Loading Bombs a Long Way From Home
Roger Bosse • Elk Point, South Dakota
Sergeant, U.S. Army
Don Doll, S.J. photo • Story by Tim Gallagher
Roger Bosse gives thanks he sleeps in the same bedroom where he was born almost 90 years ago.
"I like this home, this farm. It’s where I’ve always been," says Roger who resides on a farm between Elk Point and Jefferson, South Dakota. His grandparents homesteaded there in 1881. The only time he was away from home was during World War II. He served 3. 5 years with the U.S. Army and spent all but six months overseas, loading bombs for planes in Europe and Africa.
He had no furloughs during his service, from January 1942 to June 1945.
"I was drafted January 22, 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor," he says. "I was 23, not married and working on the farm at home. I knew I’d probably go."
His departure was difficult on his parents who had asked him to leave high school after his sophomore year to help on the farm. "They had to let the hired man go; they couldn’t afford to pay him $10 per month," he says. "It was the Depression. We didn’t have much."
Roger’s younger brother, Bernard, aided the farm operation in his absence.
"I loaded bombs for the Flying Fortress for two years until I hurt my back. I spent nearly a year then working in the kitchen. I still do all the cooking here for myself."
The men in his unit received two citations for distinguished service, one for a daring attack that destroyed an enemy ammunition convoy during the closing stages of the Tunisian campaign. The group flew more than 300 missions.
"I was fortunate," Roger says. "We brought up the rear behind the front lines."
His unit was always on the move, darting from London to Africa and then Italy. He attended Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome one Christmas Eve. It was one of few highlights of his tour of duty.
Roger hated the climate and developed a distaste for sea rations and powdered eggs. He hasn’t purchased Spam since coming home.
"I wrote home, but it was hard," he says. "There wasn’t much going on, plus our letters were censored."
Roger boarded the Queen Mary luxury ship at Naples, Italy, the first week of May 1945. He was being sent stateside for 30 days.
"We had been at sea for three days and were just outside Newport News, North Carolina, when the message came over the ship’s loud-speaker that the Germans had surrendered," he says. "There was lots of hollering."
That night Roger dined on chicken, the best meal he’d had in three years. He then received the best news he’d had in three years: He would be discharged and could go home to the farm. Following a short stay at Fort Snelling in Minnesota, he took a train to Sioux City. He met his parents at the station downtown. He shook his father’s hand, gave his mother a hug and they returned to the farm.
The adjustment was rough, he admits, but soon he was bailng hay and watching the family corn crop grow. He remembers 1945 yields being smaller than average. "It was a short crop, as I remember it."
He became the head of the family when his father died of a heart attack in 1949. One year later, he married Rachael Bernard of Jefferson. They raised three children.
Between raising crops, livestock and children, Roger served on the parochial school board and the grain elevator board for years. He retired from farming in 1981, the same year the Bosse place became a Century Farm. He moved Rachael to a nursing home in nearby Vermillion and now visits her every Friday morning. He returns to the farm every Friday afternoon, always keeping an eye on the corn and soybeans, crops he’s watched since he could crawl. And each night, Roger Bosse turns out the lights and drifts off to sleep in the room he’s known since birth.