POW/MIA: The Kassel Mission had an abundance of both
An airman's remains come home after 80 years
You know it’s been a rough couple of weeks when the highlight of the time period is a funeral.
First the Yankees had a Fukushima style meltdown, followed by democracy dying in broad daylight, by its own hand no less. Then I learned of the passing of a former colleague, Janet Kroenke. She used to work in the art department of the Bergen Record when I was a copy editor, and she designed the labels for a few of my early audio CDs. She was a ceramic artist and sold her creations on Etsy and eBay, but she had a lot of health problems and lived in some difficult conditions. She also was writing a book about growing up in New Jersey and from time to time she would post a chapter or a vignette on Facebook. Her stories were poignant and compelling, and I wondered if she ever finished the book. I’m going to reach out to her niece to see if she left behind a manuscript. In the meantime, so that her stories don’t get lost, I spent several hours scrolling through her Facebook feed the other day — when someone practically lives on Facebook, by the time one scrolls through more than two years of posts, it’s like scrolling through molasses, but I didn’t want to miss anything and I made it back to early in 2021 which hopefully was around the time she started posting stories. Just to give you a glimpse, this was not a full blown story but simply one of her posts:
Feb 26 2025
I talked to my middle niece, Rosie, yesterday. They have a large piece of property and keep a few chickens.
The first group met with untimely ends at the hands of coyotes and bears. Only one survived, Miss Omelette. Since then I always ask how Miss Omelette is doing.
Yesterday. Rosie regretted to tell me that the feisty, badass Omelette had passed 4 months ago when an egg broke in her body. Valiant rescue attempts failed. I grieve.
However, 6 chickens now inhabit the coop:
Waffles,
Noodles,
Nuggets,
Sammie,
Eggo
and
Feather Locklear.
R.I.P. Miss Omelette
And then on Friday I went to a funeral for John Tarbert at the Gerald B.H. Solomon Saratoga National Cemetery. John was a waist gunner on a B-24 named Mairzy Doats on the Kassel Mission of Sept. 27, 1944 and died when his plane was shot down. Six members of his crew survived, but John was not seen to leave the plane and the last person who saw him said he was kneeling at his position and praying while the others bailed out. His widow received the telegram, I suppose informing her that he was missing in action but it might have told her of his death, the day she gave birth to their son, John. She remarried and John didn’t learn of the circumstances of his birth father’s death until he was an adult. In 2012 he became active in the Kassel Mission Historical Society and, like a certain son of a tanker, has been on the organization’s board for a dozen years. John Tarbert’s remains were identified only recently through a DNA match with his son and another relative.
While we’re on the subject of unwritten books, I encouraged John to write his story from the very beginning. Incidentally, the funeral was covered by a local TV station, following articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and a couple of other major news outlets.
Also at the funeral were Keira Miner and her brother Jim, whose father, Reg Miner, was a pilot who survived the battle and became a prisoner of war; Paula Jolley, whose father died on another B-24 on the Kassel Mission; and Megan Judy, whose grandfather was the navigator on Mairzy Doats and survived to become a prisoner of war.