A good-bye, 70 years later

Robert Fischer was shot down over Norway a few months after he entered World War II.

— A Gotha resident and some of her family traveled to Belgium to visit the grave of her brother who was killed in World War II.

GOTHA — Louise Fischer Meador still remembers the knock on the door on that stormy night in 1944 and the delivery of the dreaded telegram, “We regret to inform you … .” She was 13 when she learned her big brother — a World War II P-51 pilot who had been missing in action for two months — had been shot down and killed.

“He was a father figure to me,” Meador said. “He wasn’t even 21. It was devastating.”

That was a rough week for the family; they found out that one of her uncles, Ocoee resident Logan McNeil, was killed in the Battle of the Bulge, as well.

Seventy years after the war, Meador had the chance to give her brother — U.S. Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Robert G. Fischer, of Gotha — a proper good-bye, when she and two of her children traveled to Belgium and visited the white cross marking his grave in Ardennes American Cemetery & Memorial. Fischer is one of 5,329 U.S. military personnel who died in the war and are buried in Ardennes.

TAKING FLIGHT

Fischer played football for and graduated from Ocoee High School. Meador remembers many of the local boys going into the military during or right after high school.

“He wanted to go into the Air Force,” she said of her brother. “But everyone said, ‘No, stay.’ So he stayed another year.”

He enlisted and was briefly stationed at the U.S. Army Air Corps training center in Bartow with the 56th Fighter Squadron before being sent to Europe.

“From what I remember, they put these men through training as fast as they could to get them over there,” Meador said.

Fischer was overseas — assigned to the 335th Fighter Squadron, 4th Fighter Group — for just a few months before he was killed. He crash-landed in the small Norwegian town of Sola, and residents protected his body until the U.S. military could get to him.

“That was the sad thing: He couldn’t get out,” Meador said. “It was a fast plane, and it had an automatic cockpit opener, and … he was supposed to eject, but they hit him in the spot where he would have ejected. So he knew he was going to die. That gave me nightmares.”

She still has his Purple Heart. He was also posthumously awarded the Air Medal for meritorious achievement while participating in aerial flight.

PROPER FAREWELL

Plot D, Row 13, Grave 24. This is where 2nd Lt. Robert G. Fischer is buried. And it is here that Meador and her family learned more details about his short military career and his death. It was also a chance to finally say good-bye.

Meador, her sons, Paul Meador Jr. and Robert Jackson, and her daughter-in-law, Kathryn Meador, started at the cemetery’s visitors center, a stone structure with an impressive American eagle and other sculptures and, inside, a chapel and three large wall maps made of marble.

An employee helped them find information about their family member, including where he was stationed, what routes he took, where he dropped bombs and where he was shot down. They also learned that the gravesite was being taken care of, although the caretaker’s identity couldn’t be revealed.

It is customary in Belgium and the Netherlands for families to adopt a fallen American soldier’s grave, and that responsibility is passed down through the generations.

Meador was touched by one scene she witnessed. As they were walking through the cemetery, they saw an elderly woman with a young child, perhaps a grandson, sitting on the ground.

“She was pointing to different things and pointing to us, and I thought that it was a perfect example of how much they care for us and educate the younger generation,” Meador said. “Those white crosses, all of those white crosses, mean so many people were killed.”

The closer they got to her brother’s grave, the more Meador’s eyes filled with tears. When they arrived, the employee took a coffee can and a damp sponge out of his backpack, pressed tan Normandy Beach sand into the engraved words and then wiped away the excess.

“My brother’s name just really came out,” Meador said, making the information visible in photos.

The man left to allow the family time to say good-bye, and he returned to the visitors center and played taps and “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the carillon.

“We all lost it,” Meador said. “We didn’t talk; we didn’t say a word.”

The visit has finally brought some closure to 2nd Lt. Fischer’s family.

“We learned exactly what happened,” Meador said. “The Norwegian people took good care of him. And now (the Belgians) take care of and put flowers on my brother’s grave.”

Henry Wilkening, second from right, built a home for he and his wife, Emma, and one for each of his three daughters, at left. Louise Meador, one of Wilkening's grandchildren, lives in one of them, the house she grew up in.

BACK IN THE HOMESTEAD

Robert, Louise and Everette Fischer grew up in Gotha at a time when it still had plenty of open space. Their grandfathers were pioneers of the community, established in 1885.

In 1894, Edward Fischer, a young man who had just finished studies in a Missouri seminary, arrived in Gotha to pastor Zion Lutheran Church, originally at Hempel Avenue and Morton Jones Road. It relocated in 1920 to the intersection of Gotha Road and Hempel and is a Church of Christ today. Fischer served from 1894 to 1903 and 1925 to 1954.

Henry Wilkening, whose family is from Hanover, Germany, arrived from Kansas by train in 1911 without ever seeing Gotha. Wilkening, his wife, Emma, and his three daughters, Esther, Rose and Gertrude, stepped off with all they owned.

Wilkening developed the northeast corner of Hempel and Gotha, building a garage, grocery and drug store with apartments upstairs.

“All of them were Lutheran, and that was the magnet that brought them here,” Louise Fischer Meador said.

The two families were joined when George Fischer (who was one of 10 children) married Esther Wilkening and had three children, Robert, Louise and Everette. Robert was killed in 1944 during World War II, Everette lives in Windermere, and Louise lives in Gotha in the house she grew up in.

This home is one of four that Wilkening built — one for he and his wife and one for each of his daughters. Wilkening Farm Road is named after him. Meador moved back about 10 years ago. The retired piano teacher now spends time performing with the Sunshine Singers.

Contact Amy Quesinberry Rhode at [email protected].