John McDowell gave two sentimental gifts to a war museum in Georgia.
One was a submachine gun.
The other was his story.
It was tough giving up the gun from World War II, but McDowell, 82, is used to sacrificing for his country.
He served two years in the U.S. Army, then spent another 20 years in the U.S. Navy.
Born in Pennsylvania, his father worked in a steel mill. He joined the Army Air Corps at 17 and served with the 389th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force. He was a nose gunner on B-24s.
After he got out of the Army, he joined the Navy in California and retired after 20 years. His last duty station was at Sand Point in Seattle.
“I stayed there,” McDowell said. “I said I didn’t have enough money to leave town.”
Besides memories of war drama, McDowell brought home keepsakes
“My brother, William, eight years older than me, entered the Army right after Pearl Harbor,” McDowell said. “He started out in North Africa. His duty was a gunner on a half-track. He ended up in Austria at the end of the war in Europe.”
His brother sent a German MP40 submachine gun to England.
“As a ground soldier, he had many opportunities to pick and choose what he wanted as souvenirs,” McDowell said. “I picked up the gun at our cousin’s house.”
McDowell, who lives in Everett, put the gun in his duffle bag and flew home in a B-24.
“We just walked through customs,” McDowell said. “I wasn’t nervous. The worse they could do was take it away from me.”
He took the gun home to Pennsylvania. Sometime in March 1946, newspapers carried stories that soldiers and sailors who brought home weapons should drop by their local police stations with guns and live ammunition.
The police chat resulted in a visit from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (before “Explosives” joined the federal agency’s name).
In order to keep the weapon, the federal agent told McDowell, he had 30 days to plug and weld the chamber shut.
Or for $500 per year, he could have kept the gun in its original condition.
“I decided against that,” he said. “For a thousand bucks back then, I could buy an Oldsmobile.”
So he had it plugged up.
The insurance salesman got the gun back from his parents’ house in 1964. He flew back to Everett, commercial, in the days before we had to take our shoes off at checkpoints.
The gun has been appraised at $19,000. He was told there are less than 50 MP40s in the United States. Deciding to make a donation, he found the 8th Air Force Heritage Museum in Georgia. He visited to make sure the museum wasn’t just two rooms in a garage.
It impressed him. He decided to bring the gun to Georgia, and this time he flew with it dismantled and stowed in a tool box.
As retired Navy, he flies for free from McChord Air Force Base in Tacoma. He had to fly the gun down, because FedEx, UPS and the U.S. Postal Service wouldn’t ship a machine gun.
Museum folks were as tickled to meet McDowell as to get the gun. Brenda Elmgren, chief administrative officer for the museum, said as much as they love displaying military artifacts, their 1,000 oral histories are the backbone of the repository.
“We don’t have any of that type of gun,” Elmgren said. “Probably more important is the story about how he came about the gun and got it back. We are a museum about stories.”
She said the gun would more than likely end up in a display, but they don’t have a safe place to show it now. They received 100,000 visitors each year at the 90,000-square-foot facility.
Drop by any day, she said, and hear a veteran’s personal story.
Proud to share, it was still hard to part with the gun, McDowell said. But he has some dandy souvenirs left, including a pristine silk battle map that flew in his B-24.
But Elmgren is right. Hearing the story from a real hero was the best.
Columnist Kristi O’Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.
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