This is the field as I saw it for the first time in March, 2003. I thought it would be important to share the simplicity of the place that was forever changed on Friday, April 13, 1945. By the time I arrive there next week, the excavation preparations will be underway and the field will no longer look as it does in these photos. It is easy to see that the field has remained exactly as it was 60 years ago when a squadron of American fighter planes flew overhead enroute to their airfield. One of the eyewitnesses to the crash told me he was standing on the road in this picture when he heard and saw a squadron of fighter planes overhead. The next thing he knew, my father’s plane was billowing smoke and spiraling toward the earth. He learned later than an anti-aircraft gun was positioned on the railroad tracks in the distance and my father’s plane was the only target. He remembered wanting to run toward the burning wreckage but his father pulling him into a ditch for protection. They stayed there for hours until the explosions stopped. He cried as he told me how sorry he was that he couldn’t do anything to save my father. Until we met that day, he didn’t know who the pilot had been. I showed him my father’s smiling photo and he hugged me and apologized again for being “only a little boy” and helpless to do anything.
I took the picture of the tracks with a clear view of the field. I was told that during the war the anti-aircraft guns traveled along the tracks all day searching for enemy aircraft. On the day my father’s squadron flew over the field in Elsnig, he was flying the only P-38 painted black in the group. I have speculated with members of his squadron if that was why he was selected by the gunner on the tracks. Whatever the reason, these photos depict the field and the tracks exactly as they were then which leaves little to imagine except what it would have been like to be that little boy walking back to the field with his father after lunch to finish the days work.