Constable: Arlington Heights World War II veteran, 99, to be honored by a third nation

Seventy-five years after his heroics during World War II earned him countless medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross and the British Distinguished Flying Cross, 99-year-old retired U.S. Army Air Corps Maj. James P. Ostler Sr. of Arlington Heights will attend his first awards ceremony.

At noon Nov. 21 at Arlington Heights American Legion Post 208, Consul General of France to the Midwest Guillaume Lacroix will present Ostler with the French Legion of Honour, the prestigious award created by Napoleon.

Ostler was busy as a navigator on a B-17 bomber in Europe when the U.S. Army Air Corps awarded him our nation's Distinguished Flying Cross. He passed on a lavish British ceremony in 1945 because it would have delayed his homecoming after the war.

Sharp, thoughtful and articulate, Ostler remembers how his military career began.

"When the Japanese bombed everything, it was like the scene from a bad movie," says Ostler, who was a student at Loyola University in December 1941. "School is over and everybody walked down to enlist."

Born April 28, 1920, in Melrose Park, Ostler was the youngest of three sons of English immigrant Charles Ostler, a house painter, and Johanna Murphy, who came to the U.S. from her native Ireland. "I never did get an honest story from either of them about how they met and married," Ostler says with a smile. He was quarantined at home with scarlet fever for much of his senior year at Proviso High School, but he did well enough to earn a scholarship to Loyola, where he dropped out to enlist.

"There wasn't any discussion," Ostler remembers. "Somebody dropped a bomb on us. Let's go get them."

After training with the Army at Fort Sheridan, Ostler was sent to Vernon, Texas, to become a pilot.

"I washed out of pilot training," Ostler says. "That was my first big academic failure. It taught me a lesson that you can be pretty good, but when pretty good isn't enough, you have to learn to live with it."

Ostler became the navigator on a crew of 10 with the 388th Bombardment Group, which was stationed at Knettishall, England. They flew their B-17 Flying Fortress on bombing missions into European areas occupied by the Germans.

"We weren't there long until they found something for us to do," remembers Ostler, who flew his first bombing run over France on July 14, 1943. On Oct. 2 of that year, they flew their first combat mission, and Ostler, who sat in the nose of the plane between the bombardier and the pilot, often had to man one of the 50-caliber machine guns. He saw other planes get shot down and brought home a souvenir metal piece of enemy flak "because I pulled it out of the bulkhead near my head." But he says he and his crew didn't think about dying.

"You were a little 10-man world all to yourself. If the plane went down, you all were going down," says Ostler, who was called J.P. to avoid confusion with another Jim on the crew. "When the plane right next to you is shot down, that sobers you."

The most agonizing times were spent on base, when crews would go to the landing strip to welcome back friends returning from bombing missions.

"People would stand around looking at the sky. 'That's only four airplanes. There should be a lot more than that,'" remembers Ostler, who says the only thing men could do was shrug and acknowledge the loss. "Too bad."

They dubbed their plane Little Willie, after "a terribly unfunny cartoon," Ostler says. When they finished their 25 missions, another crew inherited Little Willie. "They flew one mission and never came back," Ostler says.

The "most anguished time I ever spent" was when he was returning to Chicago and a chaplain asked him to comfort the Milwaukee family of a man killed in action. Ostler didn't know the dead man but had seen the man's plane crash into the North Sea. He called the man's home, determined to comfort the woman who answered the phone.

"I was one of the last people who saw Harry before he got shot down," Ostler remembers saying. "She interrupted, and said, 'He's dead?'"

Ostler felt compelled to take a train and a taxi to the man's house, where he met with grieving and wailing relatives. "I made up all kind of good things about this guy I didn't remember at all," Ostler says. "I don't think 'closure' was a word anybody spoke back then."

After 25 missions, Ostler figured he was headed home. Instead, he was tabbed for duty with a secret operation for the 803rd and 36th Bomb Squadrons working with the British Royal Air Force in Sculthorpe.

"We lived with them, we ate with them, we drank with them," says Ostler, who notes his crew never was told about the people and secret equipment on board. "Ours was not to reason why. Ours was to kick bales of stuff out of the airplane."

A stranger with mysterious suitcases often would enter the back of the plane shortly before takeoff. Sometimes they'd drop leaflets, sometimes counterfeit money, and sometimes metal pieces designed to mess with German radar equipment. They never crossed enemy lines and "were told to ditch the plane in the sea if something happened," to keep their secrets out of enemy hands, Ostler says.

"The only time we really knew there was a war on was on D-Day," he says of the massive Allied invasion on June 6, 1944. "We cruised up and down the English Channel and saw thousands of ships and guns."

Every medical person on their base was sent to Normandy. His crew's flight surgeon, an obstetrician from Dallas, came back with a new definition of courage. "He was haggard and bloodstained," Ostler says. "He looked at us and said, 'You're a bunch of effing cowards.'"

But Ostler's bravery and service were recognized by English King George VI, who ordered the RAF to award Ostler's crew the British Distinguished Flying Cross "in recognition of the excellent work that you did for us during the time that you were engaged in Bomber Support operations in this theatre." The 1945 ceremony conflicted with their flight back to the United States.

"We could go to Buckingham Palace and get a medal from the king, or we could go home," Ostler says. "Guess what we did? We stiffed the king and went home."

The medal was sent to his parents' house in Melrose Park. "I happened to be outside and here comes the mailman with a little package for me," Ostler remembers.

The French honor came about after Oster's daughter, Kathy Ostler Carmean, read a story about Batavia resident Howard Keskitalo receiving that medal in 2017. She contacted the Illinois Department of Veterans' Affairs, who contacted the French.

"There must be hundreds of others whose records must be similar," Ostler says in downplaying his honor.

After the war was over, Ostler returned home and called Time Inc., the publisher of the magazines Time and Life that was about to launch Sports Illustrated. "I knew that I wanted a job with words. I like their sound, I like their meaning, and I like people who use them correctly," says Ostler, who didn't discover until 1995 that he had enough credits to earn his bachelor's degree from Loyola.

Time didn't offer writing jobs to people without experience, but they did say he could apply for a printing job in Chicago.

Still in uniform because his brothers usurped his civilian clothes, Ostler got the job. He created his own position and called himself production editor, a title that stuck. One time, after the New York editors sent to Chicago to work on a big story went home, Ostler discovered they forgot to include space for picture captions in a Life magazine piece about Winston Churchill's Secret Speeches of the War. That meant Churchill's prose was six lines too long.

"This is what I get paid for, so I rewrote Winston Churchill's speech," Ostler says. He shared that news with an editor in New York, and they both decided not to tell anyone else. Churchill didn't complain.

Promoted to a job in Philadelphia for a couple of years, Ostler went to a Christmas party thrown by his boss in New York, where he met his future wife, Audrey Cahill, who grew up in Brooklyn. "You could see the lights of Ebbets Field from the window of the back bedroom," remembers Ostler.

They were married on Oct. 23, 1948, moved to Arlington Heights in 1955, and raised their children James Jr., Ray, Tom, Nancy, Bob, Kathy and Mike. Ostler retired in 1985, and his wife died in 2012. He has 12 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

Honored by three nations for his heroism, Ostler says the heroes of Veterans Day are those who didn't get the opportunities he has been able to enjoy.

"The people to be honored are the ones who didn't come back," says Ostler, his voice cracking with emotion. "When the guy who had the bunk next to you doesn't make it back and you did, you think about life and death differently."

There was no time during World War II to contemplate the meaning of it all.

"This is what we signed up to do. We're going to do it the best we can," Ostler says. "And that's it. Nobody was particularly frightened. Nobody was particularly joyful about what we did. It was a job that our generation had to do, and we did."