Hearing a Father's Voice
A daughter hears her father 76 years after his plane is shot down during WWII
Lieutenant James D. O’Neill was a fighter pilot during World War II. Stationed in the Asian theatre, James wrote copious letters to his young wife, roughly one thousand letters in the three years he was away. His baby daughter, Bernadine, received one letter from him for her first birthday. In it, he included this advice, forever etched in Bernadine’s mind: “[Y]ou must do your share — Eat all that Mommy gives you, help her to keep you clean and healthy — and above all be good, but very good.”
The family was united for a brief furlough when James met Bernadine for the first time. Their brief visit together was also memorialized in the birthday letter to Bernadine. “I didn’t know how to hold you much less burp you but Mommy laughed at it all and taught me how. I called you ‘my little Rose Bud Mouth.’ You were so very adorable and cute. But in those two short days we got our beginning at being daughter and father.”
James wrote about all the things they would do when he got home from the war. “[W]e’ll go for rides in the car and visit the zoo and go on a picnic and take pictures and buy clothes and dolls and toys. And sing and play together as never before. Gee, we’ll have fun - you and Mommy and Daddy.”
In 1944, James’ plane was shot down somewhere over China. His body was finally repatriated in 1949, four years after the war’s end.
“My mother kept my father very alive,” Bernadine explained. “I learned that Daddy had blond curly hair, eyes as blue as the sky and a voice nicer than Bing Crosby.”
Bernadine’s parents met while her mother, Mildred Gossard, was selling war bonds in the window of Bloomingdales in New York City. James had been orphaned at five-years-old when his parents died in an automobile accident. An aunt initially had custody of him but then sent him to his uncles who were bachelors in New York City. He went to St. Anne’s Institute, St. Michael’s Boarding Catholic High School, Manhattan College, and finally St. John’s Law School. “His uncles took care of him financially, but did not provide him any love,” Bernadine reports. It was only when he was getting documents ready for his marriage license that James realized he had been misspelling his family name his whole life.
Mildred’s family, in contrast, was large and tightly knit. James was quickly adopted into the mix, calling his future mother-in-law “Mama” after the couple’s second date. A future brother-in-law became his best man. It was this kind of large sprawling family that James and Mildred dreamed of building together. They were both very devout Catholics, and James attended daily Mass when he could.
After James died, Mildred never remarried although widowed at twenty-five. She was very devout and prayed the rosary every day of her life at bed time from eighteen to her death decades later. The only day she missed praying the rosary was when she got the news that James had died because she never went to bed.
Mildred became a founder of the Gold Star Wives of World War II, personally asking Eleanor Roosevelt for her support, and lobbied Congress for its recognition. She died at ninety on what would have been the couple’s sixty-third wedding anniversary.
Bernadine recalls that any holiday, or any another thing that happened in her life, she and her mother would go to the cemetery. Her mother would always take pictures and talk about her dad and how he was the best man in the world, which is why she didn’t remarry. But it was his voice that was in the letter that her father had written to Bernadine that “taught her how to live.” Bernadine even carried the letter with her bouquet as she walked down the aisle at her wedding. But because Bernadine had no memory of her father, his words that rattled around in her head were always in her voice.
Then something miraculous happened. In 2020, a registrar at The Daughters of the American Revolution located a black box recording of Lieutenant James O’Neill and shared it with Bernadine. It held his voice speaking during the last moments of his life as his plane was going down seventy-six years later.
As Bernadine listened to the recording, she was struck by how calm and courageous he sounded. “He was so calm in what was happening around him.” She was also surprised that didn’t have a heavy New York accent. Bernadine had seen a silent video of her father and mother and her together, but hearing his voice was something she never dreamed possible.
Finally, Bernadine had a real voice to put in the place of her own to go with her father’s letters. Finally, she could hear his actual voice when she read this ending of his birthday letter written to her so many decades ago:
Good night my most precious darling — sweet dreams of you.
I love you forever.
Daddy
Bernadine Starrs with a young friend around the time she heard the recording of her father’s voice.
