by Tom Shroder
So I suppose that Mack had both a more clearly necessary war and a somewhat forgivably less nihilistic understanding of its consequences. All his life he had longed to be a hero. I’d seen it in his childhood fascination with the Civil War vets, the self-deluded belief that he had rescued a girl from a burning car, and his atrocious lies about serving in the First World War. The civilian hero of his imagination, the protagonist of Long Remember, talked his way past pickets, unarmed, into one of the most famous and fatal infantry charges in history, not only surviving, but somehow managing to kill a Confederate general with a borrowed bayonet in the process.
Even when he was in his late thirties, there remained an element of a boy yearning to prove he was a man—something he apparently hadn’t been able to do, no matter how many women he’d had. He would be a correspondent only because he couldn’t be a soldier. His goal was not to report whatever truth he could find—which is my understanding of being a war correspondent—it was to help in the fight.
“If I were any good, I would do something a little more pertinent,” he wrote. “But I guess I’ll have to content myself with propaganda.”
At first, he did. And because his propaganda was effective, over time he managed to ingratiate himself with the standoffish American airmen he was more or less embedded with in the 305th Bomb Group of the Army’s 8th Air Force, stationed at an airfield in Chelveston, seventy miles north of London. The commanding officer was a feisty colonel named Curtis LeMay, whom Mack instantly admired and whose favor he curried.
In August of 1943, Mack scored a hit with a heroic poem—aimed squarely at the tear ducts—about a tragedy all too common in an air war that was taking heavy casualties. On July 4 of that year, a B-17 bomber from the 305th was hit by enemy flak and set on fire. Seven crew members were able to parachute from the flaming plane, but one of those chutes opened too soon and caught fire.
Or as Mack put it so floridly in the poem:
. . . a little flame chewing,
Eating the glossiest silk of the chute.
Who was it had waited not near long enough?
Who let his hand tremble too eager and wild?
Who managed his handle too soon, so the cord
Tossed open the fabric to kiss the high fire?
There was some question as to which of the crew had died this way, and Mack played that uncertainty to effect by focusing on the plane’s young navigator, Second Lieutenant William R. Bailey, whom he had met, briefly, in the barracks.
Based on the poem, he obviously didn’t know him well, playing off instead on a sentimental stereotype of a Kentucky kid from the heartland:
This is the way that I think of you always:
Cocky and walking untrammeled and quick.
Tough face and monkey mouth wrinkled and pert. . . .
Childish forever you swagger and sing.
Always your cot with its rumpled gray blanket.
Always your pin-ups with lingerie leer,
Always your silken-limbed blondes on the wall,
Always your tongue running loose, and some
Fellow hauling you off of the bed on your fanny,
All the way down to the floor with a bump.
Like a drumbeat throughout the long poem, filled with insider jargon (Broken the firing pin / Or broken the firing pin extension, / Or broken the belt-holding pawl arm), was the repeated refrain O Bailey—who burned?
It didn’t strike me as a great poem, but like the sentimental mourning-in-verse of spelunker Floyd Collins that launched Mack’s literary career a quarter century earlier, it would hit a chord with a public eager to connect emotionally with the appalling losses.
Still, then as now, a heroic poem was an oddball way to reach the masses.
When the dispatch arrived at Ben Hibbs’s desk and he saw that it was verse he thought, Oh, God! What has this unpredictable guy done now?
By Hibbs’s account, he put the poem on his second-in-command’s desk without a word. The number two “came back with his eyes glittering, and said, ‘Let’s give it the works.’”
Here’s the telegram, now in the Library of Congress files, that Hibbs sent to Mack in Europe:
“HAVE DECIDED TO BREAK RULE LONG STANDING AND GIVE BAILEY TWO PAGES UP FRONT WITH FULL COLOR PAINTING STOP.”
The big display, and even bigger response from readers, made an impression on the men with bars on their shoulders whom Mack depended on for access. Now that he had proven himself simpatico to his air squadron hosts, he managed to talk his way into the squadron’s gunnery school, learning to shoot the big .50-caliber machine guns that provided a B-17’s only defense against attacking enemy planes. He gained entry by saying he wanted to take the course to write about it, but he finished second in his class, a result that gave him the credibility to wheedle his way into actual combat missions, and even to fire the gun in anger when the navigator was otherwise occupied. This latter chore was expressly forbidden to correspondents under the Geneva convention, so I suppose that, technically, my grandfather was a war criminal.
I admired Mack’s drive to get close to the story, even though close meant sitting in the freezing confines of a lumbering B-17 at altitude, flying into flak so heavy it could be mistaken for cloud cover while German Messerschmitts screamed through the sky, hunting them.
I don’t even like to fly on supersafe commercial flights, and neither, I discovered, did my grandfather. In one interview, he said he had nearly lost his Cedar Rapids newspaper job by refusing to take a plane to a distant assignment. Yet he flew five combat missions, missions in which one of every twenty planes sent out didn’t return. The sheer horror of combat in these flying coffins has been so well and vividly described in immortal novels like Catch-22 and nonfiction masterpieces like Unbroken, I feel I can fully imagine the almost supernatural effort of will it would take for someone who didn’t absolutely have to be there to nonetheless voluntarily climb up that ladder into the belly of the beast. Not just once, but five times (one source, less reliable, in my view, said he flew eleven missions). During one of these he claimed to have fired in the general direction of an incoming German fighter, and to have been awarded a “probable kill” when that enemy plane went down.
My grandfather would have had one more mission to his credit, I discovered, but the orders to allow him to board a B-17 nicknamed Polly Ann before dawn on September 23, 1943, were botched. Some junior officer failed to transmit Mack’s authorization in time, which Mack regarded as nothing more than “a rank and annoying stupidity.”
In due course, it became something far more significant than that.
I found his account in an author’s note on a short story he wrote in 1944. The bomber had departed before dawn, without Mack, for a raid on Stuttgart, Germany. Mack was at the airfield when the squadron returned from the successful mission around noon.
As they were landing, “the plane went down; the crew died instantaneously in flames and in the hasty disintegration that comes with impact. I watched them smoldering for hours—watched the wreckage of the B-17 in which I had been supposed to ride and from which I had been saved by a microscopic, unpredictable defect in the machinery of Bomber Command.”
Of the “ten boys” on the plane, there were no survivors, he said.
I have to admit, given my grandfather’s history of embellishment of his military encounters, I wondered if perhaps he had made up his near miss. Correspondents have exaggerated their combat scrapes before and since, of course; Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly being only the most recent examples. But what were the odds I could confirm or disprove, seventy years after the fact, the crash landing of a single B-17 out of 4,754 of the bombers lost in the European theater?
My grandfather had noted the date of the event and I knew the base where it took off and allegedly crashed. It turned out that was all I needed. With a little searching, I found a crash on la
nding on that date at the Chelveston air base, with ten fatalities, just as he’d said. That’s how I knew the plane was nicknamed Polly Ann, and that it was flown by a pilot on his fourteenth mission by the name of Norman A. Drouin, just twenty-two, three years younger than my son.
The official report said Drouin was flying in the lead on the approach to the landing strip. When he peeled off to land, he slowed too much and collided with the planes on either side. The other planes, both damaged, managed to land without casualties, but Drouin went down just short of the strip. Polly Ann crashed and burned. It wasn’t classified as a loss by enemy action. So, pilot error?
The reports I found made no mention of any other factor, but Mack said the plane had been so shot up with flak in the raid that it had become virtually unmaneuverable.
A few days after the crash, my grandfather went to where the men had been buried, Brookwood Cemetery, “drawn not by the magnet of affection (I did not know those boys well . . .) but rather by a grim personal curiosity. . . . Brookwood stayed in my mind. Each time I closed my eyes I saw again the patient trees . . . quiet lengths of clipped grass above the older graves, brown gravel on the new ones. Waking or sleeping, I saw those crosses.”
I’d always been confused as a kid, seeing photos of my grandfather posing jauntily in his Air Force uniform, a pair of wings pinned above his breast, the thin line of a neatly clipped mustache above a huge grin, and a dazzling light in his eyes that I now see as an explosion of joy at finally inhabiting the role of his dreams. I’d been unaware that even war correspondents had uniforms in those days, so between that, all those mementos on the wall, his friendship with General LeMay, and the showy regimental insignia he wore on his blue blazer, I’d always assumed he’d actually been in the Air Force.
Now that I knew more about his war experience, I understood. As far as Mack was concerned, he had been.
And apparently, the Air Force shared that conviction.
Very early in my research I came across something online that said MacKinlay Kantor had won the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Stunned, I immediately texted my brother and sister. Turned out that none of us had ever heard that our grandfather had been awarded the highest honor the United States government can bestow on a civilian. How could that be? Mack wasn’t exactly shy in pointing out his achievements.
I still can’t explain it, other than as an index of our sheer inattention and indifference to matters of family history. The Web accounts were murky on the details of why it was awarded, and even differed—by a decade—on when he received it.
That all got cleared up in spades when I came across Mack’s own typed account of the award presentation. He wrote it quite clearly while still giddy with excitement, wanting to share his moment with a long list of friends. “When the thing finally broke, it broke fast,” he wrote. He’d been in New York in November 1947 when he got the call, two days before the proposed presentation ceremony in Washington, which would be presided over by General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, recently appointed as the first chief of staff of the newly independent Air Force. Mack was asked if that would be convenient. “Since you don’t tell a four-star general that anything would be inconvenient, I said Yes.”
It wasn’t convenient. The date chosen was the day before Thanksgiving. Mack yanked fourteen-year-old Tim out of school, and called my mother at college, telling her to come home a day early. On Wednesday, November 26, he took the 9:30 train to Washington’s Union Station with Irene and the kids. There was one additional passenger in their party, of high interest to me given what I knew about the future of their relationship—his best buddy from the war and Irene’s present and/or future lover, Hark. Then, irony upon irony, the man who had flown five combat missions said they were taking the train and “refusing to fly because of the pitiful and dangerous state of commercial aviation.”
I guess it was an acceptable risk only if people were shooting at you.
The actual citation for the medal, which, contrary to what you can find online, was not the Presidential Medal of Freedom then, but simply the Medal of Freedom, initiated to allow the military to honor civilians who had made strong contributions to the war effort. “I think they have authorized fourteen of them to date—including Marlene Dietrich’s,” Mack reported. “I know my legs weren’t as pretty as hers; but I can’t tell you whether mine were shaking.”
Spaatz read the citation, which Mack says he barely heard—“all I could recognize was Tooey’s militant gaze, burning like tracer bullets.”
The award, it said, was for “outstanding service . . . through his personal experiences and his participation in actual combat operations he became familiar with the problems and characteristics of the Air Forces and skillfully carried the soldier’s story to the people . . . and contributed immeasurably to the morale of the Armed forces and to the enlightenment of the American people.”
Digging through one of the boxes of family photos my sister had been storing, I came across the official news photo of the medal ceremony. The general is focused on the breast of my grandfather’s tweed coat, where he is attaching the medal, a humble medallion back then. Mack is staring straight ahead, appearing for once more frightened than proud. He is standing at attention, but his rounded shoulders and a slight wedge of fat beneath his chin announce middle age. As I thought about the date, I realized that this is how Mack would have looked when my father encountered him for the first time, courting my mother after they met at a college party given by mutual friends.
Also in my sister’s boxes were a clutch of old envelopes, bound by a rubber band that disintegrated at my touch, containing letters my father had written to my mother in the year between when they met and when they married. They consisted almost entirely of an elaborate catalog of his longing for her, written in a classically adolescent style by a young man just out of the Navy and barely out of his teens. More intriguing, and surprising, were some other envelopes containing evidence of my father’s early desire to be a writer, unknown to me. “The stories I want to write, the things I love and hate,” as he put it in an unintentionally amusing prose poem: “Whistling in the oblivious world upon a rainy street. Living life and being lived by life. Trying to delve into the incomprehensible, and finding nothing but my own personal thoughts . . . the joy of putting your ideas on paper as you wish them to be put down, and the keen and bitter disappointment when you fail.”
In fact, my father went into his father’s building business, which he never loved, and often hated. He completely lacked the ability to sit in one place alone for more than a few minutes, much less to struggle with the eternity of writing, so he channeled his desire to express himself artistically into directing community theater productions, at which he grew expert enough to secure a brief gig directing a professional off-Broadway production of an Arthur Miller play.
His desire to write, if it still existed, was never mentioned while I was growing up. But I would find out, late, when he knew he was dying, just how essential it had been—not to him, but to me, to my very existence.
One of the main things that attracted him to my mother, he told me, was that her father was MacKinlay Kantor.
—
In my adult life, whenever the subject of my grandfather came up, I would begin, “You’ve probably never heard of him,” and most people hadn’t.
They were impressed by the mention of a Pulitzer Prize, of course, but the title Andersonville most often produced a squint—the name seemed kind of familiar, though possibly because of the unrelated recent Turner Broadcasting movie of that name or the historic prison camp itself.
The one thing that almost always rings at least a faint bell is The Best Years of Our Lives, a 1946 movie that killed at the box office, swept the Oscars, and still makes most lists of great American films. When humanities scholar Stanley Fish did a top ten all-time movie list for The New York Times in 2009, Best Years was number one—the greatest American
movie, period. Fish’s blurb: “Regarded as producer Sam Goldwyn’s masterpiece . . . filled with thrilling and affecting scenes.”
I always hesitated to mention it, though, because this was one aspect of my grandfather’s career I had always known, or thought I had known, and it was complicated.
The story I remember my mother telling was this: Mack wrote a novel about vets returning home from the war. Against his editor’s strenuous objection, he wrote the entire book in blank verse. When Sam Goldwyn asked him to turn it into a screenplay, he got halfway through the script, then said he was quitting to go back to the war. Goldwyn, enraged, brought in another screenwriter. When the movie came out, he vengefully changed the title to The Best Years of Our Lives, chosen by a focus group. Mack hated it, thought the internal irony would be missed or misconstrued. He had named his book Glory for Me, after a hymn his mother had loved (When all my labors and trials are o’er, / And I am safe on that beautiful shore, / Just to be near the dear Lord I adore, . . . / O that will be glory for me). Goldwyn refused to even mention the name of Mack’s novel in the film’s credits, leaving my grandfather feeling bitter and betrayed.
My research told a far more complete, and significantly different, story.
Articles written when the movie came out said that either Goldwyn, or Goldwyn’s wife, became fascinated with a story that appeared in Time magazine in the summer of 1944.
As a Goldwyn publicist put it in Dramatics, a glossy publication distributed to promote what was then considered a big-budget film ($2.5 million), the story was “a moving and factual account of a trainload of American Marines coming home on a furlough to a country that seemed unfamiliar and occasionally hostile. [Mr. Goldwyn] saw in the news story the subject for a film at once novel, important, and tremendously human. So, with the instinctive gesture of the man who knows he is right and goes ahead, he put in a call to MacKinlay Kantor. . . . Mr. Goldwyn himself might not be able to explain why this name sprang immediately to mind.”