Jack Forgy; son of fallen soldier helped others find facts, peace

WASHINGTON -- Jack Forgy never forgot how it felt to lose his father, an Army officer, when he was 10 years old.

As he grew up in Arkansas, he wrote letters to his father's colleagues and commanding officer and learned some details of the July 27, 1945, death. Years later, when he followed in his father's footsteps and became an infantry officer, he visited the Normandy town where his father died.

Few people remembered the battle, and the language barrier almost defeated him.

"Five minutes out of town, a black car pulled him over," said one of Mr. Forgy's two sons, John of Fairfax, Va. "It was the doctor who had treated my grandfather, and [my father] got a great first-hand account."

"He knew all the circumstances," agreed Mr. Forgy's wife of 44 years, Crystal. Lieutenant Colonel Percy Forgy had climbed into a jeep and just taken command of the troops when he was hit by shrapnel.

Upon retirement in 1996, Mr. Forgy realized his skills could help others who lost their fathers in wars. He could read military personnel files easily, and he knew how to research records at the National Archives.

He began volunteering for the American World War II Orphans Network and over the next 12 years uncovered the fates of more than 600 military men whose families always wondered how their relatives died.

Mr. Forgy, 74, who died Sept. 26 of lung cancer in Warrenton, Va., was perfect for the task.

"You have to know how the military works," he told USA 8Today in 2004. "But you also need a sense of intuition, so when you pick up a 700-page file on a division that fought in the Philippines, you'll find what you need."

It is a job that can daunt grieving relatives.

"You just keep peeling the onion back, [a] layer at a time, trying to find out more information," he told NBC's Tom Brokaw in 2001. "All I knew was that my father was killed in Normandy. So I just started digging. ..... I opened up a page of a document. And there it was. It said at 12:30 White Six was hit. My father was White Six.

"And I realized that I could help other people," said Mr. Forgy, a colonel. "Having been through the process, having been in the Army, having worked in personnel management, personnel systems, I knew how things worked."

One of his discoveries resulted in the awarding of a Silver Star to Gerard Flannick in 2001, 56 years after his death. Flannick was copilot of a B-17 that on Feb. 23, 1945, bombed a rail yard in Bolzano, Italy, and then was hit by antiaircraft fire. He flew the plane while eight of his crewmates bailed out. They survived and were sent to a 8German prison camp; Flannick and another crewmate died when the crippled bomber crashed.

"The reason for all this is that Jerry Flannick's act was heroic, and it deserved to be recognized," Mr. Forgy told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel in 2001.

Flannick's daughter, Kathy Piatek, died last year; her husband, Edmund Piatek of Greenfield, Wis., said Mr. Forgy's work meant the world to her.

"Because of him, she met four of [her father's] crewmates," Piatek said. "They knew him, and that was the closest connection to her dad because she was not quite 3 months old when he died."

The discovery of traces of a parent's life can have a powerful impact. "We all grew up believing we were the only ones, although about 200,000 children were left fatherless after World War II," said Patricia Gaffney-Kindig, past president of the orphans' network.

At an orphans' network meeting in St. Louis, Mr. Forgy helped arrange for the group's members who had requested records to go through the national depository of military records there. Archivists met with them and explained what they had found.

"It was three weeks after I had gotten word that my father's remains had been found after 55 years in Papua New Guinea," said Gaffney-Kindig, of Colorado. "In June 1999, my father's remains were buried at Arlington. Jack attended ..... He found a photo of my father-in-law's plane being offloaded just before it was lost. Jack could find the rarest things that to us are so precious."