This article appeared in the January 2004 issue of KU Alumni magazine

OREAD READER

Home at last

A grieving niece takes up family’s search for lost pilot

My morning newspaper tells me an Army helicopter crashed in Iraq. Nine American soldiers died. Circumstances were uncertain, though witnesses reported hearing a missile. A young Iraqi farmer rushed to the site; there were no survivors to aid. Names of the dead were not reported.

As casually as I reach for another piece of toast I find the sports section.

Diana Thompson Dale, c’69, and her marvelous book, Finding Billy: An Internet Odyssey, remind me to consider the losses. Those soldiers who died yesterday in Iraq? They are anonymous casualties to us, but they will be missed. For their families, nothing about the crash will be forgotten, and the newspaper I tossed aside will be clipped by nine weeping mothers and added as a final chapter in too many scrapbooks.

Such was the case for Dale’s family after the October 1944 death of her handsome, 20-year-old uncle, Lt. Billy Wisner. As Dale shows in loving detail, Billy Wisner was the kid every American boy wished he could have had as a pal, and a happy-faced man who made women look twice.

He trained as a pilot for World War II, and was assigned to fly the glamorous P-38, a versatile, twin-fuselage craft that escorted heavy bombers and could make strafing and bombing runs of its own.

Wisner had been in the war five weeks when, on Oct. 17, 1944, he wrote a long letter to his parents in Dallas, announcing he had christened his P-38 the "Golden Slipper," in honor of their favorite song. Three days later, the Golden Slipper was knocked out of the sky over the Italian Alps.

Lt. Wisner’s plane was struck by parts from two other P-38s that had collided while eluding German shrapnel. Three planes went down but only two parachutes opened. Though nobody could say for certain – except for the young Tyrolean farmer who had rushed to the site, Dale learned decades later during the Internet-powered search that is the basis of her book – the fears of flyers who witnessed the event were correct. Neither chute had been deployed by Lt. Wisner, a fate obscured from certainty by low clouds.

Two weeks later, on Nov. 3, Billy’s parents were celebrating their 28^th wedding anniversary when the phone rang. Ida Wisner was told she had a telegram waiting at the Western Union office.

Her son was missing in action.

One year later he was declared dead, and in 1949 the Army officially abandoned any hope of finding Billy’s remains or mountainous crash site.

But that first telegram stated only that Billy was missing, not dead, and Ida Wisner clung to the uncertainty. She wrote innumerable letters to anyone she could think of: Army offices all over the country, Billy’s squadron mates, classmates from pilot training. Nothing worked, and Ida Wisner died in 1976, knowing almost nothing more of her son’s fate than what she learned from the Western Union Telegram.

When Dale started noodling with the Internet in 1998, she posted a query to a newsgroup dedicated to military-aviation history, asking whether any of the online veterans might have known her uncle. So began the long search that aimed to end the mystery of Billy’s fate.

First, a mild qualifier: Dale’s book, at 353 pages before the afterword, appendices and admirable index, is too long, the Internet saga too minutely detailed. What was surely an astounding computerized adventure at the time is, after five more years of Internet anecdotes, not so mind-boggling, which lessens the need for exhaustive e-mail transcripts.

Finding Billy is beautiful nonetheless.

Internet characters who join forces in the intriguing hunt for a long-dead aviator are woven tightly into the story; when they finally appear as real people, we are as delighted as Dale was to meet them in person, and the reader’s heart breaks, as did Dale’s, when a stalwart Internet friend sends along the news that her only son had inexplicably thrown himself off a cliff – not far, it turned out, from where Billy’s P-38 plummeted into the Alps.

Dale’s amateur hunt ultimately out-performed the Army’s, and proved that the Army had thoughtlessly disregarded the grieving family when it failed to pass on news of an important discovery made in the early 1950s.

Yet the search for answers to Billy Wisner’s fate is not what makes this book unforgettable. The imprint is left by letters and photographs that Diana Dale’s grandmother – Billy’s hopeful mother – saved in scrapbooks.

There is a snapshot taken on a lake during a rare break from pilot training, Billy and his pal Eddy Steffani rowing into the wind and sun, looking every bit the dashing aviators in their leather jackets. Neither had long to live.

Another flyer’s mother responded to Ida Wisner that she, too, lost a son: "I hope this will learn us to fight wars and rumors of wars. Oh God we have had a hard lesson."

And there is the unspeakably sad letter written by Ida herself, to her "darling boy," 12 days after she learned Billy was missing in action. Certain he had survived and been taken prisoner, Ida wrote to the Red Cross, brandishing a mother’s hope that someone might be able to deliver the letter she enclosed.

No words by politicians or peacemakers could possibly do more to scuttle the impetus for war than a letter written by a lonely mother to her dead son. "Don’t forget to pray, darling. Mom loves you very dearly and always will think of you as a little boy. Be sweet, as ever."

Finding Billy is self-published, by Dale’s "Golden Slipper Press," and is far beyond the qualities often associated with such works; she funded the project in part with an unexpected windfall from a successful run on "Hollywood Squares." Her book uses the authentic, brave voices of aviators, family, friends and searchers to tell us stories that should not be forgotten.

It is on bestseller lists in Denver, where Dale lives, yet it also deserves the support of a grateful nation. Finding Billy should be read so that in times of war the morning newspaper is not so easily disregarded.

Chris Lazzarino, Associate Editor