DAYTON, Ohio — Paul Young rarely talked about his service during World War II — about the B-25 bomber he piloted, about his 57 missions, about the dangers he faced or the fears he overcame.
“Some things you just don’t talk about,” he said.
But Susan Frymier had a hunch that if she could journey from Fort Wayne, Ind., with her 92-year-old father for a reunion of his comrades in the 57th Bomb wing, he would open up.
She was right: On a private tour at the National Museum of the US Air Force near Dayton, amid fellow veterans of flights over southern Europe and Germany, Young rattled off vivid details of his plane, crewmates, training, and some of his most harrowing missions. “Dad, you can’t remember what you ate yesterday, but you remember everything about World War II,” his beaming daughter said.
When Young came home from the war, more than 60 years ago, there were 16 million veterans like him — young soldiers, sailors, and Marines who returned to work, raise families, build lives.
Over the decades, children grew up, married, had children of their own; careers were built and faded into retirement.
Through it all, the veterans would occasionally get together to remember the greatest formative experience of their lives. But as the years wore on, there were fewer and fewer of them. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, just a little more than 1 million remain. The ones who are left are in their 80s and 90s, and many are infirm or fragile.
So the reunions, when they are held, are more sparsely attended — yearly reminders of the passing of the Greatest Generation.
When veterans of the Battle of the Bulge gathered in Kansas City this summer, only 40 came, according to organizers, down from 63 last year and 350 in 2004. Of the 80 members of Doolittle’s Raiders who set out on their daring attack on mainland Japan in 1942, 73 survived. Seventy-one years later, four remain; they decided this year’s April reunion in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., would be their last.