Zeamer in the 22nd – A New View

Today is Jay Zeamer’s birthday. The lieutenant colonel would have turned 101 years old. It was rather a coincidence to realize that last night as I planned to make this post today, which deals with how some newly acquired documents—Zeamer’s official flight records—both significantly alter and confirm our understanding of an important part of his wartime history, and reveal some of the inevitable struggles of historical accuracy. I’ve made it plain from the start, twenty-five years ago, that accuracy has been my primary focus in telling this story. (In all things, for that matter.) I wanted to tell the real story of this crew. The most profound result of that originally was the felling of various dramatic fables about the nature of the crew and ‘666. They weren’t screw-offs and misfits, and it wasn’t a broken wreck in the boneyard they had to piece together to have a plane to… Continue reading