Hands of Time
Feature documentary
738th Squadron, 454th Bombardment Group, 15th Air Force
He flew fifty-two missions. He wasn’t allowed to keep the jacket.
They painted a bomb on it for every mission — fifty-two of them, in rows down his chest — and then it went back to the Army. He posed for one photograph in it before he handed it over. That photograph is in my house.
His service record isn’t. The government’s copy burned in St. Louis in 1973, when a fire at the National Personnel Records Center took sixteen to eighteen million files — eighty percent of every Army record from 1912 to 1960. Proof of service, injury, and identity, gone in a night.
So what’s left is what the family kept. A picture of a man in a jacket he had to give back. A separation record in a drawer. A newspaper clipping that ran the headline but not the photo. Fifty-two missions in his own handwriting.
Hands of Time is about that fire, and everyone still holding the only proof they have.
- Name
- Kovach, Charles Jr. — Staff Sergeant
- Born
- 22 December 1920
- Home
- 84 Androvette St., Tottenville, Staten Island, N.Y.
- Enlisted
- 16 July 1942 — from Koenig’s Service Station, where he worked as a mechanic
- Unit
- 738th Squadron, 454th Bombardment Group, 15th Air Force
- Based
- San Giovanni Airfield, Southern Italy
- Position
- Top turret gunner, B-24 Liberator
- Aircraft
- The Buzz Job · The Ghost · Kati-Did
- Targets
- Oil refineries and storage; viaducts in France, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria
- Missions
- 52
- Decorations
- Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters · Presidential Unit Citation
- Separated
- 26 September 1945
- Federal file
- Destroyed — St. Louis, 12 July 1973