Hastily going back to his letter, he wrote Barbara that he believed she had ferried some of the planes from their factories in England to an airfield on the Channel coast. From there they had been flown by American or Royal Air Force pilots to join the battle he was now fighting in.
After two more months of inching their way deeper toward German soil under constant attack and in freezing cold and blizzards, in March, Stephen and his company were with Patton and his men and tanks as they swept past German resistance. They crossed the Rhine River on pontoon bridges at Oppenheim, between Mainz and Mannheim. Advancing on German soil, they joined two other Allied armies moving toward Berlin as the Soviets approached the city from the other side.
On the way to Berlin, Stephen was among those who discovered Nazi concentration campus and the horror of gas chambers at Buchenwald and Dachau. But he did not write Barbara about them, or the skeleton-like prisoners that had been found barely alive. They were the few survivors of the millions of Jews and others who had been tortured and executed in what became known as the Holocaust.
Stephen's Christmas letter from France was the only one Barbara received all winter. His others were lost in the crash of an army plane carrying the mail from the battlefields. She could only guess why he had not written, or where he was, but followed the news about General Patton's advance to Berlin believing Stephen would be in the campaign.
Just over two weeks into the new year, Soviet and Polish troops took Warsaw back from the Nazis. Good things were happening in the Pacific, too. GIs freed over 500 prisoners of war in the Philippines on February 1, and five days later General MacArthur announced the capture of Manila and liberation of 5,000 prisoners.
Then on April 12 the world learned of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the age of 63 during his fourth term as President of the United States, and his vice-president, Harry Truman, succeeded him. That same day, Allied troops liberated Vienna, and within days afterward, Allied soldiers freed the prisoners at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and GIs liberated Buchenwald and Dachau.
Barbara learned from a radio report on April 22 that Soviet troops had reached Berlin and surrounded the city. Three days after that, the US First Army and Soviet First Ukrainian Army met at Torgau on the Elbe River near Leipzig in east-central Germany. Eight days later, on April 30, Hitler committed suicide in his bunker headquarters in Berlin.
On May First, a call to her hotel room that sounded urgent awakened Barbara from a much-needed late morning nap after ferrying another bomber: "Barbara, you're wanted in Assignments."