From the Heart

Billy Huffman was killed in action during World War II. Soon after, his Purple Heart was also lost. That was the end of it, until a Linn County veteran set out to track down the man’s 96-year-old widow and make sure she got it back.

By Jennifer Moody, Albany Democrat-Herald Reprinted with permission.

Billy Huffman’s Purple Heart vanished shortly after the end of World War II, when the foot locker in which it was stored disappeared.

Now, thanks to the Oregon Department of Veterans’ Affairs and the diligence of Randy Martinak of the Linn County Veterans Memorial Association, the Linn County man’s widow recently got it back.

It took more than a year to work through the official channels to get a new Purple Heart made bearing Huffman’s name. Last month, Martinak traveled to San Diego to present the badge to Betty Rosevear, now in her late 90s, who married Huffman on June 6, 1943.

He could have simply put the decoration in the mail, Martinak acknowledged, but he wanted to see it through — and to meet the woman who, like her late husband, made a career out of service.

Randy Martinak displays the Purple Heart that he hand-delivered to the widow of airman Billy Huffman last month.

Democrat-Herald photo by Mark Ylen

“I wanted to make sure I did it right and it got done,” Martinak said. “It’s a promise I made and it’s a promise I kept.”

Huffman was killed Feb. 20, 1944, when German planes attacked his B-17 over Denmark. His belongings, including the Purple Heart, went to his young widow, who had become a second lieutenant while Huffman was overseas.

Two years later, Betty, a nurse, was about to start a job in a hospital next to the Presidio in San Francisco. She was in the process of moving to an apartment in Oakland when the foot locker disappeared.

The story might have ended there were it not for modern technology — and Martinak.

Martinak makes it his mission to research the lives behind the names listed on the memorial wall at Timber-Linn Memorial Park. It’s important, he said, for people to know who those people really were.

“For me, it’s an obligation as a veteran who lost friends, not only when I was in service, in Vietnam, but since then, in other places,” he said. “It’s easy for us to walk out here and say, ‘Yeah, all these guys died in a war,’ but as time passes, these people fade from memory.”

A few years ago, Martinak happened to pick Huffman from the World War II wall, for no particular reason other than that there were two Huffmans listed and he thought he might have a chance at finding information about at least one of them.

Luckily, Billy Huffman was an airman, Martinak said. The Army tends to have more information on their service because it kept track of what happened to their aircraft, and thus recorded the fates of anyone lost when one was shot down.

That’s what happened to Huffman.

He was assigned to the 452nd Heavy Bombardment Group, part of the 8th Air Force, and to the 728th Bomb Squadron, which deployed to England. He was the pilot of The Mavoureen, which he named in honor of an Irish folk song, “Kathleen Mavourneen,” which Betty had taught him (accidentally leaving out the first “n”).

On Feb. 20, 1944, with Huffman as pilot, The Mavoureen headed out on a bombing mission to Poland and Germany.

Witnesses later reported The Mavoureen took a hit to its No. 1 engine, with a 20 mm cannon blasting a hole about 2 feet by 3 feet on the leading edge of the wing. Huffman’s crew bailed out, parachuting into the sea. Two were captured. The other seven died.

Huffman stayed with The Mavoureen, which crashed north of Fuglebjerg, on Seeland Island roughly 90 kilometers southwest of Copenhagen. German records indicate Huffman’s body was found near the plane and buried in the Danish cemetery of Svino By.

Martinak was able to obtain Huffman’s file from deceased personnel material on downed aircraft that had been donated to a museum. That led him to information about Huffman’s family, and the family’s struggle to have his remains brought home to Oregon.

Betty had remarried by that time, but the military still wanted her to sign off on the family’s request. She did so, and that’s how Martinak found out her new name: Rosevear.

He contacted Rosevear, who gladly filled in the holes in Huffman’s biography. And he made her a promise about her husband’s lost Purple Heart: “I told her I would do everything I could to get that replaced.”

The project took several more months and went through several hands before coming to fruition. Mitch Sparks, now acting director for the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, was the one to oversee the last portion, making sure the medal was mounted and framed before emailing Martinak to come pick it up.

In San Diego, Rosevear belongs to the Rancho Peñasquitos Post 11388 of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. So Martinak contacted the post’s commander and quartermaster and talked to Betty’s daughter, Paula, to make sure an appropriate ceremony could be arranged.

“It means something to the families if you can point out the fact that the sacrifices those guys made are remembered,” he said. “It brings a humanness to a memorial that otherwise is just brick and stone.”