A Marine Phantom + comments

I monitor a couple of groups where Vietnam vets post some of their “private stock” photos; those they took themselves.  Unlike the more familiar published photos we’ve commonly seen over the years, these are often more gritty and show detail.  Infrequently, the thread will take a personal tack where recollections of the same or similar events from differing perspectives develop.  This was one of them.

A Pilot's "Dinner speech"

A friend sent this piece to me yesterday. Over the course of living a pretty full life, I've encountered two groups who thoroughly loved their work...cops and pilots. The pilot who authored these words summed up a pilot's love affair with his work as well as any I've seen before:

Change Of Command Dinner speech by CDR "Beef" Wellington, former USNR VFA-203 "Blue Dolphins" C.O.

"Two days ago I closed out my career as a Naval Aviator. The realization is just now starting to hit me, as I'm sure it will the rest of you someday. What follows are my remarks at my farewell dinner. Several of the guys in my squadron had asked me for a copy of what I had written and because it had been jotted down on the back of a cocktail napkin in my weird-assed hand writing and because these things came from my heart, I debated for a while whether or not to write it down, but the response from all the guys and their wives was so humbling and overwhelming, I thought... why not.

Being an F/A-18 pilot and an airline pilot at the same time gives you an interesting and different perspective. Unlike others, at my airline (NWA) they do not have a history of hiring Single Seat Naval Aviators and as such we are definitely in the minority. On every trip when you first sit down next to a guy, the first volley of questions in getting to know each other always includes "What is your background?" Based on 3 years in the airline industry, I have recently decided to flat out lie and stop telling guys that I am a Naval Aviator and an F/A-18 pilot. You might be asking yourself, why would anyone do that?

There are 3 reasons.

One - Because everything that the uninformed population knows about Naval Aviation they got from the movie Top Gun: a credible and reliable source of information if there ever was one.

Two - Because when I tell guys that I am an F/A-18 pilot, the machismo and bravado that immediately comes from the left side of the cockpit becomes somewhat intolerable and I am forced to sit and listen to stories for the next 4 days that go something like, "Mike, did I tell you about the time when I landed my C-5 on a 15,000 foot runway with only 30,000 pounds of fuel in the tanks, with the weather at minus, and oh, oh yeah, did I say it was at night." You gotta be $hi **** n' me!

Three - Because, in their state of curiosity, invariably questions get asked about what flying the F/A-18 is like and what this business of Naval Aviation is all about. It is in my futile attempts to answer these questions that I have finally decided that it is impossible to do so. How can anyone possibly explain Naval Aviation?

How do you explain what it has been like to have seen the entire world through the canopy of an F/A-18 like a living IMAX film?

How do you explain what is like to fly an engineering marvel that responds to your every whim of airborne imagination?

How do you explain the satisfaction that comes from seeing a target under the diamond disappear at the flick of your thumb?

How do you explain catapult shots - especially the night ones?

How do explain the exhilaration of the day trap?

How do you possibly explain finding yourself at 3/4 mile [on final], at night, weather down, deck moving, hyperventilating into your mask, knowing that it will take everything you have to get aboard without killing yourself?

How do you explain moons so bright and nights so dark that they defy logic?

How do you explain sunrises and sunsets so glorious that you knew in your heart that God had created that exact moment in time just for you?

How do you explain the fellowship of the ready room where no slack is given and none is taken?

How do you explain an environment where the content of a man's character can be summed up into two simple 4-word phrases - "He's a good Sh**" or "He's a F---in' idiot."

How do you explain the heart of maintenance professionals whose only enjoyment comes from taking care of our young sailors and providing us with "up" jets to execute our craft?

How do you explain the dedication of our young troops who we burden with the responsibilities of our lives and then pay them peanuts to do so?

How do you explain the type of women who are crazy enough to marry into Naval Aviation, who endure long working hours and long periods of separation and who are painfully and quietly forced to accept the realization that they are second to the job?

The simple fact is that you can't explain it; none of it.

It is something that only a very select few of us will ever know. We are bonded for life by our proprietary knowledge and it excludes all others from our fraternity. As I will, no matter where you go or what do, you should cherish that knowledge for the rest of your life. For when I am 90 years old sitting on my porch in my rocking chair and someone asks me what I have done with my life, I will damn sure not tell them I was an airline pilot, but rather I will reach into my pocket, pull out my Blue Dolphin money clip and tell them I was a Naval Aviator, I worked with the finest people on the planet, and that I was the Commanding Officer of the Blue Dolphins."

Zoom

Father's Day - 2014

Only about one-sixth of the men serving in the military during WWII saw any combat. My father (R), saw quite a bit of it…my father-in-law (L) saw none. However, my father-in-law captured a Japanese soldier, an accomplishment for which he received quite a bit of notoriety and respect. As with many such stories, there was a “rest of the story” to it.

The Rest of the Story. My father-in-law, Larry, was an older man with a wife, a young daughter, and a burgeoning career as a big band leader. For him, WWII was a nuisance that he wanted to avoid, if he could…so he didn’t volunteer for service, he had a family to support and was gambling that the draft would not reach men his age. Nevertheless, he received his draft notice in April 1944, about a year before the end of WWII. He was 29. Found among his things was the newspaper clipping from his hometown paper. It told 2-stories, although he only knew one of them—he was one of those scraped from the “bottom of the barrel” as proclaimed in the circled headline.

The second article, circled at lower right, told of the largest Air Force bombing raid ever launched; this one, one of the first sent to Berlin. My father, the guy on the right above, was one of those flying that mission. Larry never knew the combined story, nor did my father. I put the story together after comparing their separate records.

In late July 1945 Larry was aboard a troop transport with several thousand others sailing west from San Francisco…destination, Okinawa, a Japanese island about 450-miles south of the Japanese mainland. The Battle for Okinawa, which claimed about 65,000 Allied casualties, had just wound up in June. Okinawa was to be the staging ground for the invasion of Japan and Larry was slated to be one of the soldiers in the invading army. Fortunately for him, President Truman made the decision to drop the first 2 atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki while Larry was on that troop ship and the war ended. His procrastination had paid off, but only by a small margin.

Okinawa was a mess when he got there. Besides the 65,000 Allied casualties, there were over 100,000 Japanese soldiers lost during the battle. And there continued to be isolated Japanese resistance for many weeks after war’s end.

Larry was a good-humored, skilled raconteur who often told the story of his capture of a Japanese soldier on Okinawa—something very few soldiers ever accomplished. He was on the crapper, pants down, and his rifle a few steps away when he looked up and saw a Japanese soldier advancing on him from across a field with his rifle braced diagonally across his chest. Larry was in a tough situation…largely incapacitated, his rifle a few steps away. For a few seconds that seemed like an eternity, Larry had no idea how he was going to get out of his rotten predicament.

Suddenly, the Japanese soldier threw down his rifle and raised his hands over his head. He was surrendering…to Larry, the first American soldier he could find--the one sitting on the crapper. He hurried to hitch up his pants, grab his rifle, and take charge of his prisoner. Larry never told the whole story to others while he was in the service, preferring to be known as the guy who had single-handedly captured the Japanese soldier on Okinawa.

His soldierly feat, along with his musical expertise paved the way for him to find a band leader assignment to the Army Band in Occupied Japan for a couple of years after the war. It was during those years that the picture above was undoubtedly taken. Larry was also the “very tall Wally” who never fixed things I mentioned in a previous article HERE. He was a helluva guy.

Dad’s picture above also has an interesting story. It was taken in London during late March 1944, just after he had completed his first 6 missions…the ones during which many young aviators lost their lives as “green crews” flying in the tail-end Charlie position. Sitting beside him were his pilot and co-pilot. He described this leave and portrait sitting in his journal which is how I was able to fit it into his story. Four of those first six missions were to Berlin and were among the bloodiest ever flown by the Eighth Air Force…it was a miracle he was alive to be sitting for this picture. Those anxious young eyes were very quickly becoming more serious as the days passed. Notice there were no ribbons on his chest at this point…the vacant space would fill up substantially during the ensuing weeks as he flew 44 more.

...and he was buying me a drink (Andy Rooney)

Of Dodgy Weddings, Bit Scary & Too Fond of Tractors

Nick, an English Facebook friend, recently posted the map of England on the right; the one on the left is from my files.

After Dad passed away, a massive amount of 8th Air Force material involving his WWII service came to me. Recognizing that somewhere in all that stuff was his story...the one he never really told, I undertook to learn what I could from it.
 
One project was to take from his diary, that of an excited 21-year old 2Lt on his way to the greatest adventure of his life, his route of flight as they departed the States, eastbound over the Atlantic. He was a navigator so, he diligently recorded the waypoints along his journey. Making a very accurate route tracing on a map was possible. Now, Nick’s modern chart of England placed alongside a traditional version adds an entirely new perspective to Dad's adventure.
 
Landed at White Walkers, took a train south through 17th Century Massacres and Perpetually Drunk, continuing south to a city near Gobby. Then, in routine military fashion, reversed course, now traveling northbound on the same tracks. Turned left at Dodgy Weddings and headed west across Spare Bit of Scotland, they crossed the North Channel, disembarking at Liam Neeson’s and continuing westbound to an area just south of Can’t Decide What It’s Called, near Bit Scary.
 
Here the boys met some REAL veterans where they began to learn what they had gotten themselves into. The unit’s task was to prepare the first wave of Replacements for their combat assignments to the approximately 40 Army Air Force bases situated to the southeast, in the region of Too Fond of Tractors, etc.
 
The most important lesson imparted near Bit Scary was that if they got lost, steer 330º and “You Caunt Miss It.” That bit of sage advice would later save Dad’s fanny once or twice and he wrote a story about it, entitled 330º.
 
Upon leaving Bit Scary after traveling via some unrecorded means and route, they ended up first assigned to the 94th between Russian Spies (probably then known as Nazi Spies) and Too Fond of Tractors. Although they were pleased with the civilized digs they found at the 94th, just south of there, at the 447th the day before, Kaffun and MacDonald were shot down. So, they picked up their kit and moved south where a couple of replacement crews were now needed. He probably never knew why his crew was moved, since his diary and subsequent stories only complain about the muddy, unpleasant living conditions they found at the newer base. Kaffun and his crew were killed; MacDonald and his, taken prisoner.
 
Crossing the shore over the Too Fond of Tractors coastline, he joined the Aluminum Overcast, most frequently steering a course of 150º bound for where there was a problem. When 2 engines failed on the same wing or when the vertical stabilizer was shot up or when the flak shell pierced the right wing on its way to explode at a higher altitude or the fog was too thick to see through…recalling the sage advice imparted at Bit Scary, they sometimes steered the reciprocal of 150º …. 330º. And he never missed it….50-times.

 Adios

Bud's Crew

Found this photo quite by chance last night.  The details written along the bottom tell that it was taken from a plane flying with the 94th Bomb Group (H) based at Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk.  Noted also is the date: 25 August 1944; the altitude: 21,500-ft.; and the target: Rechlin.

The date and target caught my eye.  This was the same day that Otis and the rest of Bud's crew were shot down over Rechlin.  That story was written up by Otis and Bob, the co-pilot on that mission and I have them both.  Some years ago, I combined them and found some relevant photos to illustrate the story, then sent the story to what descendents I could find.

However, this picture may be the icing on the cake for this story.  The silver specks left of center and a little high is another group of planes that could be 447th B-17s; the two Groups often flew their missions together.  Back home in England, their bases were about 5-miles apart.  Otis, flying in Bud's crew, may be in one of those planes, plowing their way to the target and to their date with destiny, ditched in the North Sea....68-years ago.

For a crew that had to ditch in WWII, if they survived, the story became the one they told all their lives.  It was fairly rare to survive a ditching.  Another story and amazing picture can be found here. 

To illustrate my earlier story, I used a satellite image to draw the course and note the point of ditching.  Matches pretty close to the picture, doesn't it?  (Note: Their briefed target that day was the missile base at Peenemünde but, good results reported from the first Groups over that target led to the decision to turn off to Rechlin).

Wow! 

The Torch Has Passed to a New Generation

I've given thought as to when the WWII generation stepped back and handed the keys to us. Judging from my father's behavior, I think it was about the time Wavy Gravy came forward as one of our generation's spokesmen.

As old men, there still appears to be quite a gap between them. The old airman sports a bombardier's wing, 2 Distinguished Flying Crosses, a Purple Heart, several Air Medals, a WWII Victory Medal, and a very proud grandson who will undoubtedly grow even more in awe of his PaPaw as time passes. Wavy....well, Wavy has a red nose.

Adios

Happy Thanksgiving - 2012

Happy Thanksgiving

click pictures to enlarge them

(Words adapted from: "A Few Good Men")

Never forget...there is nothing so conducive to civilized behavior than the threat of a punch in the nose for uncivilized behavior.



Adios

Fathers' Day - 2012

This Father's Day finds most of us with only fond memories of our fathers. A touching thing began to develop last year on Facebook as first one then another of our classmates began to post pictures of their fathers. Several of them posted pictures of their dads in their WWII uniforms.

It happens that the WWII Army Air Force has been a topic I've delved deeply into over the past few years. Except in general terms, many people, including me, had little idea what our fathers did during the war. A lot of them were front line warriors, others were in support functions, still others served in stateside billets. All of them did their parts to preserve our country for us and our children.

I hope you will choose to participate in this ongoing project to add your father's picture to the collages that I hope grow from this small start.

Send me a picture of your Dad in uniform and I will be pleased to add it to the collection posted here.

This modest blog has had over 65,000 page reads and gets about 100-200 new page views each day. Not bad for a bunch of computer illiterate old duffers. SEND 'EM IN.

July 2011 update: My father was one of those young men who flew in the bombers high in the skies over Europe during WWII. During the early months of the war the young airmen were shot out of the sky in such alarming numbers that the bombing missions were entirely halted for some weeks while the brass scrambled to figure out how to combat the deadly effectiveness of Hitler’s Luftwaffe. As the Air Force was strengthened, the Luftwaffe was effectively neutered by Spring 1944. After that, it could only mount vigorous defensive attacks on infrequent occasions. The danger to the airmen increasingly came from the deadly accurate anti-aircraft guns on the ground…flak.

Dad’s diary provides an interesting account of his experiences aloft during 1944-45. Wording in his diary was purposely frugal. He never showed it to me nor talked much about his war experiences. Only in recent years have I been able to learn quite a bit of what he saw, but never told…it was frightening. His diary showed a degree of youthful (he was 21) excitement during his first tour, Spring 1944; but, his second tour, which ended in early March 1945, was clearly less eventful. The war was winding down.

Recently, a pair of pictures were posted to an account of a late March 1945, mid-air collision over Germany, near Koblenz. The pictures were far more detailed than any I had ever seen before. One of the difficult things for an airman to tell and a layman to understand is the stark terror and grinding fear that accompanied most of our young WWII Army Air Force aviators flying in the ETO. The picture posted below shows the 2 bombers tumbling to earth a few moments after the collision. Pictures like this are very rare and this one tells the story my father and so many of his fellows could not tell.

Ten young men are still in each of the planes. Two will survive, eighteen will die. One man got out in time to open his parachute about 400-feet above the ground. The other, the ball-turret gunner, fell to earth unable to get out of his turret…and he survived! Dad was on his way home when the collision occurred, his missions completed, his war was done….

Adios

Pearl Harbor – 2011

These guys have been getting together for almost 70-years to honor their lost friends and recall the event that immediately plunged the United States into WWII; the youngest of them is about 90. One of the local old-timers spoke into a radio station microphone to tell of his own grand children and great grand children having no knowledge of the Pearl Harbor attack and not wanting to hear anything he had to say about it. Think about that for a moment.

I’m sorry to say that in my own youth, I had little interest in the topic other than to watch some of the old WWII movies and read of it in our school textbooks—but I was aware of it throughout my life. While we were at EHHS, WWII was pretty recent history and was thus lightly treated in our history textbooks…to some extent, it was still a nearly current event as many of our fathers played a part in it.

However, myopia on the part of youth and younger adults is nothing new. Noted Civil war veterans such as General Steven Lee wrote of it near the end of their lives during the early years of the 20th century. So did the noted Civil War historian, Bruce Catton, in the introduction to his 1962 Civil War trilogy,

”The books which makes up this trilogy began, very simply, as an attempt to understand the men who fought in the Army of the Potomac. As a small boy I had known a number of these men in their old age; they were grave, dignified, and thoughtful, with long white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community. They lived in rural Michigan in the pre-automobile age, and for the most part they had never been fifty miles away from the farm or the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much. All that was real had taken place when they were young; everything after that had simply been a process of waiting for death, which did not frighten them much—they had seen it inflicted in the worst possible way on boys who had not bargained for it, and they had enough of the old-fashioned religion to believe without any question that when they passed over they would simply be rejoining men and ways of living which they had known long ago…..

“…We do learn as we grow older, and eventually I realized that this picture was somewhat out of focus. War, obviously, is the least romantic of all of man’s activities and it contains elements which the veterans do not describe to children. This aged berry-peddler, for instance, who lost his arm in the Wilderness: he had never told me about the wounded men who were burned to death in the forest fire which swept that infernal stretch of woodland while the battle was going on; nor had any of his comrades who survived that fight and went on through the whole campaign to the last days at Petersburg ever mentioned the lives that were wasted by official blunders, the dirt and the war-weariness and the soul numbing disillusionment that came when it seemed that what they were doing was going for nothing. There was a deacon in the church, who used to remind us proudly that he had served in the 2nd Ohio Cavalry. Not until years later did I learn that this regiment had gone with Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, burning barns, killing livestock and pillaging with a free hand so that the Southern Confederacy, if it refused to die in any other way, might die of plain starvation. In a sense, the research that went into these books was simply an effort to find out about things which the veterans never discussed.

Yet, in an odd way, the old veterans did leave one correct impression: the notion that as young men they had been caught up by something ever so much larger than themselves and that the war in which they fought did settle something for us—or, incredibly, started something which we ourselves have got to finish. It was not only the biggest experience in their own lives; it was in a way the biggest experience in our life, as a nation, and it deserves all of the study it is getting.

In any case, these books try to examine a small part of that experience in terms of the men who did the fighting. Those men are all gone now and they have left forever unsaid the things they might have told us, and no one now can speak for them. Here is my attempt to speak about them."

I hope the young will continue to be taught the correct and amazing history of this noble experiment, the United States of America. Given the state of current events and feckless leadership, I often wonder.

WWII was so much more vast than was the Civil War that it is difficult to generalize the experience. However, one nice, small story (my favorite kind) about Pearl Harbor can be discovered by entering the names Zenji Abe and Richard Fiske in your Google search window.

Adios

Andy Rooney's 1943 Wilhelmshaven Story

The previous posting referred to Andy's good bombing raid story...here it is:


Originally published in The Stars and Stripes, European Edition, Sunday, February 27, 1943.

A U.S. BOMBER STATION, Feb. 26 — From the nose of Lt. Bill Casey's Banshee, I saw American Fortresses and Liberators drop a load of destruction on Wilhelmshaven today.

We flew to Germany in the last group of a Fortress formation and Banshee was in the trailing squadron.

Soon after dawn the bombers thundered down the runway. Lt. Casey's windshield was splattered with mud on the way. It really was a blind take-off.

Like a pickup football team on a Saturday morning, we grew in strength as we flew, until all England seemed to be covered with bombers.

Everything was quiet — almost monotonous — for an hour after we left the English coast.

Sees First Enemy Plane

Then the trouble began.

Peeling out of the sun came shining silver German fighter planes, diving at one bomber in the formation and disappearing below the cloudbanks as quickly as they had come. They seemed tiny, hardly a machine of destruction, and an impossible target.

My first glimpse of a German fighter came when the navigator, 2nd Lt. William H. Owens, of Tullahoma, Tenn., nearly knocked me into the lap of 2nd Lt. Malcolm A. Phillips Jr., the bombardier, whose home is in Coffeyville, Kan. Owens swung around at what appeared to be an Me109 as it whipped down through the clouds on our left.

From that time until three and one-half hours later, when we were half way home, no one had to look far to see a German fighter. They were all over and they were all kinds of planes — Me109s, Ju88s and Me110s. There were no FW190s, by far the best plane Jerry has to fight the Forts. Their absence strengthened Allied contentions that Germany is desperately short of fighter planes.

From a vantage point in the pilot's cabin Lt. Casey and his co-pilot, 1st Lt. Kelly G. Ross, were calmly giving information over the inter-com.

"Here comes one at 2 o'clock, Elliot. Get the son-of-a-bitch."

T/Sgt. Wilson C. Elliot, of Detroit, Lt. Casey's top turret man, is the only man from the original Banshee crew left.

Before we were very deep into Germany deadly black puffs began to appear around us. It seemed as though they were "air mines" that were touched off as we came to them. A puff would appear to our right and then in quick succession a row of five more black splotches flowered out, each one closer as they caught up to us.
Lt. Casey zigged, and the puffs appeared in the tracks of our zag. He was one jump ahead of the flak. All but once he was one jump ahead.

Thought Plane's Nose Torn Off

Lt. Phillips was leaning far forward in the nose, between his guns and bomb-sight, when suddenly the whole nose seemed to break out of the ship. My first impression was that they had given up the flak and had thrown the gun at us.

Lt. Phillips sat back on his heels and covered his eyes with his hands. Splinters of flexiglass formed coating over his helmet. It was a minute before he recovered from the shock to open his eyes and find that he could see and was unhurt.

What appeared to be the nose being ripped off actually was only a small hole the size of a man's fist.

The formation was perfect, and the German sky dotted with Forts in front of us and Liberators behind us was comforting. Below, the land seemed to be farmland for the most part. Even that was divided into aggravatingly square plots. It looked German and unfriendly. You had the feeling you would have known it was Germany even if you hadn't attended the briefing.

German flak didn't seem to bother German fighter planes. They poured in even when their own flak was thickest.

Approaching the bombing run, the doors of the ships in front of us could be seen swinging open, and not far above us the yawning bomb bay of a Fort revealed more bombs, hanging by some mechanical hairpin, waiting for the bombardier to push the tiny button that sends them to the target.

Lt. Owens was having trouble with his oxygen and Lt. Phillips' fingers were nearly frozen. I was healthy but helpless. Finally the valve of the navigator's air intake froze completely and the next thing his head had dropped to the top of his caliber .50, and his face was an unlovely greyish purple. Both of them had work to do in the nose. I was strictly cargo. The oxygen on my side was okay. We fitted the mask to Lt. Owens' face, revived him and I started back for the pilot's cockpit.

By the time I struggled back without oxygen, with a backload of equipment that would make Santa Claus look sick, I was almost out. Lt. Casey almost yawned at what I was sure was a major crisis in my life.

He fixed me up with oxygen and the remainder of my brief first glimpse at the war was from the pit behind the pilot.

As we started the bombing run I was up in the nose of the ship, standing over to the right trying to keep out of the way of the navigator and bombardier. I had a camera, and that was probably the greatest underestimation, or something or other, of the Germans anyone ever made. I definitely did not feel like taking pictures. I made an effort once or twice and I got a couple of pictures of a small bunch of six little ships down on the water, but it's elementary that you have to be able to hold a camera still to take pictures.

We were well into the run and the flak was puffing to the right and left. The boys said it was not nearly as intensive as over St. Nazaire, but there was more of it, spread out in different places, they said.

Fighter planes were always there while we were making our run. They come in so fast it's hard to tell where they're coming from, but frequently you could see a vapor trail start to form, like a cloud standing on end. You knew that was a fighter starting a run.

As the bombardier crouched low over his sight, I was just in back of him, trying to take a picture of the bombs falling from the plane ahead. They dropped theirs, and I guess we must have the next second but I couldn't feel it.

Behind the tail gunner, T/Sgt. Parley D. Small, of Packwood, Iowa, reported that he had seen a Liberator go down with one engine flaming. Although on fire he said it was under control for a crash landing. Small himself picked off one German plane as it tried to tie a stream of machine-gun bullets on our tail. He described the end of another German fighter.

Jerry Stopped Cold

"It looked like a piece of cardboard that had been thrown out of a plane," he said. "It came up under the belly of a B24 and someone let him have it right on the nose.

He stopped dead and fell away. The plane didn't seem to be burning. It must have killed the pilot."

As Nazi planes kept nipping at the formation, far away from the coast of Germany, they probably picked us up from the French coast. It is improbable that German-based fighters followed the USAAF bombers that far, even though many of them seemed to be twin-engined planes.

Almost half way home, three Ju88s could be seen diving at a B24 that had fallen out of formation and was in distress.

After 20 minutes without sign of Jerry, things began to look more pleasant.

Song of Triumph

Lt. Casey and the crew began to sing over the intercom. Casey had the bends and was squirming in his seat — but smiling and singing. Next to him, Lt. Ross had to do most of the flying on the way home. Finally England was sighted and believe me, whatever you think, it is one of the most beautiful islands in all the world.

As Lt. Casey says, "I'm an Irishman, southern Ireland, but that is still the best looking damned little island I ever saw."

After a roof-lifting "buzz" (hedge-hopping) over the field, not orthodox, Lt. Casey brought the ship in smoothly.

Looking over the Banshee, we found that it had been hit in about ten places. The biggest hole was a gaping wound in her metal near the tail gunner. The chip of flak tore a hole through an English penny that Sgt. Small had left on the floor behind him.

With the exception of one frozen finger — Lt. Phillips' — the Banshee had what the crew called "a quiet trip."

I don't want to go on a noisy one.

---

Copyright ©, 1943, Stars and Stripes. Reprinted with permission of Stars and Stripes.

Better Than Typical

Andy Rooney, 92, perhaps our nation’s favorite curmudgeon, passed away Friday night. Nearly anything you would want to learn about him can be readily found elsewhere online, so I wanted to share something about him that you may not too easily find online.

During WWII, Private Rooney was a London-based writer for Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper. In that role he lived a safe and comfortable life, but was forever affected by his observations of American soldiers, particularly the Army Air Force airmen. His contemporary writing and post-WWII reminisces involving those aviators were, in my opinion, some of the most insightful words on the subject ever crafted.

Over the years he expressed similar thoughts in a number of published pieces. I particularly liked the chapter in his 1995 memoir, “My War,” in which he told his heartfelt story of the young airmen he had known in WWII England well enough to bring tears. While that chapter is too long to post here, the following introduction Mr. Rooney wrote for a 1981 book entitled, “One Last Look,” is a fine example of his masterful wordsmithing.

MEMORIES
By Andy Rooney

London—There’s just so much sentimental baggage you can carry through life. I’m not much for reunions. Anyone who has reached the age of 60 could easily spend the rest of his days just sitting around, remembering.

I’m here at this old U.S. 8th Air Force Base near Bedford, England, though, because members of the 306th Bomb Group are having a reunion and I flew with them on the first U.S. bombing raid on Nazi Germany in February 1943. It’s sentimental baggage I carry easily and with great pride.

It’s been 40-years now since these men flew their four-engined Flying Fortresses out of here. They’re the kind of men Americans like to think are typical Americans, but they’re better than typical. They’re special. A lot of World War II Air Force men are.

It was a terrible war for them although during this reunion they’re managing to recall a lot of the good things about it. It would be too sad if they didn’t. It was terrible because so many of them were killed. One evening they’d be sitting around their huts talking, worrying, playing cards and writing letters home. The next evening, if there had been a bombing mission that day, the bed next to theirs or the one next to that—and maybe both—might be empty, its former occupant, their pal, dead. Perhaps he had gone down in a parachute that caught fire. “Who burned Bailey?” MacKinley Kantor wrote. “Was it you?”

It was a great and terrible war for me because, as a young reporter for the Army newspaper, The Stars and Stripes, I was in a strange position. I came to this base often when the bombers went out, and when they returned—if they returned—I talked to the crews about what had happened. Then I’d return to London and write my story. I often felt ashamed of myself for not being one of them. I was having the time of my life as a newspaperman and they were fighting and dying. That’s how I came to fly with them just that once to Wilhelmshaven. It made me feel better about myself.

Looking out at the crumbling remains of the old runways at this airfield, I’m haunted by flashes of memory. Often the bombers came back badly damaged and with crew members dead or dying. In April 1943, I was here when they came back from a raid deep in Germany and one of the pilots radioed in that he was going to have to make an emergency landing. He had only two engines left and his hydraulic system was gone. He couldn’t let the wheels down and there was something even worse. The ball turret gunner was trapped in the plastic bubble that hung beneath the belly of the bomber.

Later I talked with the crewmen who survived that landing. Their friend in the ball turret had been calm, they said. They had talked to him. He knew what they had to do. He understood. The B-17 slammed down on its belly…and on the ball turret with their comrade inside it.

 
There are funny stories, too. Everyone here remembers the eccentric gunner Snuffy Smith. Sgt. Maynard Smith. He was an oddball kind of guy, but he did his job well in the air. The Air force loved to give medals and they had good reason in Snuffy Smith’s case. On one occasion, Henry Stimson, then called secretary of war, came to England, and officials, thinking this would be good time for publicity for the Air Force and the secretary, arranged to give Snuffy Smith the Medal of Honor. The whole entourage came to this base with the secretary and a dozen generals, but the hero was nowhere to be found. It turned out he was in the kitchen washing dishes. He was on KP, being disciplined for some minor infraction of the base rules.

This reunion is a bittersweet experience. Last evening I had a drink at the bar where there was a gathering, and a strong-looking weather-beaten man came over and quietly said he’d like to buy me a drink. He’s a Nebraska farmer now. He had been the tail gunner on the Banshee, the B-17 I flew in over Wilhelmshaven. We’d been hit that day and it was a terrifying trip, but it made a good story for me. We laughed and talked together and he paid for the drink. As we lifted our glasses in a mutual toast, I noticed that two fingers on his right hand were missing. It often happened to crewmen who stuck by their guns while their hands froze.

And he was buying me a drink.

Girl Scouts

These members of the Class of 1963 earned the Girl Scouts’ highest award, The Curved Bar, at the beginning of 9th grade at Meadowbrook. I think the Curved Bar was somewhat equivalent to the Eagle Scout award achieved by a few boys in each class.

Awarded the Girl Scouts’ Curved Bar pins were: Linda Barr, Nancy Barnes, Jeanette Barber, Nancy Lathrop, Francina Mason, Jametta Long, Susie Wadlington, Susan Hofmann, Janet Hooton, and Susan Begley.I recall Susie and Susan as being class scholars; Linda, Jeanette, Jametta, and Janet as being athletic; and the Nancy(s) were active with student publications.
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Vietnam Aerials – 1970 (prox)

A Central Highlands Village

Pictures are fascinating when you consider that they record just a fraction of a second in time. Although I don’t specifically look for pictures like these, when I see something unusual, I’ll stay awhile to have a look.

These pictures of circa1969-70 Vietnam, taken during the war from a military aircraft really stood out for their clarity and subject matter. Most of us who served over there didn’t get this kind of view; however, most of us heard of the places or went through them from time to time. Capable 35mm SLR cameras were relatively new and only recently available at an affordable price. Even at that, there were some operator challenges to getting a good picture out of them. Due to the high cost of color printing at the time, most of us used slide film. The manual controls could be fussy for a novice to master. In my outfit there were only a handful of 35mm cameras in use and it’s anyone’s guess how many of those guys were capable of taking a good picture.

In the case of these particular shots, considering the operation challenges, add to it the scarcity of guys assigned to fly low and slow enough to take pictures like these and I would consider them very rare. As a bonus, the photographer, an Air Force pilot, provided a brief description of the image.

If you only heard of these places over the network nightly news, along with the body count….here they are, or rather, were:

And along the final approach course to Nha Trang:

Here are a couple taken in the Saigon area:

If you were listening to the broadcast news back then, you would recall the huge shrill raised about incursions into Cambodian airspace. Here is a picture of one of those incursions...a massive thunderstorm cut the 25-year old pilot off from taking a direct route to his home base.

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Memorial Day - 2011

Last year I wrote a serious piece about one of the fallen young men we honor on this day. He was a WWII bomber pilot who was shot from the sky over Europe in early 1944. He was also a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point. As a young group leader he took his task seriously…seriously enough to offer his life to help accomplish his task.

We try to select leaders from among us who have either demonstrated their substance through their prior performance, or in a more hopeful sense, someone who has the capacity to grow into the job with which we entrust them. In my experience, until the early 1990s when a Wall Street Journal editorial wondered in print, “Are There Any Adults in Charge?” during the early days of the Clinton administration, I had never thought that we might have trouble finding adults among us as our leaders. To my knowledge that had never been a problem before.

A year ago during the Memorial Day weekend, our President chose to take a short vacation to Chicago and, as a nod to the reverence of the day, tacked on a quick visit to a local Chicago national cemetery to put in an obligatory appearance. God was not pleased and the skies opened up in a downpour and an electrical storm.

In accordance with tradition, this year he put in his appearance at Arlington National Cemetery at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. God smiled, and provided a beautiful day for the ceremony. Then, our President screwed it up and went out to play golf that afternoon, once again raising the question…are there any adults in charge?

I’m not one to criticize another man an opportunity for a pleasant round of golf when he has the chance, but I can attest to the fact that 95° and humid is not a pleasant day on a golf course. On the other hand, after recently being embarrassingly schooled by Netanyahu, writing the wrong year in the Westminster guest book, and messing up the Queen’s toast in a very public way, maybe he was due. But it surely did appear to be in bad taste.

The Telegraph writer, Nile Gardiner, had more to say on the subject in his article.

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Victory at Sea on DVD

Perhaps you’ve already seen this DVD set in the Walmart cheap video bins….$5. If you were like me, about 1953-54 you anxiously waited each week for NBC to broadcast the next program in their Victory at Sea series. Not much in them meant much to me…Dad flew in the Air Corps over Europe, but the visuals were mesmerizing. And its music was composed by Richard Rogers (Rogers & Hammerstein).

If you’re stumped for an occasional gift for a grandchild, or even for one of your offspring, you could do much worse than giving one of these 3-disc sets. At $5 they are an incredible bargain. With the Internet available these days, they can launch off in hundreds of different directions to learn something triggered by things they see in the videos. Given the state of current public education, the chances of your grandchildren learning anything approximating this information is probably slight.

Film used in these programs was of the period and the narration script was close enough in time to the events that it could be considered of the period also. I always like to read or view source material similar to the documents of the past few posts as they are not subject to later interpretations which can, at times, skew the truth.

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Historic Document - Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was the authorizing document used to enable the executive branch to attack North Vietnam at will rather than having to gain concurrence from Congress. It was drafted in response to an open sea incident that occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin. 

Ultimately about 2,600,000 of our young men and women would be engaged in-country and 58,000 of them would die there.

Signatures on the document are Lyndon B. Johnson (D-TX), Lee W. Metcalf (D-WY), and John W. McCormack (D-MA)

Patriots, all. Democratics, all.

Freedom is not Free

 

At the Strategic Air Command Museum in Omaha, Nebraska, there is a static display of an SR-71 Blackbird.  Carved into its base are these words,

“We must never forget that freedom is never really free, it is the most costly thing in the world.  Freedom is never paid in a lump sum.  Installments come due in every generation.  All any of us can do is offer the generations that follow a chance for freedom.”

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Chicken Shit

During my Vietnam military service it seemed that a tremendous amount of time was simply wasted. I suppose it’s just the nature of it—better to waste time than getting your ass shot off. With so much time available to observe things, you couldn’t miss seeing a lot of both funny and dumb stuff.  And sometimes, just for your own amusement, you made something up to see how someone would handle the situation.

The WWII Sad Sack comics lampooned military silliness; so did Bill Mauldin’s Willie & Joe; but for me the less well known Private Breger in Britain comics made some of the more lasting impressions. A couple of my favorites are included in this posting.

Is it any wonder that when we went off to Vietnam service, the military establishment had trouble figuring out how to deal with us? A significant percentage of us had either a degree or part of one. And with our having been exposed to the WWII attitudes of our fathers, is it any wonder that we took certain notions into the service with us?

The term chicken-shit came out of WWII and wasn’t lost on us.  For a great example of chicken-shit illustrated in film, take a closer look at John Larroquette's Captain Stillman character in Stripes. Pay special attention to his odd salute, repeated several times…that’s chicken-shit.  Guess you had to be there...and I think that at least one of the sceen writers had been.


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General George S. Patton & Sgt. Bill Mauldin

While I was growing up, there were 3 small WWII cartoon books in our home library that Dad had purchased while he was in the Army Air Force. I discovered them sometime in the mid-1950s when I was about 10 and many times went through them cover to cover. Those little books no doubt had a significant part in shaping my sense of humor.

The books were: Sad Sack, by Sgt. George Baker, who worked for Yank, the Army Weekly; Private Breger in Britain, by Sgt. Dave Breger, who also worked for Yank, the Army Weekly; and the last one was Up Front, by Sgt. Bill Mauldin, who worked for Stars and Stripes, the Army newspaper.

Bill Mauldin’s book was the most interesting of the 3 because Mauldin drew the most attention from the Army brass and most especially, the attention of General George S. Patton. A Wikipedia article rightly relates, “Those officers who had served in the army before the war were generally offended by Mauldin, who parodied the spit-shine and obedience-to-order-without-question view that was more easily maintained during that time of peace. General George S. Patton once summoned Mauldin to his office and threatened to "throw his ass in jail" for "spreading dissent," this after one of Mauldin's cartoons made fun of Patton's demand that all soldiers must be clean-shaven at all times, even in combat.

But Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander European Theater, told Patton to leave Mauldin alone, because he felt that Mauldin's cartoons gave the soldiers an outlet for their frustrations. Mauldin told an interviewer later, "I always admired Patton. Oh, sure, the stupid bastard was crazy. He was insane. He thought he was living in the Dark Ages. Soldiers were peasants to him. I didn't like that attitude, but I certainly respected his theories and the techniques he used to get his men out of their foxholes.”

Mauldin described walking into Patton’s office for that meeting as “gazing into four of the meanest eyes I had ever seen.” The extra pair of mean eyes belonged to Patton’s dog, Willie. The Mauldin cartoon of the magnificent scenery is one that particularly rankled Patton.

Mauldin wrote, ”The ideal officer in any army knows his business. He is firm and just. He is saluted and given the respect a man who knows enough about war to boss soldiers around in it should have. He is given many privileges, which all officers are happy to accept and he is required, in return, to give certain things which a few officers chose to ignore. I try to make life as miserable as possible for those few.

”Since I am an enlisted man, and have served under many officers, I have a great deal of respect for the good ones and a great deal of contempt for the bad ones. A man accepts a commission with his eyes open, and if he does not intend to take responsibilities as well as privileges, he is far lower than the buck private who realizes his own limitations and keeps that rank.

”I never worry about hurting the feelings of the good officers when I draw officer cartoons. I build a shoe and if somebody wants to put it on and loudly announce that it fits, that’s his own affair."


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Not On My Watch

Happy 4th

click pictures to enlarge them

(Words adapted from: "A Few Good Men")

Never forget...there is nothing so conducive to civilized behavior than the threat of a punch in the nose for uncivilized behavior.

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