Family Publishes WWII Pilot's Witty Account of His Service

Not many people would be able to find happiness while fighting in World War II.

Not many people would want to remember their days as a POW and being interrogated by the German forces.

Not many people would go up to their bedroom upon returning home from the war and spend hours reliving their experience as they record every detail from their time overseas and turn it into a manuscript.

But Ted Fahrenwald did.

Now, his daughter Madelaine and other family members have honored his memory by turning the manuscript into a 288-page book entitled Bailout Over Normandy: A Flyboy’s Adventures with the French Resistance and Other Escapades in Occupied France.

World War II veterans “didn’t really talk about the war,” Fahrenwald said. “He might’ve just vented it into a manuscript—got it out of his system.”

Ted, who was 24 when he returned home to Morgan Park from the war, served as a fighter pilot in the 352nd Fighter Squadron. He worked with the French Resistance before bailing out of his burning plane two days after D-Day and being captured by the Wehrmacht. He escaped and found his way back to his squadron in England.

According to Fahrenwald, her father attended Clissold Elemtary School and Morgan Park Military Academy—now Morgan Park Academy—and owned a steel foundry in Harvey. He lived in a white stucco house at 115th and Longwood from the age of eight until his death in 2004, the place where the manuscript was created.

“It was kicking around our house since my dad wrote it,” Fahrenwald said. “Three generations of our family were in that house.”

Ted tried to publish his manuscript once he wrote it, but “publishers were swamped with WWII memoirs,” Fahrenwald said. Family members and friends read it throughout the years and always encouraged him to seek out a publisher again.

After her father’s death, Fahrenwald began a four-year-long process of self-publishing the book, transforming it from a 1945 manuscript written on a typewriter to a computer word processing document before three publishing companies discovered the book and sought it. She did much of the editing herself. “I only did light editing,” she said. “I really kept his language because it had this 1940s gangster language.”

Fahrenwald, who first read the manuscript around age 12 or 13, always found it “excting” to read. “He was like a comedian—real reckless and daring, a typical fighter pilot,” she said.

“[The manuscript] was a family thing; he never really got acknowledged,” Fahrenwald said when asked why she did it. Now, he would probably say, “‘I’m real proud of you, Madelaine,’” Fahrenwald speculated.

Ted also sent vignettes about his time at the England air base in his letters back home. “They were hilarious, little short stories,” Fahrenwald said. When she mentioned the letters, which had been copied and saved, to the publisher, a second book was created, titled Wot a Way to Run the War: The World War II Exploits and Escapades of a Pilot in the 352nd Fighter Group.

Both books are published by Casemate and are available on Amazon.com.