A story of two Detroit brothers in war, part two

This is a two-part story about two Detroit Armenian brothers during war: the eldest Haigus, a five star hero during World War II, and the youngest Hagop (Jack) during the Korean War. It is a story of the Tufenkjians, an immigrant Armenian family who came to Detroit, Michigan after the Armenian Genocide, and their offspring born in the early 1920s. 

The family was composed of four children, three boys and a girl. The siblings in order of age are Ghazarn (John), age 26, Haigus, age 20, Angelle, age 19, and Hagop (Jack), age 12. The two oldest children found themselves of draft age in 1942 after Pearl Harbor. 

In part one of this story, we covered Jack’s story in the Korean War, commemorating 73 years since Jack’s participation in the war beginning in 1951. 

After Jack was drafted, he was inducted into the Marines; being a drummer, he joined one of the Marine bands. This was his first special power. Jack’s second special power was that he could speak fluent Turkish. The Marines were looking for bilingual Marines to work as translators, because the Korean War was a United Nations conflict. Jack applied and was selected to serve one year with the Turkish Army. Turkish was the language of the Tufenkjian household, and Jack did not know Armenian.

Around June 25, 2000, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Korean War, Jack received at his home a package addressed to him containing two letters of commendation, one in English the other in Korean, along with a medal. The letters make no mention of him directly or what he did to deserve them, with only the greeting, Dear Veteran. He of course inquired among his friends, and no one else received such a package.

Part two of this story is about Haigus, on the 80th anniversary of his heroic sacrifices in Germany on August 24-26, 1944. In January 1942, Haigus was still enrolled in the famous Ford Trade School studying electrical engineering. He was drafted into the U.S. Army by the end of 1942. His older brother Ghazarn (John) was drafted in January 1943. Both brothers were eventually assigned to the U.S. Army Air Corps. The Tufenkjian family had a small window flag with two blue stars at their home to show that they had two sons serving. 

John served in the Pacific theater of the war, mostly in the Philippines as a mechanic and truck driver. He returned home safe and sound in one piece, got married and raised a family in Detroit.

Haigus eventually was trained as a flight officer, most probably with the rank of warrant officer, the highest rank an enlisted man could achieve in the U.S. Services. He was trained as a navigator and a bombardier. He chose to fly in a bomber in the European theater of the war; he could have chosen a less dangerous assignment in the Air Force, but he didn’t. This decision qualifies him, and others like him who made similar choices, as a hero of the first magnitude.

Haigus was assigned to the 491st Bombardment Group H, 854th Squadron of the Eighth Air Force, flying out of Metfield, England in B-24 bombers. Later, he was sent to North Pickenham in Norfolk to be part of the new 14th Bomber Wing.

This story about Haigus’ heroism revolves mostly around a B-24 bomber whose nose art had the name, “Wham! Bam! Thank You Ma’am,” of which Haigus was an emergency volunteer addition to the crew. Part of this story is included in the book The Last Mission of the Wham Bam Boys by Gregory A. Freeman. I gathered all of the facts for this article from the book as well as from Haigus’ nephew Aaron who resides in North Carolina, a long way from Clark Park in Detroit. Buy the book, donate it to your local community library after you read it and share it with your family and friends. The Tufenkjian family was promised by Tom Hanks, a World War II buff, that he was interested in turning the story of this book into a movie, which to date has not happened. 

The story begins with the training of the B-24 bomber crew of pilot second lieutenant Norman Rogers in the United States and in England. A B-24 crew includes 10 men: a pilot and co-pilot, radio operator, navigator, bombardier, engineer and four gunners.

After never being involved in any raids in occupied Europe, the Rogers crew was called to fly their first mission on August 24,1944, just as their navigator and bombardier were away on a radar training session. At this time, Haigus was temporarily unassigned, because he was wounded on his own plane and recuperating. Being wounded qualifies him as a one-star hero. Haigus had never met any of this novice crew, just as the crew did not know him. Because he got on the plane late, the gunners, two pilots, engineer and radioman did not get acquainted with him. Volunteering for this mission earned him his second candidacy as a two-star hero. He did not have to go, but he did!

For their first mission, the crew was part of a formation of 1,319 bombers and 739 fighters on their way to bomb Germany. Haigus, due to his experience, was designated the second navigator on the flight, meaning if the first plane got shot down, Haigus would lead the group. The target of their 72 plane flight segment was to bomb the Langenhagen Airfield near the city of Hanover. As fate would have it, after the successful bombing of the airfield, their B-24 bomber was severely damaged by anti-aircraft artillery fire, rendering the plane not flyable. The entire nine-man crew successfully bailed out of the plane. It was the only plane of the 72 that bombed the airfield not to return to England. Bailing out of a burning crashing airplane and landing denotes the third star of heroism.

Shortly, all nine crew members were gathered by local farmers and collected at the local constabulary. Half of the crew did not know Haigus, as they had not met him. They thought he could be a prisoner or a planted spy. The police were concerned that there could be Jews in the crew — particularly Haigus, who looked Middle Eastern — so they made all of them undress to see if any were circumcised. The pilot Rogers had sprained an ankle on landing. Flight engineer Sgt. Forrest Brininstool was wounded by anti-aircraft fire. He was separated from the other eight for medical attention and did not reunite with them until after the war. The survivors, including Haigus, all have the distinction of being four-star heroes as prisoners of war.

As their target had been in the northern third of Germany, they bailed out of their planes north and west of that location on the way back to England. They were put on a long train ride with three German home guard soldiers to a prisoner of war camp for flyers on August 25,1944. Due to disruptions to rail lines, in the middle of the night outside of the city of Rüsselsheim, the eight American POWs had to leave the train with the three guards and walk through a burning city to board another train. Rüsselsheim had been bombed the night before on August 25 by the Royal British Air Force. It was the practice of the Allies for the Americans to attempt precession bombing during the day and the British to carpet bomb at night, a so-called around the clock bombing of Germany.

Consequently, the crew had to slowly walk through a gauntlet of hundreds of howling mad civilians, who believed that they were the terror flyers who had bombed them the night before. They wanted personal revenge. The eight American POWs were attacked with every sort of missile the crowd could find among the debris of the city and hurl at them — rocks, bricks, paver stones and roof tiles. They were poked and beaten with wooden boards and steel pipes. As they reached a prominent stone wall at the train station where they tried to take refuge, they were set upon for the final coup de grâce. Railroad ties were dropped on them, and they were beaten with hammers and shovels and believed to have been left for dead.

Two men came to place all eight bodies in a two-wheel cart to be taken to a local cemetery where they were to be buried the next day. Hearing some imperceptible moans, groans and whimpering, they bludgeoned the men on top of the heap, whose blood drenched the two crewmen at the bottom of the wagon. The latter would survive the ordeal to tell their gruesome story. Before the burial took place the next day, the two severely wounded crewmen freed themselves and hid in the cemetery until the burial of their comrades. The burial party did not realize there were supposed to be eight bodies buried in the mass grave.

The two survivors were Sgt.William F. Adams, the nose gunner from Klingerstown, Pennsylvania, and Sgt. Sidney E. Brown, the tail gunner, from Gainesville, Florida. Both gunners were 19 years old, and as fate would have it, these two country boys were longtime personal friends. On the run with little or nothing to eat, they managed to distance themselves from Rüsselsheim for about three to four days before they were recaptured and sent to a formal prisoner of war camp for air force personnel. 

Haigus Tufenkjian met his death on August 26, 1944 in Rüsselsheim, giving his life for his country and murdered by German civilians, now a five-star hero along with the other martyred crew members.

On September 5, 1944, with the Western Union Telegram boy at her door, Haigus’ mother Anoush Tufenkjian opened the Secretary of War letter stating that Haigus had been missing in action since August 24, 1944. This was all that was known about this tragedy until the two surviving crew members were liberated from their prisoner of war camp after the war ended, more than 14 months later.

However, it was not until October 5, 1945 that the Department of War informed the Tufenkjian family that Haigus was presumed dead, because he had been missing for more than a year. They did not realize that Haigus was one the six bodies of the “Wham Bam” crew exhumed from the mass grave in Rüsselsheim and temporarily reburied in the Bensheim American Military Cemetery in Germany. He went unnoticed since he was not permanently assigned to either aircraft, as he volunteered to go on that mission at the last minute, and he was not mentioned in the New York Times article about this tragedy.

Haigus was lost in the confusion, and as we learned later, he also suffered the most because of his appearance. Appearing Jewish to the Germans of Rüsselsheim, he received the worst beating, according to Adams and Brown. The Tufenkjian family could replace one of the blue stars on their flag in the window with a gold star.

This was the plight of second lieutenant Norman Rogers’ inaugural flight on the “Wham Bam Boys,” its destruction, the crew’s captivity and punishment and their criminal murder. Haigus’ murder earned him the last leg of his fifth and final hero star.

Then came the trial and punishment of the civilian perpetrators of the crimes against the six American prisoners of war and the three German acts of atonement. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, this part of Germany was included in the American zone of occupation and therefore subject to its code of military justice. Very shortly, this tale of injustice became well known and consequently found its way into the pages of the New York Times. Eventually, the case was tried in a three-day American military court trial. It was the first trial against the Germans, before the famous Nuremberg trials against Nazi government leaders. In fact, the famous President Nixon Special Prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, was then a lieutenant colonel who prosecuted this case against 11 civilian defendants among the hundred or more who attacked the eight POWs. Later, Jaworski became one of the famous Nuremberg Nazi prosecutors, as a German immigrant who spoke fluent German.

Of the 11 accused, nine were male and two female. Five men and both women were sentenced to be hanged. Two of the remaining men were sentenced to 15 years, and one to 25 years, of hard labor. One was set free. Later, the two women, Kathe Reinhardt and Margarete Witzler, who were also sisters, were spared the hangman’s noose by a military appeals court, because they were women. The three hard labor sentences were also reduced for Cold War reasons.

The most interesting fact here is that the two sisters were the primary individuals charged with whipping the civilian population into a frenzy in the first place in this evil event. How was it that only nine others were cited? It depended on how many witnesses could verify who struck the blows. The men who took the bodies to the cemetery and returned to assail those who appeared to be alive were hanged.

The military trial lasted only three days, but it was significant in that it was the first of the other post-war tribunals. A World War II program called “Masters of the Air,” which tells the story of American B-29 bombing raids over Germany, covers this entire event perfectly dramatized.

In 1985, 40 years later, the Tian family, including Jack and his wife Stella, the five other families of the deceased crew members, as well as the three surviving crew members and their families were asked to participate in the first of three acts of reconciliation events held in Rüsselsheim to honor the six murdered airmen of the “Wham Bam Boys.” Rüsselsheim’s second act of atonement was 16 years later. The third and final was in 2004 on the 60th anniversary, when a special monument was designed and built with lifelike images of the deceased American flyers. It is preserved as part of the stone wall at the train station, which has come to be known as the Place of Remembrance. It is believed that many missing in action airmen from World War II must have suffered the same fate.

There are some remaining questions I ask myself about Haigus. They are the following: what were the circumstances of his being wounded? How serious were his wounds, and how long was he incapacitated? The policy of the U.S. Army Air Corps was that if you survived 25 missions in enemy territory, including “Milk Runs” over France as well as deep flights into Germany, you would be sent home as a trainer of new aircrews. Haigus was selected as the second navigator on the flights of many planes into Germany, because he was a very accomplished navigator. He must have been very close to achieving that goal of 25 flights, which is why he volunteered for this last flight that killed him.

Here in Metro Detroit, Armenian American veterans in the mid-1960s built a building on the 16-acre complex of St. John Armenian Church. The building includes a dining hall and a large room to gather for meetings and cards. It is situated between the AGBU school and the gym. Today, the church sponsors a weekly luncheon every Tuesday, which I attend on occasion.

Months ago while sharing a table with others, two men I know brought up Haigus Tufenkjian’s name; at this writing I could not tell you why both of them, Arthur Mardigian and Harry Couyoumjian, also knew Haigus and spoke Turkish.

After lunch that day before going home, I decided to peruse the very large bronze wall mounting of deceased Armenian veterans from Detroit, which is about three feet high and nine to 10 feet long and contains eight or nine vertical columns of names in alphabetical order. As I ran my fingers down the T’s I finally found him, with his five-pointed star just before his name. For me, they represent my five definitions of a hero. I then looked for his brother Jack Tian and found him too.

There was a well-known Turkish Armenian actor, playwright and poet in our very long history of writers named Bedros Tourian in the epicenter of Armenian cultural life in the Ottoman Empire in Istanbul, who passed away at the age of 21 in 1872. He left us with a famous true-ism, which is, “You are never dead until you are forgotten.”

Dear Jack and Haigus, you are not dead, because you are not forgotten. You are still alive and well in the hearts of your friends and loved ones, wherever you are buried!