History prof takes human look at past

Responding to an apocalyptic scenario in which the world would end tomorrow, History Professor Thomas Childers advocated the need to look beyond history's larger trends to the smaller events of human love and suffering that often stand behind them. Speaking as part of a lecture series sponsored by the History Undergraduate Advisory Board, Childers outlined personal experiences which demonstrate the need for popular history. He compared anecdotes from his own life to the process undertaken by people studying history. The lecture recreated events of April 21, 1945, when -- in the final days of World War II -- a group of 150 B-24 bombers lost a single plane, called the Black Cat, on what turned out to be one of the final flights over Germany. "An 80-millimeter shell, one of the only of the little clouds that exploded, hit the Black Cat -- and a young radio operator from Tennessee was on that plane, my Uncle Howard," the professor said. Childers said he has had periodic visions of a room full of color since childhood. Upon discovering photographs of and letters from his deceased relative in a locked drawer, he found that his childhood vision was an early recollection of his uncle's flower-filled funeral room. "I looked farther into the drawer and found unanswered notes from my grandfather asking the War Department what had happened to his son the day the plane went down -- we never really knew," he said. "Two men had escaped, but the War Department had reports of three parachutes opening." As a historian, Childers said he decided to look into questions about his uncle that had "hovered above me since my earliest memories and haunted my family since 1945." Childers discovered what he found to be the truest reason for historical work -- the search for meaning amidst the past -- during a six-year search for the answers to what happened to the members of the Black Cat. He sifted through countless government documents, interviewed survivors and eyewitnesses to the crash and published a book entitled Wings of Mourning, en route to discovering the truth about his uncle. He found that his uncle did land that day -- only to be beaten, paraded through the streets and returned to the crash site lifeless by the townspeople who had killed him when they discovered he was a United States military pilot. "We have many books for the history of global economics, the strategy-makers and people at the forefront, but precious few devoted to the others who found themselves in the iron and terrifying grip of war," Childers said in identifying the need for popular history. Aaron Jaffe, a Philadelphia resident who attended the lecture, recalled his World War II commander named Sgt. Hodges -- who was killed days before the arrival of peace just as Childers' uncle had been. And referring to the lecture, he said "[Childers] was talking about the Sgt. Hodgeses of history ? people will say it was Eisenhower who won the war -- I say it was Sgt. Hodges."