DEDICATION

This project is dedicated to my Old Man- If I could've read your lousy handwriting in the diary when I was younger and understood the significance of what I read, I'd never have thought as badly of you as I did. Thanks for giving me the little blue book.

INTRODUCTION TO THE DIARY

It's a little book, looks mostly empty at first glance through the pages. About five by seven inches, maybe 1 1/2 inches thick. Its blue leather cover is a bit chafed on the corners by careless handling in a barracks in England fifty years ago. The gold gothic letters of the title 'Five Year Diary' are still clear in the upper left corner and the gold edging on the pages is mostly intact. It'd look worse except that it was packed away when its author disappeared into a Nazi prison camp. It spent the next 30 years in a cedar hope chest along with other memorabilia of that war: a Hungarian bayonet, an Air Medal with too many Oak Leaf Clusters, the Ike jacket of a skinny ninteen-year- old tech sergeant, a bundle of fading letters.

For the $1.50 it cost, it was a pretty good deal. Inside the title page ("...in which should be recorded important events most worthy of remembrance...") are pages of generally observed American holidays (Lee's birthday, Patriot's Day, Flag Day, Lafayette Day...), variable and fixed church days, birthstones and wedding anniversaries, and the locations and colors of the American colleges. Then starts the main diary, on January 1. In the body of the diary each page is printed with five "19"'s down the left margin with four lines between each. The writer ignored these, writing around them as the activities of one day usually filled the whole page in his small, cramped script.

After Dec 31 is a section titled "Important Events" where he put the basic data of each mission up to mission # 20. This corresponds approximately to the time the aircrews recieved word that the tour of duty had been lengthened past 25 missions before they could go home. Then follow unused sections for addresses and phone numbers, Christmas cards sent and memoranda, before coming to the inside of the back cover and calendars for 1943- 1948, where some dates are marked from December 24, 1943 through Feb 1, 1944. Many of the dates are the same as mission dates, but not all.

The period covered by the diary runs from November '43 through April '44, so to read the little blue book in chronological order one must start at the end of the diary then come back around to the beginning. In this transcript the diary is presented in chronological order, and this is the reason for the writer's frequent insertions of "44" at the year markers at the top of the page as a reminder in the early months of the new year. The only other alterations of the written content of the original book is that 'Important Events' have been moved to an Appendix; and the author's reminiscences of combat and POW life which were written more recently have been added as a section at the New Year to break the narrative flow as little as possible. This extra section is text obtained from interviews done during this project, and other writing  by the author who wanted "to get this stuff down before I forgot it all". It has been incorporated into background material and appendices with only slight editing for continuity.
 

BACKGROUND

A lot of farm boys went to war in the 1940's, among them Harley Hamilton Tuck. Born 24 August 1924, he was raised in Yakima, Washington, a small town in America's Apple Basket. He went to school social functions with relatives of the girl he would marry after the War. He says he was a virgin til he got married, and there's no reason to disbelieve him. His family, like many of their neighbors, lived through the Great Depression on oatmeal bought cheap for livestock feed. Harley's world was limited to whatever a rural community could provide for entertainment, along with playing with his three sisters and four brothers. He always enjoyed shooting tin cans with his .22 rifle, and he had been known to take the family stove apart before he knew how to put it together again. He had few close friends, being too busy working on the large family fruit ranch.

When Pearl Harbor was bombed in December 1941 he was a sophomore in Yakima High, too young to follow his two older brothers who'd both enlisted in the Navy. The next year he tried again but was rejected for minor medical reasons. So, he joined the Army, avoiding an imminent Draft and getting a crack at his choice of training. He was happy when he got the school he wanted: radio school, Air Force branch. For one thing, flight pay was 50% added on to the base pay.

"When any of we three brothers, Grover, Tad, and I left home [to join up] Mother would not go to the bus or train station, she just quietly sat at home as we drove off. The community was pretty proud of Mom, with three stars in her window for her three sons in the armed services for the war effort. When the Post Office got the telegram that I was missing in action the postman would not deliver it as a regular letter, he came back and delivered it personally, with condolences." In Fall of 1942 his life changed dramatically.
 
 

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