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July 19, 2011

secTion B

TaTe Talk

Joe Molea is a fighter.The first thing that the

86-year-old Buena Vista Lakes resident would tell you is that he is a soul win-ner. Molea fights for what he believes in: his Christian faith.

Molea, who has an ad-vanced form of cancer, is also a veteran of World War II, having served as a gun-ner on a B-17 bomber. He fought for the same Ameri-can freedom that was estab-lished by the founders of this nation.

Raised in Akron, Ohio, the son of an Italian im-migrant, Molea is one of twelve children, five sons and seven daughters. When the war broke out, two of his older brothers went off to fight. Joe says that the day that he turned 18, he went to sign up for the United States Army Air Corps.

“I wanted to go to war too,” Molea said. “I figured if my two brothers could go, I could go too.”

Upon enlistment and completion of his training, Molea was assigned to the 384th Bombard Group as part of the 546th Bombard-ment Squadron, stationed in England.

He describes the excite-ment they felt when they first arrived overseas and awaited assignment.

“We were like a bunch of guys with all of that train-ing sitting on a bench like a football team waiting to go out and play. It’s the strang-est thing how you’re young and you feel like you’re bul-let proof or you feel like, ‘I can’t wait to get in there and kill those damn Germans for all they did to us,” he said. “We flew every chance the weather would permit us. There was a lot of times when we wouldn’t fly for four or five days, maybe six or seven days. Each one of those gets you anxious. Of course we were scared ev-ery time we went. I’d chal-lenge a guy to say he wasn’t scared. But we still went be-cause we wanted to see the war over.”

Molea says that the B-17 flights typically took ten hours, as the “Flying For-tress”, as they’re called, are long-range bombers and would fly completely across

Germany, largely without an escort. Because they didn’t have the escort protection that they needed, he says sometimes they would lose fifteen planes and only come back with eight.

“All of these (people we lost) were good friends of ours. We got to where, after our tenth mission, we started getting silly. We started ask-ing dumb questions like, ‘Hey, I like that jacket you’re wearing, if you don’t come back can I have it?’ and stuff like that. We’d put money in a pot and, if there were ten crews that did that, the ones that came back would split the money.”

Because the B-17 would fly at high altitudes, some-times 35,000 feet, the pilots would have to take seri-ous precautions in order to stay warm, as temperatures would drop to 60 degrees be-low zero. They would have to wear thick electric boots they would plug in to keep warm, and heavy gloves, especially for those, such as Molea, who were gunners, having to handle the metal guns. Molea recalls people not wearing their gloves and paying the price, sometimes losing fingers to frost bite.

“A lot of times when we came back you could watch the doctors thump (the fingers) right off of their hands because they were all black and frost-bitten, because they did that when we trained them not to do it. But, you know how some guys are. ‘Oh, you know that can’t happen to me.’”

“We were scared to death when we started going to Berlin. We wanted to hit Berlin hard because we knew Hitler was there, and it was right close to the time the war was over. We’d be going over there and planes were constantly coming back to reload. It was close to D-Day. The guys on the ground were really moving too.”

Molea can recall one in-stance where things didn’t go quite as planned. Gen-eral Patton once led his troops into an area that was scheduled to be bombed to early, and the planes ended up dropping bombs on their own troops.

“General Patton was a glory hound. General Eisen-hower would tell him to hold back until the bombers

got in there. He wanted to be a glory hound. He’d go in there before the bomb-ers and we bombed our own men one time. They got hit hard and bad but they still stayed there because it was just minutes from the town where we dropped our bombs.”

This occurrence led to a chance encounter years later.

“I met a guy one time in New Orleans and I was ex-plaining to him what I did and he was explaining what he did on the ground, and he said, ‘The Eighth Air Force bombed us one time because we got up there too early.’ And I said, that was us,” Molea laughed. “Boy he was mad, he said, ‘You son of a gun!’ and I said well, we did what we were supposed to do and you did what you were supposed to do. But Eisenhower told them not to go in until (Patton) got word that the bombers had been in first. But he went in.”

Molea also recalls a time in his tour that he, an Akron resident crossed paths with another man, whom he had never met, also from Akron. Although the two did not know each other, they had more in common than they initially realized.

“We sat together and we started talking and he says he’s got a girlfriend and he can’t wait to go back and see her because he missed her so much. I said ‘Yeah, I’ve got a girlfriend too,’ and I pulled out my wallet and he pulled out his and we showed each other the same girl. I’ll never forget that. His jaw dropped open and he said ‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ We never did see her anymore, even when we got home.”

Molea’s crew successful-ly completed 35 flights. The famous Memphis Belle flew 25 missions with a 10-man crew and gained fame for keeping its crew completely intact.

Because of their achieve-ments in the war effort over-seas, Molea’s home now proudly displays a case full of awards he was issued in recognition for his service. Molea also once turned down an opportunity to re-ceive a Purple Heart award. The Purple Heart is an award reserved for those who have been wounded in battle.

“I got shot right here (in the hand). We got hit hard

that day with flak and stuff,” he said. “When we got on the ground we always had to be interviewed because we might give our group some information that would help with the next mission we go to. I was taking my silk glove off and I couldn’t get it off. When I finally got it off, I had some blood there that had coagulated on that glove. The doctor says, ‘Well here, let me sign you up for the Purple Heart,’ and I said, ‘You’ve got to be kid-ding.’ I didn’t get it. I should have said okay because if you got a purple heart you got a little extra pay, plus you get points for that and you get discharged when the war was over. But it didn’t matter.”

Following his time in World War II, Molea stayed in the reserves and was called back to duty during the Korean War. He wasn’t called into combat, he trained those who were go-ing into combat.

Molea loves to share tes-timony of the time that he was saved.

“A friend of mine that was in the war came over one night and said that he’d been saved. I didn’t know what ‘saved’ meant. I asked, ‘What do you mean you got saved, were you on fire or were you drowning or what?’ and he said, ‘No, I gave my heart to Jesus and I asked him to forgive me of my sins and live in my heart.’ I asked how he knew that because that sounded funny, having someone liv-ing inside of you, and he said he didn’t know how to explain but he experienced it and he invited me to church with him,” he said. ”When I went to the church with him, everything that minister said fit my life to a tee. I thought somebody told him about me. I was 24 years old then and that was the first time that I’d heard the gospel. I’d never heard that. I went for-ward and accepted the Lord and it was exciting for me because I’d never heard it.”

“After I was saved about six months or a year I started thinking about that. Here I am and I’ve been in this war and a lot of guys, when the lights went out and we were supposed to go to sleep, would get out of their bunk and get on their knees and pray. I could hear that noise

and I’d see these guys down there and I was thinking ‘Man, those guys are really religious. They’re on their knees right here in the army.’ I was thinking about that and thinking it’s funny that I’ve been saved just a short time and I’m telling everyone about Jesus, and these guys were with me for years, and never even mentioned Jesus to me. What if I’d gotten blown out of the sky? Those guys could have at least told me. In my opinion, I think everybody should at least hear it, and then their deci-sion is their own deal.”

Following his service dur-ing the Korean War, Molea says he went to school to study the Bible and the once he got a good education, he began teaching the Bible and says that he’s been teaching it for 50 years now. It’s his faith that he leans on as he deals with cancer.

“It’s been a wonder-ful journey. After all those years of me living, because if someone would have told me when I was 50 that I’d be alive in 2011, I’d have called them crazy. I wouldn’t even believe them. But here I am, 86 years old and still alive and I’m weighing it all up. I’ve been teaching the Bible for 50 of those years and got excited about it. I know all about what’s going to hap-pen when I die,” he said. “I told my class yesterday I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be in that man-sion that Jesus was making for me last month, because the doctor said I had six months and that was seven months ago. Whatever is go-ing on in (my body), I don’t know about. I do know this. I feel so good, that I’ve start-ed just living the life of a normal 86-year-old man and if I’m able to get my tractor out and mow my lawn then I’m going to do it. And I did the next afternoon.”

Author’s note: As a young man, I’ve grown up hearing references to the people who lived during the Great De-pression and World War II as “The Greatest Generation.”

Never has that been clear-er to me than in my brief meeting with Joe.

Joe Molea is “The Great-est Generation” personified.

And they just don’t make them like that anymore.

Fighting the good fightTheron FlyRepoRteR

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