Prescott veteran receives honor quilt, focuses on father’s wartime sacrifice

Tom Bowman thinks of his biological father every single day of his life even though he never actually met him. 

His mother was six months pregnant with him when his father, John J. Barcynski, died in World War II as a B-29 bomber pilot. His plane and crew were shot down over Iwo Jima during the Battle of Titian, a significant event in the Pacific Theater. 

“Every day. You better believe it. I cry a lot about that,” says Bowman when asked if he thinks a lot about his dad, who died at age 22.

Although Bowman was recognized on Tuesday with a Quilt of Valor for his service in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War, in many ways the honor was just as much for his father as it was for him.

A deeply religious and humble man who says he and his family are prayer warriors, Bowman spoke mostly about his father during a quilt presentation ceremony before 20 family members and friends and later with LebTown during an exclusive interview. The presentation ceremony was at The Clay House Cafe in Lebanon.

Jo Garvin, a local volunteer with Quilts for Valor, read about Barcynski from a prepared script and Bowman during the ceremony. She said Barcynski became a second lieutenant and served aboard a B-29 called the Bumper.

The aircraft, known as a Superfortress, is a retired American four-engine propeller-driven heavy bomber designed by Boeing and flown primarily by the U.S. during World War II and the Korean War.

She said the Superfortress was designed for high-attitude strategic bombing, but also excelled in low-altitude night incendiary bombing, fire, and in dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – the only aircraft ever to drop nuclear weapons in combat. 

“John and his crew were killed in the Battle of Titian, which was a significant event in the Pacific Theater of World War II. The Marines successfully landed on the island, securing it for allies and ultimately paving the way for the use of Titian Island as a major air base for bombing missions against Japan,” said Garvin. “John’s wife Norma was six months pregnant with their son when he was killed in action. She named her son Thomas John Barsinski.”

Later adopted by his mother’s third husband, Bowman has an unrelenting love for a father who paid the ultimate sacrifice in defense of America’s freedom. He spoke with great emotion during the ceremony about how his father and mother met.

“My mother, Norma Faye Ludwig, lived in Palmyra. My dad lived in Lebanon. They met at the Hershey Ballroom. Anybody ever heard of the Hershey Ballroom? I danced there in high school. Some of you still remember it,” said Bowman, who never knew his mother’s second husband either since he died in a car crash shortly after they were married. “They met there. This was before the telephone, cellphones, cars. Well, there were cars but they didn’t have any.”

His mother took the train to Hershey and his father hitched a ride with a friend. “They fell in love, the war came, my dad enlisted,” Bowman added.

He said their time together wasn’t easy as his father learned how to fly the aircraft.

“To be a pilot on a B-29, out of 100 candidates, maybe one would be chosen, so he must have been pretty bright,” Bowman said. “They had to decide whether to get married right away or to get married after the war. Thank goodness they got married at an airbase down in Georgia.”

A logistical move every three months to different bases to learn more about flying the Superfortress is what made life difficult for his soon-to-be parents.

“There was no on-base housing for my mother or anybody else, any other dependents. She would have to find a place to live, usually rent a room somewhere, And every three months she would catch a bus and rotate to the next place. It was not an easy life,” said Bowman. “She would have maybe a couple hours a week on a Sunday afternoon to spend with my dad. The rest of the time he was in intense training.”

Their last time together before Barcynski was deployed was during Christmas 1944 in Omaha, Nebraska, according to Bowman, who lives in Jackson Township near Prescott.

“That was the last place that they, that he rotated to. They had a Christmas party there. That’s probably when I was conceived. A bunch of us were conceived around the same time,” he added.

Bowman said his father flew 22 missions. The 23rd mission would be his last. 

“A round-trip mission on a B-29 to fly to Japan, drop the bombs, and come back was usually around 17 hours. Many of them didn’t make it back because they crashed on the way back.

“They ran out of fuel. They were so damaged,” said Bowman. “He died on the 23rd mission, May 29, 1945, over Yokohama, Japan. There were 464 B-29s in the air that day bombing Yokohama. Four were shot down. My dad was one of them. On his flight that day was the head of the whole unit, James Connolly. He was the head of the whole 504th bomb group. He was an observer. He was also killed.”

Bowman spent his entire time speaking about his father and how his dad’s cousin, Kaz Barcynski, helped introduce him to the 504th group that has reunions in honor of the men who served in the war.

Bowman has met the sons of other soldiers killed on the same day as his father. Only two soldiers from his dad’s unit remain, he said. He had a motive to speak about his father instead of himself.

“He died 80 years ago and this is the first time I’ve been able to recognize him,” said Bowman. “I mean, I’ve known it most of my life but I didn’t know much about him until I found out about these reunions and then my cousin Kaz Barsinski, he got involved with me and started introducing me to my relatives, my aunts and uncles and stuff.”

Garvin mentioned Bowman’s service during the ceremony. He served in the Navy from 1966 to 1970 on the USS Jamestown, an Oxford-class technical research ship acquired by the Navy for the task of “conducting research in the reception of electromagnetic propagations.”

“She (the Jamestown) operated in the South China Sea, gathering valuable information for the Navy ships fighting to protect the independence of South Vietnam while adding to the long Navy tradition of serving the field of scientific research. She continued operating in the Far East, often operating in the Vietnam War zone through mid-1967. Jamestown was decommissioned Dec. 29, 1969, and scrapped in May of 1970,” said Garvin.

When asked after the ceremony about his time in the service, Bowman said he turned 21 in boot camp.

“I went with a bunch of guys from Lebanon. My best friend called me and said, ‘Hey, a bunch of us are going to the Navy, you want to go?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ I was working for the phone company,  working 12-hour shifts, seven days a week, guarding a manhole in Harrisburg,” he recalled.

He believed his work at the phone company might translate into being placed in the signal corps in the Navy.

“They tested you in boot camp, you know, and I tested high end in languages, so I became a Laotian linguist. And that’s why I was on the ship, the spy ship,” Bowman added. “I was in Vietnam for a year on a ship, in the wars. I finished my tour at NSA, the National Security Agency at Fort Worth, Maryland. I worked on that kind of stuff there, security stuff.”

He said their ship had one type of weapon – .45 pistols – when the Pueblo, a ship similar to the Jamestown, was captured by North Korea.

“We were in the war zone on this big ship with 300 guys,” recalled Bowman. “As soon as that happened, they sent us back to Subic Bay, put a .50-caliber machine gun on our patrol, and that was it. So we didn’t have anything to protect us if we’d been attacked. Forty-five pistols, that was it. In the war zone.”

He said since his father died, he probably would have never been drafted to go to Vietnam. He did, however, enlist at the urging of his friends. Since his younger days, his attitude about Vietnam has shifted.

“I didn’t know that was a bad war. We shouldn’t have been there. Many men died needlessly in Vietnam. Of course, at that time there was a communist behind every tree sort of (mentality) thing. And I was young,” said Bowman.

Garvin said the local quilting group, based in Hummelstown, has provided over 520 service members and veterans with quilts since 2017. Their mission is to “cover service members and veterans touched by war with comforting and healing Quilts of Valor,” she noted.

Anyone who would like to nominate a service member or veteran to receive a quilt can fill out the submission form at qovf.org.