It's my birthday buddy's birthday today. He was a guy who died decades before I was even born, yet I've always felt an affinity towards him just because we happen to share the same birth date.
And because of the fact that even though his life was tragically cut short, he seemed like he was an incredible dude.
Since I have to go shoot a Wednesday “High School Bowl” in a few minutes, I'm going to leave you with the text of a speech I gave about my birthday buddy on the 70th anniversary of his death a decade or so ago. I've put it up here a few times in the past, but it's perhaps the one way I can honor Alvar Liimitainen.
Happy birthday, Oliver. Your birthday buddy,
******
“As far as I can tell, there haven’t been a lot of noteworthy people who’ve been born on December 4th. There’s Jay-Z; there’s Dennis Wilson, the late drummer of the Beach Boys; and there’s some British guy who did something with economics back in the 1700s. They may be famous; whether or not they’re noteworthy is another matter altogether.
So let me introduce you to someone born on December 4th who, while he’s in no way famous, certainly is most noteworthy. Alvar Liimatainen was born in December 4th, 1919, to Albin and Lempi Liimatainen. He was one of four children growing up in what was then referred to as Marquette’s “Piqua Location”; in fact, you can still see the family house if you’re riding or walking down the bike path near Sherman and Cleveland streets. Oliver, as absolutely everyone knew him, was a typical kid in the 1920s and 30s; he had a paper route, he tried his hand at ski jumping, he sang, and he ran track. He was most atypical when he received an award at his graduation in 1937 honoring him as never having missed a day of school his entire academic career. Not one.
This wouldn’t be the only time in his life Oliver was out of the ordinary.
After graduation he worked as a bellhop at the Hotel Northland before joining the Army Air Corp for what was supposed to be a three-year hitch in 1940. He had hoped to become a pilot; however, he was given training as a radio operator and assigned to a bomber crew that found themselves being sent to places like Brazil and Egypt before ending up on the island of Java the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. The Japanese also attacked other U.S. installations that day, including the base where Oliver was stationed. He found himself in the middle of the airfield when the raid began, and took cover in a foxhole made out of sandbags. He received a mild concussion and was put in the base hospital for a few weeks. He didn’t mind, though; in a letter to his brother, he said in the hospital he was finally getting food that was edible and, quote, “that helps a lot”.
The next couple of months were busy for Oliver and his crew. They flew 22 bombing missions in the South Pacific. They were attacked by enemy fighters 15 times; Oliver himself was credited with shooting down three of those fighters and damaging three others. On August 6th, 1942, Oliver’s crew—commanded by captain Harl Pease, and co-piloted by an Australian, Fredrick Earp—left their base in Australia for a bombing mission over Lae, New Guinea. On the way there, they had one of the engines on their B-17 fail, and had to return to base. This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence; what happened next was.
When Oliver’s crew returned to base, they knew that they had another mission the next day. They didn’t know what it was; they just had been told it was important. So the entire crew found another B-17 that was barely flight worthy and worked all day and all night to make sure it could get off the ground. On just three hours sleep, Oliver and his crew took off the next morning on a mission they knew was important but didn’t know why. As it turns out, their mission that day was bombing a Japanese fighter base at Rabaul Island. They were to bomb the base so that the fighters could not attack U.S. Marines that would be, at the same time, landing on Guadalcanal. They had no idea why they were flying the mission; they just knew they had to fly it.
Oliver’s crew as one of thirteen bombers that made it successfully to Rabaul and dropped their bombs on the Japanese base. On the way back home to Australia, their jerry-rigged plane started having mechanical problems, and fell behind the rest of the squadron. Thirty enemy fighters had by then appeared in the sky, and since Oliver’s plane had fallen behind the rest of the group, they bore the brunt of the attack. The B-17 was last seen losing altitude over the jungle, with no parachutes observed leaving the aircraft.
With that, Alvar “Oliver” Liimatainen became the city of Marquette’s first service casualty of World War II.
Several months after the incident, each member of the crew was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for their work the day before and their actions that fateful day. Captain Pease was also awarded the Medal of Honor, and to this day, there is a Pease Air Force Base near his hometown in New Hampshire. But it wasn’t until 1946 that searchers discovered the wreckage of the plane, as well as two bodies. They moved those remains to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, where they spent several years trying to identify the remains. It took until 1950 for them to be able to distinguish that one of the bodies belonged to the Australian co-pilot I had mentioned earlier. In fact, that was thanks to the discovery of a shoulder patch of a member of the Australian Air force. After studying dental and physical records, the other body was identified as Oliver’s. His parents asked that his body be returned to his hometown, and it was on this spot on August 7th, 1951—nine years to the day after his death—that Oliver was laid to final rest.
A total of 72 men and women from the city of Marquette died in World War II. Some are buried not far from here; some are buried in the countries in which they died, and some were never found. They all have stories like Oliver’s, and that’s one reason why we wanted to hold this ceremony tonight. Whether they were born on April 20th or July 7th or December 4th, they were all among the most extraordinary people ever born on that particular day. They were the men and women who did things that most of us could never imagine doing ourselves, and they were the men and women we honor tonight.
Alvar “Oliver” Liimatainen. Born December 4th, 1919. Died August 7th, 1942. Laid to rest here August 7th, 1951. Thank you for your service. And thank you for being extraordinary.”
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