Illustration by Scott Gwilliams
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Captain Cole’s Last Mission
By Warren Sloat, May & June 2004
Over Occupied France, one U.S. pilot lost his life but saved a village. For nearly 60 years, his only son knew nothing of his sacrifice
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Four miles from the small village of Nieul-les-Saintes in the south of
France lies an untilled, rocky field. Sixty years ago, during the buildup to
D-Day, an American bomber crashed here. Nine crew members parachuted safely to
the ground, but the pilot perished with his plane.
Captain Donald Cole died at 23, giving his life to save the village. But it
would be more than 50 years before his son learned about the heroism of this
man—the man who was his father.
Cole's squadron was stationed at Snetterton Heath in England. Their
mission for January 5, 1944, was formidable: a five-hour flight down the coast
of Occupied France to bomb a German airfield at Bordeaux. The Luftwaffe
installation, situated about 350 miles south of the D-Day landing site at
Normandy's beaches, was heavily fortified with ground and air defenses, and
the bombers would be flying without fighter escort.
Cole taxied his B-17 into position, all four propellers whirling, then
lumbered down the runway and headed southeast. The Flying Fortresses, as the
bombers were called, reached the target about noon and bombed it
successfully—another step in breaking down Nazi defenses for the coming
mainland invasion. But resistance was fierce.
"We began to hit ack-ack [antiaircraft] fire, and it started
splattering all over our airplane," recalls Harland Hendrix, a tech
sergeant on Cole's flight crew. One of their engines caught fire.
The wounded plane lagged behind as the bombers headed back to base. Smelling
blood, German fighters strafed ferociously. Soon, a second engine spewed flames
and the crew had to bail out. Two population centers lay in the path of the
doomed plane—Saintes, with 30,000 residents, and the medieval village of
Nieul-les-Saintes, population 955.
Hendrix, the only member of the 10-man crew still alive, says he was the
last to jump. "Captain Cole said, 'Get up here in the front seat and
let's take this thing down.' Just as I was getting ready for that, he
said, 'No, you go now.' So I grabbed the parachute and went to the back
to get out."
The villagers of Nieul-les-Saintes watched helplessly as the blazing B-17
roared overhead, dogged by two German fighter planes. A half-mile past the
village, the plane crashed and exploded. Parachuting down, Hendrix saw the
impact before he hit the ground.
Had Cole bailed out with the rest of his crew, he could have survived. But
villagers believed he stayed at the helm in order to save them.
"I sincerely believe that the captain had a chance to save
himself," says Michel Souris, the current police chief of Saintes. A lover
of history, Souris has pieced together the story of the crash, interviewing
more than 80 witnesses and experts. Based on his investigation, Souris believes
Cole hoped to land the plane, or at least direct it to an open crash site and
then parachute out. "But the airplane crashed quickly," he says.
The villagers carted away Cole's body and buried it in a local
graveyard. But his memory lived on. The fruit and poplar trees that line the
field where he died grew taller, weeds covered the wreckage, rain pounded the
debris into the fertile black ground. But the field was never tilled again, and
even today the mark of the explosion is still visible.
Souris calls the field "holy soil."
Donald Cole grew up in Whittier, California, during the Great Depression. In
1941, he and Beverly Thomason were "going together," as people said
then. Shirley Van Epps, Beverly's sister, remembers him as "a country
boy, quiet, with a sturdy build and not an ounce of fat." She recalls that
he wore clothes nicely, with a relaxed look, and after attending junior
college, he looked spiffy in the uniform of what was then called the Army Air
Corps. On December 7, 1941, while he was stationed at Bakersfield, California,
the world they all lived in changed in an instant.
"I had the radio on, and Don was home for the weekend," Beverly
recalls. She jumped in the car and drove to the Cole farm to tell him of the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. "He was gone in a flash," she says.
He knew he had to get back to his base.
Five months later, they were married in Roswell, New Mexico, where Donald
was in training. The following year, Beverly gave birth to a son, also named
Donald. With the world at war, each day was laced with poignancy. To pass the
time, the young couple partied and made friends with other Air Corps couples.
Don and a fellow trainee, Captain Joseph Walters, became close buddies. The two
shipped off for England within weeks of each other. "Let's get on with
it, was my feeling," Walters recalls now. "I figured when we went
across that we were going to win the damn thing."
With Cole and Walters overseas, Beverly and the baby went back to Whittier
to live with her parents and await her husband's return.
One day a few months later, Donny was being fussy, which was unusual for the
good-tempered baby. Since it was quite early, Beverly cuddled him in the bed.
"In the room at the end of his crib was a dresser, and over this dresser,
pressed with four thumbtacks, was a picture of Don and his crew and the
plane," she recalls. "All of a sudden, it was hanging by one
thumbtack and swinging back and forth. And I thought—hang on, hang
on!" she says. "And then—it fell. Behind the dresser."
Five days after that, a telegram arrived, saying Don Cole was missing in
action.
Beverly immediately posted a letter to Don's buddy Joe Walters, who was
stationed at another air base in England, asking him to find out whatever he
could. Walters, who was a squadron commander, clambered into his B-17 and flew
to Cole's base at Snetterton Heath, but was unable to learn anything.
On February 10, five weeks after the crash, Beverly received official word
of Donald's death.
Joe and Beverly exchanged letters over the course of the next year, and
their friendship flowered.
In July 1945, Walters was sent home on leave. But he didn't head for his
family in Indiana. Instead, he went to California to visit Beverly. "She
and her father met me when the train arrived, so I went to their home and you
know," he says with a laugh, "one thing goes to another."
Not long afterward, the two were married. Joe adopted Beverly's son,
whose name was changed to Don Walters. The couple also had two daughters, Marie
and Nancy, and raised the trio as Air Force nomads. Joe served in Korea, had a
distinguished military career, and retired a colonel. Since then, Joe and
Beverly have lived in Marietta, Georgia.
Looking to the future is a family trait, Beverly says. The Walters clan
never spent much time dwelling in the past. Maybe that's why young Don
never heard much about Don Cole. In fact, while Beverly remembers sitting Donny
down in his early teens to tell him that his biological father had been killed
in World War II, Don doesn't remember hearing it. He eventually understood
that he was the son of his mother's first husband. But to him, Joe was his
father, and that was that.
Don grew up to be six-foot-four, served in Vietnam as a Marine, married, had
a son, and launched a successful career as a self-described "computer
geek—more like what used to be called an efficiency expert."
In late 2000, he was 57 years old and working in his home office in
Asheville, North Carolina, when he received a startling phone call from Bill
Bell, editor of the Whittier (California) Daily News. The Air Force had
enlisted Bell's newspaper to find the family of Captain Donald Cole. Bell
told Walters that a village in France intended to put up a monument to honor
Cole and hoped that the captain's family could attend.
Walters was skeptical. His first thought, he says, was why Cole? "There
were a whole bunch of guys that died over there, not just my dad," he
says. Walters told his wife, Judy, that the call was insignificant, just
"a reporter beating the drums for some news."
When Major Dale Huhmann, an Air Force attaché at the U.S. Embassy in
Paris, called a few days later, Don's attitude changed. In an hour-long
conversation the major filled in the details of Cole's mission and the love
that Nieul-les-Saintes bore for him.
During that call, Don realized—possibly for the first time—that
he knew "little or none, and closer to none than little" about his
biological father. He was amazed to discover that Cole was a full-fledged
hero.
Don and Judy decided to go to France for the ceremony. (Joe and Beverly, by
then in their 80s, stayed home.) The couple arrived in January of 2001. At an
elaborate dinner, they met Police Chief Michel Souris—the amateur
historian who was the guiding light and chief planner of the event—and
local officials. Through an interpreter they were able to talk with
eyewitnesses to the crash.
The big surprise came the following afternoon.
The Walterses expected their pilot's story to be one of many told at the
ceremony. "I thought we would go over there and Donald Cole's name
would be one of 500 on a plaque somewhere," Judy confesses.
The villagers had other ideas. On a thoroughly unpleasant day with a
temperature of 38 degrees and a steady piercing wind that made it seem much
colder, hundreds turned out to honor Captain Cole. Schoolchildren had made
American flag placards to line the route for two miles or so along a road from
the village to the monument, located near the crash site in a swath of
countryside called Rochevent. French and American flags flew on both sides of a
granite marker, which stood waist-high. Walters unveiled it to reveal a
memorial to his father alone: "Capitain Charles Donald Cole, United States
Air Force Pilot, Died Commanding the B-17 'Hunyak' at
'Rochevent' on the 5th of January, 1944."
Then came the speeches. Fighting back tears, Major Huhmann described the
last moments before the plane crashed, based on Air Corps interviews with the
crew members. Albert Duc, a French farmer who hid one of the surviving crew
members from the Germans, said that Cole was a hero not only because he gave
his life to fight Nazism but because he stayed at the controls of the plane in
order to keep it from crashing in their village.
Called upon for remarks, Walters told the crowd that two months before he
had known nothing about his father except that he had died in World War II.
After learning about Cole's successful mission—and the crash that
spared every life except his own—Walters continued, "What can I say
other than 'Thanks, Dad, you did a great job'?"
When the dedication was over, the band lined up to lead a procession roughly
half a mile to a local road renamed for Captain Cole. Then a small group led by
Chief Souris took Don and Judy up a tractor path to the crash site. Designated
a national historic site, it stands unused, although fields all around it are
cultivated. A small creek, with eels, runs nearby.
Souris offered Don a shovel to search for fragments of his father's
B-17. Don looked around for a likely place and started to dig. He found some
charred metal and collected some soil, which he put into a plastic bag.
Back at the town hall, tables were laden with various parts of the B-17 that
had been removed from the crash site. The villagers gave Don a memento found
while excavating at the site—a scrap of leather from Captain Cole's
flight jacket.
As they were leaving, Judy Walters thanked Souris for his efforts.
"This is a lot of work," she said. "Why did you do
this?"
"Well," he responded, "My father used to say when a man dies
it's a book that we bury."
Thanks to the perseverance of a police chief who is also a historian, and to
the gratitude of a French village, the bravery of Donald Cole has been rescued
from oblivion—one hero among thousands deserving of honor on the 60th
anniversary of D-Day.
The process also deeply touched Cole's stoic only child. "You
don't always know how Don feels about things," said Marie Silverman,
his sister. "But I know this really moved him. It shook him, in a good
way."
Don Walters summed up his feelings in his parting remarks to Michel Souris.
"Thanks to you," he said through an interpreter, "I have two
fathers now, and both of them are heroes."
Warren Sloat lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is the author, most
recently, of A Battle for the Soul of New York (Cooper Square Press,
2002).
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