Re: A Mission of Love

Date: April 24, 2004

"A mission of love

Detective work finds fate of woman's brother in WWII

Jim Schultz Record Searchlight

Paulette Gooch

Paulette Gooch was 7 when her brother's B-24 was shot down and lost over Germany 60 years ago this month.

It was April 29, 1944, when the bomber went down with its 10-man crew, including Gooch's 20-year-old brother, Sgt. John "Jack" Bonnassiolle, a gunner on his third mission. It was one of two U.S. bombers shot down that day near the village of Meitze.

Gooch, now a 57-year Fall River Mills resident, remembers her older brother as a kind and gentle man who sent her birthday greetings from overseas in the months before he died while fighting in World War II.

Not knowing exactly what happened that day or the whereabouts of her brother's remains has haunted Gooch for years.

For there was always a missing plate at the dinner table during holidays and family celebrations, as well as a bittersweet ache in her heart.

"I thought about all the years my brother and I could have shared and the family he might have had," she said.

Her mother, who is 101, has been reluctant to talk about his death. So Gooch, who retired four years ago as supervisor of the Burney branch of the Shasta County Superior Court, took it upon herself last year to find any information about her brother and his doomed crew.

"I really wasn't very hopeful about it," she said, adding that she wanted to try to leave a history about him for the family and a place for him in their hearts.

Through the Internet, Gooch learned that her brother's name is inscribed on a missing-in-action memorial at a U.S. military cemetery in the Netherlands.

She later posted a message on a B-24 Web site seeking additional information, which triggered a "virtual avalanche" of responses from those eager to help.

Through those messages, she said, she eventually came into contact with those who said they witnessed her brother's bomber crash in a field, as well as a volunteer, nonprofit group that searches for Allied airmen missing-in-action.

Ironically, the Missing Allied Air Crew Research Team had only days before launched an effort, which included getting a number of governmental permits approved, to find Bonnassiolle's missing airplane, she said.

The seven-person team spent countless hours last spring and summer excavating the site before its leader, Enrico Rene-Schwartz, spotted a "fuzzy" and wadded up object in the dig.

It was her brother's name patch.

"I have goose bumps and shed tears whenever I think about it," Gooch said.

Two engine identification numbers from the bomber were also found that day. Gooch and her son, Shawn, who lives in Reno, visited the crash site this past fall.

And on that trip, she said, she met the owner of a horse pasture who was himself a young boy when the bomber went down after it was fired upon by German fighter planes.

But, she said, he told her that he vividly remembered that day, saying he ran to the family's bomb shelter just before the plane slammed into the field.

Shortly afterward, he said, a bomb in the wreckage detonated, sending debris throughout the small town.

And, he told her, another B-24 crashed nearby a minute later. Three of that plane's crew died.

Since that initial find of Bonnassiolle's name patch, more wreckage has been discovered as well as a number of bones, and the U.S. Army has taken control of the crash site and the objects, Gooch said.

DNA testing will be performed on the bones for identification, and it's Gooch's hope that her brother's remains can be quickly identified for the sake of her mother and returned to the United States for burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

"We would like to see him brought home," she said.

Reporter Jim Schultz can be reached at 225-8223 or at jschultz[at]redding[dot]com

©2004 Record Searchlight - The E.W. Scripps Co. "