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Spirit of MartinezWhat a Family Kept
The locker arranged: B-15 jacket, crew plate, wallet, and gloves

The footlocker

What the paperwork says, and what it cannot settle

None of these documents agrees with all the others about exactly what happened, or exactly how many times it happened. Fourteen chapters into trying, the book stopped trying to resolve that. A family kept everything anyway.

Seven numbers

And what each one counts

Every figure below is documented. No two of them count the same thing. Choose one and the mission record answers — or declines to. Fourteen captains’ charts survive in the locker; the list opens on those.

The 95th Bomb Group’s own crew record, from Chemnitz on 14 February to Oranienburg on 20 April. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Stuart certified the same figure on 8 May 1945, with 208 combat hours. Frank and Joyce numbered the scrapbook to twenty-eight, mission for mission.

14 of 28 on a chart in the locker

  1. 0114 February 1945Chemnitz44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  2. 0215 February 1945Cottbus44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  3. 0319 February 1945Osnabrück44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  4. 0420 February 1945Nuremberg44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  5. 0521 February 1945Nuremberg44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  6. 0622 February 1945Bamberg44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  7. 0724 February 1945Bremen44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  8. 0825 February 1945Munich44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  9. 0927 February 1945Leipzig44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  10. 103 March 1945Brunswick44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  11. 114 March 1945Ulm / Baumenheim44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  12. 1210 March 1945Dortmunderfeld44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  13. 1312 March 1945Swinemünde44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
  14. 1414 March 1945Seelze44-6838 Spirit of Martinez
Full mission board

Decorations

  • Distinguished Flying CrossRibbon present; citation not located
  • Air MedalGO 289 · 27 February 1945
  • Air Medal, oak leaf clusterGO 482 · 15 March 1945
  • Air Medal, second clusterGO 638 · 28 March 1945
  • Air Medal, third clusterGO 720 · 7 April 1945
  • EAME Campaign MedalCentral Europe, Ardennes, Western Europe

Objects

Award of Merit, 1939

Treasure Island. Gas Model Hydroplane Meet. Outstanding junior citizen. Two signatures, one of them Leland W. Cutler’s.

Certificate of Promotion, 1935

Martinez Junior High to senior high, Alhambra Union High School District. Frank J. Calicura. Given at Martinez, June 21, 1935.

At their stations

Seven in-aircraft prints on a paper page, labeled in a family hand. Markus and Ernest are not on the sheet.

Woody Woodpecker solo card

19 October 1943, Canal Field, Ocala. Signed Ellis G. Ort. The Army let the occasion be what it was.

Greenville Aviation School

Ocala. Primary Training Course. Aviation Cadet Frank James Calicura. Cooper, Hanley, Cummins. The paper that names the school.

Instrument ticket, 15 April 1944

Turner Field. A.A.F. Form No. 8. Same day as the commission.

Identity card, 15 April 1944

2nd Lt. Frank J. Calicura. 5 ft. 9 in., 155 lbs. Right-hand fingerprints. The silvering is the photograph.

The PILOT ring

Dark oval stone, eagle and shield, a banner with one word. The paper from that April is all addressed to somebody. The ring is not addressed to anyone.

Shipping voucher no. 13

Fifteen pieces of flying gear, Hendricks Field, 25 July 1944, in Frank’s own hand. An A-2 jacket worth $8.12 had already gone missing from a locker.

The short snorter

A dollar bill covered in signatures. The Army did not require it, did not track it, and would not have cared if it were lost.

Nine wallets

Martinez Kiwanis Club, stamped SPIRIT OF MARTINEZ, ordered for a war in the Pacific that never came.

The Red Bar card

8 Green’s Court, off Brewer Street, Soho. Open 2.30 to 10. THIS CARD CANNOT BE SOLD. Carried back from a London pass. The mission reports do not mention it.

Joyce’s scrapbook

Clippings glued to black pages in a wooden cover, numbered in pencil from Mission #1 to Mission #28 after he came home. The only object that was made rather than kept.

Fourteen captains’ charts

Newcastle to Prague, annotated by hand, missions one through fourteen without a gap. Control points, times, flak in colored pencil.

The ribbon bar

Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, EAME campaign medal. The DFC citation has not been located. In July 1973 a fire in St. Louis destroyed most of the files.

Stuart’s memorandum, 8 May 1945

Twenty-eight operational missions. Two hundred eight combat hours. Recommended instructor. It does not count the food.

GO 289, 27 February 1945

Air Medal. A mark beside the name. Second Lieutenant still. The rest of the crew on the same page.

VA letter, 30 October 1959

Claim C-1,302,621. Compensation denied. The condition was found either not service-connected, or service-connected but rated below ten percent. Both readings were available in the same sentence.

Airman Rating Record no. 107645

4 August 1947. Commercial pilot, single- and multi-engine land. Flight instructor, 30 September 1947. 731 Mellus Street.

CAA medical, 7 July 1948

Second Class Airmen. 731 Mellus Street. Limitations: none. His signature.

The plates

Photographs and objects the family kept. Each one has its own address. The mission reports document targets, tonnage, losses, and times. These document a dirt strip, a wet street, a handshake, a name on the nose, and the papers that would not agree.

86 of 86

Questions left open

These are not gaps awaiting a tidier draft. They are the points at which the surviving record stops.

  • Which classification center

    The collection does not say which of the three Army Air Forces classification centers administered Frank’s battery. No assignment has been made on the strength of geography.

  • The thirtieth bomb

    The jacket carries thirty symbols. Subtracting two missions in borrowed aircraft, the crew record accounts for twenty-nine.

  • The Distinguished Flying Cross

    The headstone and the coat carry the ribbon. At least one archival summary of the service record does not list the award, and no citation has been located. The 1973 NPRC fire is the ordinary condition of that absence.

  • The origin of the back injury

    A sworn statement places its onset at Avon Park in the autumn of 1944, before combat. The 1959 letter is capable of two readings and settles neither.

  • The seventeenth child

    This book gives seventeen throughout, as the family does, and states at the outset that only sixteen can be documented. Either a seventeenth child was born later and went unrecorded, or an infant died young and is counted by the family but was never counted by the newspaper.

  • Which Treasure Island building

    The Gazette records only that Sam Calicura Jr. and Charles Beatie purchased a building at the exposition grounds for hangar purposes. Treasure Island held both purpose-built aviation structures and the Gayway. No source identifies which.

  • What he understood of the ground

    Nothing in the collection addresses what Frank Calicura understood, at the time, about the civilians beneath any of the targets he was sent to. Nothing has been supplied in its place.

  • Whether Dale Ernest is the unnamed witness

    Ernest was at Avon Park in the claim’s window, and in Martinez the year the claim was decided. The connection is offered as likely, not documented.