POSITIVE NEWS
The Dayton Daily News brings you uplifting human interest news every Thursday in Life.
As our nation celebrates this Veterans Day, one local couple, now living at St. Leonard retirement community in Centerville, has a lifetime of military memories to celebrate.
Alf and Floss Waggener, both now in their 90s, met as children in Mississippi.
“I was born in Martin, Tennessee, and lived in Denver until I was 10,” Alf said. “I moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and that’s where I met my future wife, Floss.”
Alf’s family moved from the west for work, but soon after the Great Depression had his family facing hard times like so many others in the nation. “We rented a small farm, and we just scratched out a living for five years until the Depression was over,” he said.
Then in 1942 Alf joined the U.S. Air Corp (the immediate predecessor to the U.S. Air Force, officially established in 1947), and he and Floss got married in Santa Ana, Calif., where he was stationed.
“As soon as I was settled, I went to the church there and arranged for us to get married,” Alf said. “There was a wonderful lady there and she took charge, and we had an organist, and my entire squadron came.”
And so the young couple began their lives as a military family, adding two children and moving 25 times in 26 years. “I was an aviation cadet,” Alf said. “We moved all over the West Coast, and I graduated in Arizona in July of 1943.”
But their story really begins in Pismo Beach, Calif., where the couple lived while Alf’s P-38 fighter group was preparing to go overseas. “The day came and we received our orders,” Alf said. “We sold our 1938 Ford coupe and packed my wife’s steamer trunk and shipped it home to Jackson. Floss’ brother, Dan, took her back home, and she lived with her folks until I returned.”
Alf left California with his squadron and arrived in Camp Shanks, N.Y., in January 1944. “We waited there (at Camp Shanks) until our scheduled departure for England,” Alf said. “We were allowed passes evenings and weekends, so we could catch a train to New York City and see the sights.”
The squadron landed in Scotland after sailing on the Queen Elizabeth, which had been converted into a troop ship. “Eighteen of us shared a cabin designed for two passengers,” Alf said. “The crossing took less than five days.”
Army trucks took the men to East Anglia, England, and an established RAF base. “The English had been at war for four years, so everything was rationed and in short supply,” Alf said. “After dark everything was blacked out, because sometimes a buzz bomb could be heard.”
Alf’s first mission was to escort bombers over a German submarine base on the Atlantic coast of France.
“The P38 was designed, built and tested in sunny California,” Alf said. “So its puny cockpit heater did little to assuage the sub-freezing temperatures. If a German plane had appeared, I think we were all too cold to have shot at it!”
The “big event” for the squadron, Alf said, was the invasion of the European continent on June 6, 1944, better known as D-Day.
“Of course it was kept secret,” Alf said. “But we suspected something big was brewing when we had no missions scheduled for June 5th. On June 6th we were up before dawn and into the briefing room. We carried large wing tanks to have enough fuel to stay over the English Channel as long as possible.”
Alf remembers being amazed at the number of vessels he saw crossing the Channel toward France on that day — literally thousands of them. “As we approached France, we saw huge clouds of smoke and dust as the battle raged below,” he said.
Participating in many other missions, including combat flying in a P5, Alf said he was “no hero,” but participated in destroying several German planes. “I did a lot of praying,” he said. “Believe me, it was not fun.”
Letters from home were a highlight during war time. “I took great comfort knowing that my wife, my Mom and Pop and my brothers and sisters and my Grandmother Waggener were faithfully praying for me every day,” Alf said. “Floss’ letters provided assurance of her love and were what kept me sane during the ordeal of getting shot at several times a week.”
The family was assigned to Wright-Patterson and moved to Dayton in 1965, and Alf retired from the Air Force, a full colonel in 1968.
And for Floss, the wife who has steadfastly been by Alf’s side for nearly 75 years of marriage, she looks back on their life together as “interesting and fun.”
“He flew all day on D-Day,” Floss said. “He couldn’t send me any message, and I didn’t know whether or not he was alive. But today I can say we have been really blessed in our lives with our family and friends. We enjoy old age, and we don’t have to be afraid of getting older.”
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