The Foreign Service Journal, April 2004

the correspondence and would show it to her boss. She had even gone so far as to call the author at his home and thank him personally for sending it! Needless to say, I felt very good about this, and when the DCM’s office later suggested that I send a return let- ter I jumped at the chance. But before writing the letter, I decided I had to solve the mys- tery of who this person was. So I did what any red-blooded Ameri- can would do; I did an Internet search on “Black Swan” and “B- 17.” I had expected to have to wade through pages of useless results but what came up at the top was too good to be true. It was the personal Web site of none other than the pilot of the bomber him- self — Lt. Verne Woods! He was 81, living with his wife in Massa- chusetts and on his Web site, he described in detail the night of Dec. 31, 1943, when his bomber was shot down. They had been hit by flak on the way to Germany and had to turn back alone. By a strange twist of fate, he and the normal pilot had switched seats on that mission, and during the night, as the crippled bomber limped across Brittany, the co-pilot’s side of the plane was raked by can- non fire from a German FW-190 fighter. The man in the co-pilot seat was killed instantly. The remaining mem- bers of the crew bailed out except for the top turret gun- ner, who couldn’t make it out in time. The B-17 heavy bomber, still carrying the two brave American aviators, crashed into a barn on a remote Brittany farm. (As testi- mony to the power of the Internet, Woods recently post- ed a request on a Luftwaffe veterans’ Web site asking, “Who shot me down?” Within a short time, he had not only the name of the German pilot, but also a scanned copy of the page in the pilot’s logbook from the day he had attacked the “Black Swan” in the skies over Brittany!) Well, that solved the mystery of the “Black Swan,” but what about the author of the letter? Scrolling down a lit- tle farther gave me the answer. One of the pictures of a ceremony near a marble plaque explained that Mr. Yves Carnot, the author of the letter I had saved from the shredder, was none other than the grandson of the man whose barn the “Black Swan” had crashed into! I wrote Mr. Carnot back, thanking him for his concern, and reas- suring him that there still was much friendship between the French and Americans despite the current political situation. I wasn’t sure if I would get a response, but about two weeks later I received a fat envelope contain- ing “the rest of the story.” In a 12-page, handwritten let- ter, Mr. Carnot recounted his lifelong relation with the last flight of the “Black Swan.” His earliest memories, as a child in the late 1950s, were of crawling around in a barn littered with pieces of twisted aluminum plane parts that his grandfather had either hid from the Germans that night, or dug up later while planting. His grandfather’s prize possession was the manufactur- er’s name plate from the B-17 plant in Detroit, still intact, showing the model and part number of the plane. It had a place of honor, nailed to the main support pole in the barn and was, in his words, “respected as a symbol, a tes- timony of this aerial fight, this tragic event.” Mr. Carnot’s grandfather used to sit his young grand- son on his knee and tell him the story of that New Year’s Eve in 1943 when the flaming bomber fell out of the sky. “Every Sunday,” Mr. Carnot wrote, “when I visited my grandfather, I asked him to tell me about this event. It became a ritual, and every week I came to contemplate that number plate and I dreamed about this fantastic plane.” As Mr. Carnot grew up, the “Black Swan” came to symbolize the special bond between his grandfather and him. They used to walk around the farm together, the older man relating to the child every detail of that fateful night when the quiet night sky was shattered by gunfire and explosions. Just before Mr. Carnot’s grandfa- ther died, he gave the treasured nameplate to his grand- son. Mr. Carnot, by then a young man, “undertook to do research on the B-17 in the memory of my grandfather, who could not do the investigation himself. I am sure he would have encouraged my work and in some way, it is a sort of eternal torch I am carrying; it’s my mission.” Over the next 10 years he overcame numerous bureau- cratic hurdles and painstakingly tracked down historical records that enabled him to find the names of the B-17’s A P R I L 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 59 I uncovered a few real gems from people who felt a strong emotional connection with the United States.