t take long for everything to fall apart.
I wasn’t aware of anything except how cute all those flappers were that would come by our house, smoking their cigarettes and drinking martinis. It was a wonderful time, but unfortunately my uncle, who married my mother’s sister, became an alcoholic, and Aunt Ruth died of pneumonia when she was only 32 years old. It was before penicillin. So Mother was left with four kids and an invalid husband.
I had an uncle in Connecticut. Mother and Father were both from Hartford, and my father’s youngest brother – there was something like 17 years’ difference between their ages; my father was embarrassed when he was in college and came home and found his mother was pregnant – this younger uncle was now a doctor, and he said to Mother, "Send Albert up here. You can’t handle four kids and Albert, too, as an invalid." They didn’t have the medications then that they have now that keep them living for 30 years or more. So my father went back to live with my uncle and his wife, and my grandmother was still alive. And Mother went into a business – she actually had a degree in nursing from Hartford Hospital; she was an RN, but she couldn’t leave four young children, which today nobody would think twice about doing, but she thought it was important and she stayed with her kids. She went into a business that she could do out of our home.
Our church, Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, opened up a small store. I forget what they called it; the Women’s Exchange or something like that. If you could knit a sweater or bake a pie or paint a picture, whatever you did you could sell it there and make a little money, hopefully.
Somebody who did volunteer work at this little shop told Mother that they had a lot of people bringing in pies but few brought in any cakes, and suggested that she try her hand at that. And Mother said, "I never considered myself a baker, but I guess I could bake a cake." So she started baking cakes. But she found people couldn’t afford the whole cake. So Mother came up with the idea, "Why don’t I make cupcakes? Then they could just buy one, two, a half-dozen or a dozen." So she switched to making cupcakes. And they were very popular. At that time all the drugstores had soda fountains and office buildings had luncheonettes, so one or two of them said, "Mrs. Brainard, how about bringing us some of those cupcakes? We could use them for our lunch group." And she supported us for years doing that. We all chipped in – well, my two brothers were too young. Anyway, she didn’t think it was boys’ work. But my older sister Betty and I, we learned how to ice the cakes and help get them ready, and we’d do this before we went to school.
Mother did that for 12 years. Then she rented a house – a big, lovely old place – and put up a sign and made it what they call a "guest house." We didn’t have any motels then.
By this time Betty and I were both out of school, and the two boys were finishing up high school, and Mother was able to support the family. We didn’t live very high on the hog, but nobody else did either. It was the Great Depression, and nobody had any money, but we had a hell of a good time around here. We had the beaches, and we’d meet there on the weekends. I think we all had a wonderful childhood in spite of the fact that we had no money, no TVs, and we didn’t miss it at all. I loved to read; all of us in our family loved to read, so there was plenty to do, and our high school had many dances.
Bill was the youngest of the four children. Newell came next. Newell and I were only 17 or 18 months apart. And Betty was the oldest.
Newell started at the community college, but he got an offer of a good job in the bank, locally, so he dropped out and was working in the bank. We all worked and helped support the family. My first job, I worked for the city physician at $7 a week. And that included half a day on Saturday. It seems funny now. Even when I worked for the bank I only got $60 a month. It was so completely different from today. But I bought all my own clothes, and I managed to have a wonderful time. I went north in the summer. With the seasons being what they are down here, you could get a vacation from the bank, for instance, and you’d get paid for two weeks, but if you wanted to take an extra week without pay you could do that. And there was always somebody driving north that you could ride up with. I was still 16 – I hadn’t quite made 17 when I graduated, and that was because of the Depression. They divided our classes into those who were the slowest and those that were moderate, and then there were those who caught on quicker. Today they don’t think that’s the right thing to do, but that’s what we did. We took half the year for fourth grade and half the year for fifth, and that made us come out a year earlier than we would have otherwise.
As soon as war was declared, Bill and Newell signed up for the Air Corps. And both of them went into training late in ’42, although they didn’t get overseas until later than that. Newell was a co-pilot, due to be made into a pilot the next trip. The pilot, Ray Carrow, survived and I’ve talked to him many times – he lives down in Miami.
Newell was married, to Lorraine Sproul. They got married as soon as he got his wings. Her father was a tax collector here. They were only married eight months before he went overseas, and of course he never came back.
Lorraine married four times. But the second one was a mistake. He was a local boy, but she realized she shouldn’t have married him. They moved out to the Everglades; he was big on farming, which was not her cup of tea. So I think she was only married about a year to him. And then she married a very nice guy, a veteran. She had two boys by him. And then he came down with leukemia. And when he was in the last stages of it, and hospitalized, he jumped out of the hospital window. … Her father as I said was tax collector and he owned the lot next to him, and he built her a house. And she and the two boys moved back here, and she met a very nice guy, finally. But now she has health problems.
A letter that George Collar wrote me was the first I knew of what had happened to Newell. I had sent a letter to the 8th Air Force newsletter. This was the letter George sent me back:
"April 6, 1987. Dear Mrs. Hutchins, I noticed the article regarding the B-24 ‘Blasted Event’ in the July 1983 issue of the 8th Air Force News, and a footnote saying that this ship was shot down on the Kassel raid of 27 Sept. 1944 with the loss of your brother Newell White Brainard. I was quite interested, since I also was shot down on that same raid, in which we lost so many bombers. I did not know your brother Newell personally, since I was in the 702nd Squadron while he was in the 700th. I was on my 29th mission that day and was a bombardier on the crew of Lt. Jim Schaen of Pontatoc, Miss., who was killed. Although we lost 25 bombers that day, the Germans also lost the same number of FW-190s. I have been corresponding with a Mr. Walter Hassenpflug of Friedlos, West Germany. He was a boy of 12 years at the time of the air battle and since it made such an impression on him he has since made a considerable study of the events of that day and is probably the foremost authority on it. I sent him a copy of the article and am sending you a Xerox of his reply.
"As you can see, he is not exactly sure of your brother’s fate but is constantly digging and may come up with more information. I obtained your address from the editor of the 8th Air Force News and hope that you will not consider this letter to be an invasion of your privacy. You may or may not care to delve further into this painful matter. In any case, I remain, Sincerely yours, George M. Collar."
Now, this is a copy of a document from the National Archives, that was sent to Walter Hassenpflug and which George Collar sent on to me:
"In reply to your letter of July 10, 1986, we searched the records of the office of the quartermaster general and located missing air crew reports. We also searched the records of, according to our files, Joseph A. Lemp, Paul Kolliger and others who were tried for their involvement in the shootings of 2nd Lieutenant Cowgill and Lt. Scala and others" [Newell was one of the "others."] "If you wish to order copies" – what they say is it costs money to get them.
This is a copy of a letter from Walter to George that George sent me:
"… I do not know where and how Newell Brainard died. It is possible that he landed with his chute near the village of Nentershausen and was one of the five airmen who were shot to death there. This, however, is merely an assumption. Therefore, I would like to know if his sister, Kay Brainard Hutchins, knows something about it. Do you know if she’s still alive and if it’s possible to contact her? A few weeks ago I met a lady from Lauschroden, 77 years old, who spent a few days here. … She remembered that the prisoners were handed apples through the window in the prison. I think I’ll be able to get more information this way."
That was the first that I heard about five men being beaten and then shot – and that’s March 5, 1987.
Contents
Kay
Brainard Hutchins, Page 2
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