I saw these pics for a first time when I was about 10 yo. In our elementary school. It was in 80's and before the 'Velvet revolution', so under the communist goverment yet. Back then all the information about US soldiers and airmen were forbidden, because only the Red Army soldiers were the right liberators of our country...
From some reason some of the history teachers managed to enforce displaying those pics in our school because those flyboys were the part of the history of my born town so all the kids, teachers and school visitors could see all the pics. No one felt offended but I only remember that I felt very sorry for those poor guys and couln't understand why some of the Germans on these pics were smiling posing over the dead airmen...and my wish was to find out the names our 'our' heroes from the sky one day. The Velvet revolution changed it all and gave the possibilities to our town to get in touch with the battle survivors and give the names to all 41 airmen who were KIA in the battle so also to those 28 of them who were buried in a mass grave in Slavicin, my born town. When I was kid I remember the grave with the headstone where there was written: 28 American fliers, KIA on Aug. 29, 1944, exhumed on Sept 5, 1946. Nothing else. Since 1994 each flyboy has his own name on the headstone.
All these pics you can see in our 3 museums that are dedicated to this battle, in the publication that was published in Czech and English version in 1945, in several books that were published few years ago and since 2014 also on our web. In our museums we had during the years many visitors, many relatives of the battle survivors and victims, the active duty airmen from the USAF (2 BW, 5BW and 307 BW) and also the people from the US Embassy and none of them felt ever offended by these pics.
I like watching the history channels and in almost every document, if not in all, you can see the dead soldiers, at least Germans or the victims from the concentration camps. So I only repeat, that we are not showing the pics to dishonor these poor guys, but to show to all the people what the war is, what the war mean and that we must never forget how much our past generations paid for our today's freedom. And we do our best that the sacrifice of those young men will never be forgotten.
But for sure, If any of the family members of the fallen would ask me for hidding these pics, I´d do it. It never happened so far.
Just to turn the page, let me show you few intersting links:
- Pics from the visit (2010) of Dudley P. Merrell, a nephew of Dudley E. Standrindge, the tail gunner
http://www.leteckabitvakarpaty.cz/udalo ... akce-2010/- Dudley Standridge, the tail gunner
http://www.leteckabitvakarpaty.cz/osobn ... tandridge/- Carl S. Goodman, co-pilot
http://www.leteckabitvakarpaty.cz/osobn ... s-goodman/ and his grave in Belgium
https://youtu.be/QPiZ8W60W1o Carl had a cousine whose son was Michael J. Smith, the pilot who perished during a Challenger space shuttle disaster...
- Pics from the visit (2017) of Jane Pifer, a daughter of Richard P. Hartman, the bombardier
http://www.leteckabitvakarpaty.cz/udalo ... orm-pifer/ Jane was born 6 days after her father's death...
- Richard P. Hartman, the bombardier
http://www.leteckabitvakarpaty.cz/osobn ... p-hartman/Nice weekend to all!
Roman
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