Sylvan Lucier: WWII Glider Pilot

Cambridge Cemetery, June, 2008. Reflecting Pool and Wall With (Missing in Action) Names.

                                      Bringing Sylvan Home

 WWII Amy Transport Ship, Lawrence Victory, Brings Home 5,374 Bodies

        My first activity after I decided to preserve the memory of my uncle, F/O Sylvan Lucier, who died without leaving a wife or children, was to order a grave monument to his memory at the Catholic cemetery in Fargo, North Dakota where he is buried beside his parents. It must have been a comfort to them throughout their long lives, to visit his grave. His grave maker had been a standard Army issue name plate in the ground and hard for me to find in the long grass.
      Not  everyone felt bringing a soldier's remains home was necessary. Ours is the only government that pays for that service. However, here are no places of lovelier design, better cared for or visited more frequently by veterans, civilians and school children than American cemeteries in Europe!
        Tom Lucier, Sylvan's youngest brother, was a soldier in Germany in 1945 and was able to visit Cambridge Cemetery (photos above). It was the opinion of  his brother that Cambridge was a beautiful place and his remains should have been left near the place where he died.
       The Cambridge plot where Sylvan was buried in October 1944, described in the letter above, can not be found today because the entire place was reorganized. In 2008, we visited the village in England where Sylvan's glider crashed, and were driven by a friend to Cambridge where we took the newer picture above. I place it for comparison with the photo in my grandmother's scrapbook.              
       The staff at the American Cemeteries abroad can help visitors locate grave sites. They helped us find the graves of men from Sylvan's 36th squadron which I photographed. The squadron loss included their group commander, their Squadron Commander, their chaplain, seven in all, in a midair collision of C-47s during an invasion practice (Operation Eagle) for Normandy. I found out later the chaplain was from the same tiny town in Western North Dakota where my aunt and uncle then lived.  Sylvan's chaplain's death, and others in that accident, occurred in early May, and surely affected his expectations for his own survival. After flying the British Horsa glider on D-Day in Normandy and a CG-4A glider on D-Day+1 in Holland, with all the fatalities that occurred, he must have felt doomed, and perhaps accepting of his fate.
         Sylvan's niece, Barbara Deibert and his cousin, Mitzy Hilber, shared their memories with me early in my research. They recalled that on his visit home in April 1943 before going to Africa, he told them he knew he would not survive.  I think he spoke to his mother this way as well because his youngest brother accompanied them to the train station and was bewildered by the grief stricken scene which was completely unlike his mother who had sent three other sons to war!                             
        Sylvan's mother saved a description of a dream he had the week before the Holland mission. According to everyone who knew them he had a very close relationship with his mother, . Her scrapbook contain the note below, dated shortly before the glider mission in Holland.

    
         For his mother, Eva Lucier, bringing Sylvan home was the only thing to do. The serious life long consequences of a second funeral, held four years after the first, for some of those profoundly affected by his death makes it  debatable. From my memory as a six year old at the time, and from my interviews with others, today I question the value of moving his remains. I must admit he does reside in a place with five or six generations of his family! And it was entirely common for families to chose to do this as the cable below notes. Our government made it easy and paid most expenses.

A  Fargo Forum newspaper article from the summer of 1948 states, 
Bodies of 31 North Dakota Servicemen, including seven from Fargo, and 121 from Minnesota,, are among 5,374 aboard the army transport, Lawrence Victory, now en route to the east coast from Europe, the army reports. Most of them were originally interred in temporary military cemeteries in France, Luxembourg and the United Kingdom."