Headed Home

Note to the reader: Thank you for joining me on my journey to share my father's journey! New posts to the blog here appear at the top of the main page, pushing the previous posts down below. Please be sure to check out the earlier posts and work your way up to the top. 

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Wrapping Up

Dad clowning around for the camera and accentuating his large “schnozzole."

And the war was over. 

Though the last diary entry was 22 May 1945 — two weeks after the official end of the war in Europe — Dad didn't return home to Chicago until six months later, on 19 November 1945, to be discharged five days after that. I seem to recall Dad telling me that he spent a considerable amount of the time after the war's end in France — maybe Paris? — waiting for his “points," however, my memory of that conversation is vague.

 

From the discharge record of James V. Gasbarro.

Accumulating points took quite a while, apparently. To the best of my understanding, the roll call for points came once a week (I don't know for sure, just an assumption I made in order for the following that Dad shared to make sense to me), and Dad and one of his buddies had made plans — were the next roll call to exclude them again — to requisition a jeep to load up and drive to Italy so Dad could visit his parents' home town of Castel di Sangro and the maternal grandmother he had never met. When the next roll call didn't include their names, they put their plan into effect, only to be stopped by one of their sergeants.

“Gasbarro! Where the hell are you going?" the sergeant said, according to Dad's telling.

“We're going to Italy!" Dad told him of their plans. 

“No you're not! You're going home!"

“But my name wasn't called," Dad said. 

He and the sergeant argued the point for a few seconds until the sergeant said, “Come with me!" They walked to the tent where the lists were maintained and the sergeant pulled out the clipboard from that day's points roll. He flipped through the pages a couple of times, swearing that he had seen Dad's name that morning. Then he squeezed the clamp at the top of the clipboard to release the pages and thumbed through them again. There, at the top of one of the pages, he found dad's name, which had been hidden under the clip in that day's list! Dad went home and never did meet his grandmother.

Where the Winds of War Blew

Some 80 years ago, James V. Gasbarro began a nearly three-year journey that took him from his mother's humble home in Chicago Heights, Illinois, to Texas, New Mexico, California, New York, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Germany. I have tried — according to the journal transcript he gave me — to replicate his journey as closely as possible in just three weeks (two, if we disregard my pauses in Paris and the Mosel Valley in Germany), minus the pressures of shooting planes out of the sky and being shelled and shot at in various locations!

The map below is a rough amalgam of routes likely traveled by the 129th AAA to the places listed in the journal transcript, and the routes Stephanie and I traveled to visit the same places. The vagaries of Google's “My Maps" app has rendered any of the routes inaccurate, as we sometimes ventured off the fastest routes in favor of the more direct, while Google defaults to the fastest. I adjusted the routes shown on the map for more direct routes and excluded my and Stephanie's extraneous travels (Dieppe, Paris, etc.) but after the frustration of the user-unfriendly map app, who knows!

Dad's War Journey: Three years and approximately 2,500 miles through Great Britain and Europe. (This, of course, does not include training in the US prior to deploying or the travels to return home afterward.)

Dad, like most old soldiers who had seen battle in the war, rarely spoke of the actual combat in which he had engaged, but, when he did, he spoke little and humbly. He shared with me stories of idle times in England prior to the invasion, when he and his buddies would count the bombers taking off for missions in the skies over France and Germany, and then see the return of drastically fewer planes — many of them battered and broken and barely flying. He spoke of the sight and smell of dead human bodies and the unspeakable things humans will do to other humans in the belief of a cause, things at which the movies made throughout the intervening decades glorifying the war never even hinted. He spoke more freely and often of the odd things that brought him joy or laughter — sometimes only in hindsight — despite the danger of war, things like standing for a routine exam for venereal diseases, his pants around his ankles, and smart-mouthing the medic who was examining his privates, which earned him a punch in the nose; helping the Civitareale family in Differdange, Luxembourg, and the lifelong friendship it spawned. 

And the story of how he eventually decided to become a barber:

 

To follow in one's footsteps usually means to take up one's career or legacy and carry it on. I never did any of those things where my father is concerned; I'm not a barber, I'm the last person you want as a handy-man, I'm a lousy bowler, and I am not a decorated combat veteran. But if it means honoring a father's memory in ways beyond simply retracing his path through a place where war once raged, by living a life that keeps his name respectable, and — though I am not perfect — trying to be a good and honorable man, then maybe I have done that just a little.

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