Charles Catanzaro

Had it not been for one of his brothers’ childhood illnesses sending him home, Charles Catanzaro would have waited out the war straining at the bit to go overseas. With one of the Catanzaro boys married, one already serving overseas and one trying to get in, Charles, born April 11, 1921, was left at home in Ridgewood, N.J., taking care of their widowed mother. Luckily, the military didn’t want the mastoid-afflicted Catanzaro.

“The minute they sent him home, I got a big present. I got my notice to report,” Catanzaro says today.

“The war was getting really hectic by then,” said Catanzaro, who the military, in late 1943, had decided was suited to be an aviation mechanic. “We were losing those B-17s a couple dozen at a time every time they went out.”

He left New York on March 30, 1944, to serve in the 47th liaison squadron, 9th Air Force, flying mail and doing detached service to Gen. Omar Bradley in tiny planes with a top speed of 100 mph.

“Where he went, we went,” Catanzaro said.

Usually stationed far behind lines, the squadron took generals up to see the battlefield from the top in order to plan their next moves. But when the weather was bad, there was often nothing to do all day besides sit in a tent and play cards. Once, Catanzaro found himself in a Jeep traveling behind Gen. Bradley. The Jeep stopped at one of the tents.

“I knew when he opened the flaps of that tent what he’d find,” Catanzaro said. Bradley came in and saw the card game in progress. “Ah,” he said, loud enough to announce his presence.

The lieutenant jumped up from his hand and hollered attention.

“All Omar said was, ‘At ease, men. Can I fly today?’” Catanzaro recalls with a smile.

Odd jobs presented themselves from time to time. At one point, Catanzaro did search and confiscation in Wiesbaden, Germany. He still has the book, full of photographs of Adolf Hitler. He still insists he’d “never do that again,” if given the chance. Nor would he probably walk through Buchenwald again, as he did soon after its liberation, witness to the “bodies stacked as high and long as freight cars.”

“I’ve never forgotten that odor,” Catanzaro says.

Another harrowing moment came while refueling a plane on an English airfield, when a German “buzz bomb” nearly mowed him down. When he ran out of the way, he nearly got run over by a British spitfire that had just banked its wheels.

That was unintentional. Most of the daredevil acts of the squadron were quite on purpose: swooping under the Ludendorff Bridge over the Rhine after its Allied capture, flying through the Eiffel Tower or chasing livestock through the countryside.

In Verdun, one of the officers came in over a long line of tents, knocking every single stovepipe over as he dove.

“I don’t know if Omar Bradley ever sent a little word to him,” Catanzaro says dryly.

One aerial stunt Catanzaro was taken on quite unwillingly. The pilot wanted to spin his wheels “buzzing” the top of a tall English haystack. Catanzaro was not amused. “‘Listen you big SOB,’” he told the pilot, “‘the next time you want to kill yourself, you do it without me!’”

But life in the war was life- threatening on a daily basis. One night, transporting 300 gallons of 100-octane airplane fuel on a canvas-roofed truck on a tree-lined French road with just slits of illumination from the fender lights, Catanzaro got shot at.

“All at once, this bullet went right by me,” Catanzaro says, recalling the high-pitched “wheeng!” of the bullet sailing past his ear. “I heard it go plop into the tree. Well, you just keep going.”

After the war, Catanzaro worked for a while with his brothers in the trucking business. He ran his own garage as well until Vietnam. It was while getting his phone line hooked up at that garage that he met his wife, Marilynn Pearl Eaton of Bucksport. The two had no children, but spent 41 and a half years together in marriage until her death.

These days, Catanzaro, like many veterans, calls the current war “a mess” and a “big blunder.”

“We never had enough troops,” he says. “If this President doesn’t go down as one of the worst in my lifetime, I’ll be surprised.”

He says the only way there will be enough troops is a draft or to pull out of countries like Japan, where American troops are still stationed without threat of war.

“If they were all conscripted, you’d hear bloody murder coast to coast,” Catanzaro said.

“But this is still the best country. This is the place,” Catanzaro says. “We just can’t go on trying to create democracy. I hope they find a way, but I don’t see how.”