Saving Bravo

by Stephan Talty

  But he was incorrigible. He and his friends put a smoke bomb under the hood of Mr. Anderson’s car and cackled gleefully when the fire trucks came speeding down Main Street to put out the “fire.” They hid garlic in the high school’s heating system and waited for the fumes to circulate. Finding themselves too broke to afford the latest motion picture one night, they occupied themselves by picking up a brand-new Austin car and carrying it onto the owner’s porch, where they deposited it, much to the amusement of the more tolerant Wenonians.

  When Gene and his friends were lucky enough to be able to afford a movie during the 1930s, they would sit in the cinema and watch the black-and-white March of Time newsreels that preceded the features. Events in Germany were a mainstay of the short films: the famous night rallies, National Socialists goose-stepping through Berlin’s streets, dazzling spotlights picking out the blood-red flags imprinted with the swastika. “In the most concentrated propaganda campaign the world has ever known,” intoned the narrator of a 1938 reel, “Minister Goebbels has in five years of Nazi rule whipped 65 million people into a nation with one mind, one will and one objective: EXPANSION!” Gene read the newspapers and followed the debate over whether America should get involved in stopping “this man Hitler.”

  Though he deeply resented his father, Gene shared the man’s ambition; he was dying to get out of Wenona. One night when he and some friends were attending a house party in town, the boys were sitting around talking about the news from Europe. “‘Hitler’ was a name we were hearing more and more often,” said Gene. He saw war coming and had decided there “was no way for our country to stay out of the mess.” The conversation turned to enlistment, and Hambleton—never shy—jumped in. “‘When the time comes, I’m going to get into the action,’” he told the others. “I made up my mind right then and there that I was going to be part of the military.” Not only that, but he was going to be fighting the Nazis as that most dashing of warriors, the American aviator. When the final struggle with the Third Reich arrived, Gene Hambleton fully expected to be flying bombers over Germany.

  There were, in the middle of the century, two or three generations of young land-bound Americans who angled their eyes upward and away from nearby wheat fields or greasy corner transmission shops and dreamed of flight. The story of one Vietnam pilot who served with Hambleton, Peter “Hayden” Chapman II, could stand in for the men’s collective background. Chapman grew up in a plain farmhouse in Centerburg, Ohio, a town given its name because it lay in the exact geographical center of the state. He grew up with six sisters who mothered and coddled and fought with him. “He was so damn cute,” said his sister Carol. “We wanted him to look nice. We wanted him to eat nice.” It was assumed that Hayden would one day take his place on the farm or, if he was particularly ambitious, in Centerburg itself after four years of college.

  But that all changed for Hayden when he was six or seven. That summer, on blazing hot days when the cornstalks on his father’s farm appeared as wavering stalks of molten gold, young Hayden would feel a deep thrumming that seemed to rise up from under the floorboards of the farmhouse and vibrate pleasantly in the bones of his chest, like the stirring of some subterranean monster. This would be the signal for the young boy to immediately drop what he was doing and run for the back door that led out onto his father’s twenty-five acres; from there he would dash to the farthest corner of the small plot, climb onto the lower rung of the fence, and look up, shading his eyes with his right hand to catch the thrilling and enormous black shape of a B-17 bomber against a cut of blue sky as it roared ten thousand feet above on its way across the country.

  Hayden became obsessed with flying. In fact, as a young boy he grew so absorbed in cutting out balsa models from send-away kits that he once carved the shape of a bomber into his mother’s best carpet with a pair of scissors, completely unaware that he was slicing a hole through thick wool as well as the paper pattern, for which crime he was exiled to the milk house. When Hayden outgrew the toy planes, he took a job so that he could afford flying lessons.

  Chapman’s parents took out a loan on their house to finance his pilot training, and he returned the gesture by taking them on trips to Las Vegas and Carlsbad Caverns during his weeks of leave. To have a military pilot in the family was like having a movie star coming home for Thanksgiving. “It was like nothing we from Centerburg could understand,” said his nephew Brad Huffman. “A little farm community of a thousand people. He was just the guy everyone looked up to in the family.”

  Gene Hambleton shared this midwestern obsession with flight. He was, after all, from the same generation that produced the Apollo crews who went to the moon—just three years older than John Glenn. As young boys and teenagers, many of his fellow future airmen were forking over the profits of their newspaper routes or lifeguard jobs to see movies like 1939’s Only Angels Have Wings. If the Army had John Wayne, the single greatest recruiter of human flesh into the land forces of the United States in the nation’s history, the Air Force had the dark-eyed melancholy of Cary Grant playing a pilot in a white silk scarf. Hollywood made flying seem like a rakish dare.

  In April 1941, with Pearl Harbor still eight months away, Gene was drafted and shipped off to basic training. The military quickly sent him home for failing the physical; his teeth were bad. Gene’s dream of becoming an aviator was dashed for the moment. But the events in Europe did produce one life-altering event for the young man. He found a job at the enormous Joliet Arsenal munitions factory in northeastern Illinois, which was churning out armaments for the war. And it was on the factory floor that he first met Gwen.

  Gwendolyn Mae Flessner was brunette, fine-featured, crisply beautiful, and all of eighteen years old. Her smile was radiant and often remarked on, but it hid an inner steel. “She was the rock in that family,” an acquaintance later said. As Gene and Gwen got to talking after their shifts piecing together land mines and artillery shells, he found this young midwesterner to be very much like his own caring, nurturing mother. She was cheerful and encouraging, and, crucially, she laughed at his jokes. As Hambleton toiled away making the bombs that he’d once thought he’d be dropping on Stuttgart and Düsseldorf, Gwen’s gentleness was a balm for his hurt pride. He fell hopelessly in love. It was the first real piece of luck in his life.

  Despite the smiling face she turned to the world, Gwen had known sharper tragedies than Gene. She, too, had grown up poor, though the term barely had any meeting in farm country during the Depression, so common was the lack of money. The root pain of Gene’s life sprouted from his father’s hard, bitter personality; for Gwen, it was the death of her older brother Kenneth, with whom she shared a birthday. When he was nine years old, Kenneth was riding in a tractor when the hired man driving the vehicle tried to negotiate a steep slope. The man misjudged the angle, and the tractor tipped over on itself, trapping Kenneth under its heavy metal frame. Gwen’s mother ran from the farmhouse to the road where her eldest child lay pinned, holding Kenneth’s hand until enough men could be gathered from the fields and nearby houses to lift the tractor off him. Then she rode with him to the hospital. The boy died on the way.

  For years afterward, Gwen’s parents found the accident too painful to speak of, except when her father would rail passionately against the hired man, whose negligence he blamed for causing Kenneth’s death. From that day, Mr. Flessner never again seemed to enjoy life. He was unable to express emotion—that is, the emotion of love or affection. Sadness and helpless anger he expressed readily. The tragedy hung over the farmhouse like a curse, and all the children were marked by it.

  When Gwen met the lanky young man from Wenona, she was taken with his good looks and his irrepressible high spirits. The two became inseparable. To their families and friends, Gene and Gwen seemed like figures out of a Fitzgerald novel, clean-limbed aristocrats of the Midwest. “We always thought of her as a movie star,” said Gene’s niece. She really was that good-looking: think Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life. As for Gene, he was
a better-looking Hank Williams, lanky and soft-eyed and slow-voiced, a storyteller who kept you riveted until the last word. Relatives and friends jealously waited for their visits and talked about them for months afterward. The Hambletons were fun, kind, attractive human beings.

  But as much as they made you feel that you were a special part of their lives, there was one boundary you would never cross. You would never be as important to Gene as Gwen was, not ever, not if you saw a hundred. And vice versa. Her aunts warned their niece more than once that the relationship would never last, but she only laughed. “Gwen loved him deeply,” said her sister Mary Ann. The two eloped to St. Louis, where they were married in August 1942.

  As friendly and outgoing as he was, Gene was still proud and a bit ornery at times; he remained alive to any hint of an insult. When he argued about his salary with his supervisor at the arsenal and threatened to quit, the man warned him that he would be drafted as soon as he stepped off the assembly floor. Gene scoffed and walked anyway. Within weeks, he received his notice to report.

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt had issued a call for American industry to produce fifty thousand aircraft every year, and those fighters and bombers would need pilots. As Germany began its conquest of Europe, the Army Air Corps waived most of its requirements for aviators. No longer would recruits need, for example, two years of college. “We bet there are a lot of taxicab drivers who could be turned into swell combat pilots,” noted the New York Daily News approvingly. But the Air Corps refused to compromise in other areas. Every applicant had to pass the difficult—some called it “diabolical”—physical, which included not only tests of manual dexterity and problem solving but also a rigorous psychological examination, which included a Rorschach test. Many aviators would later say that passing the exam was the toughest thing they’d ever faced in the Air Corps.

  It required bravery simply to sign up for flight school, as the service had acquired the unfortunate habit of killing its own recruits before they even saw combat. Over the course of the war, fifteen thousand airmen—as many men as made up an infantry division—would die in training before they left the continental United States. And once they were in Europe and the South Pacific, Air Corps planners estimated that the force would have to be completely replaced every five months. That is, statistically speaking, everyone in the service would soon be dead. It’s no wonder that Hap Arnold, commanding general of Army Air Forces in World War II, stated that every airman needed to be “honest, truthful, reliable . . . [and] possess that sine qua non, courage.”

  Despite the risks, tens of thousands of young men flocked to the Air Corps. Gene Hambleton was one of them. Though he had to have been short on cash, he’d somehow scraped enough money together to pay a dentist to fix his teeth. He now aimed himself at the cockpit of an American aircraft the way a missileer aims a rocket at a distant city.

  But it wasn’t to be. We don’t know whether Gene failed some part of the physical for flight school or whether the competition to become an aviator was simply too fierce, but he gave up the dream of flying bombers over Germany and settled for navigation school. It must have been a searing disappointment.

  Meanwhile, Gene’s younger brother Gil had completed flight school and was headed to Europe as the pilot of a B-17 heavy bomber. And as the months went by, the family received letter after letter describing Gil’s exploits; he flew thirty missions over Germany without a single downed plane or a single lost crew member. In fact, Gil Hambleton was so adept in the cockpit that he was chosen for assignments that pushed ahead the new technology of radar. Secret missions. Quiet, serious Gil didn’t talk much about them—in fact he preferred not to talk about himself very much at all—but there was no doubt he’d proved himself to be an exceptionally able and courageous pilot.

  While Gene had been working the assembly line, his kid brother had gone out and become a war hero. A sibling rivalry began to smolder. “On top of his resentment over not becoming a pilot, there was my father,” said Gene’s niece Sharon. Both brothers were anxious to make their mark, but only Gil had excelled among the very best the country had to offer. “It caused an estrangement.”

  Navigation school did provide one pleasant revelation for Hambleton. He found that he had an almost uncanny sense of cardinal direction, that is, a sense of where north, south, east, and west lay without the use of a compass. He was a natural. “In 1945, I graduated,” he recalled, “a smart-assed second lieutenant who knew he was the best goddamned navigator in the whole Army Air Corps.”

  But the setbacks and the lengthy training at navigation school meant that his journey to the front took longer than he’d anticipated. When he was finally ready, waiting for his first assignment, the Enola Gay dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The war had ended before Gene Hambleton could get into it.

  2

  Rocket Man

  After VJ day, Gene left the Air Force (keeping a Reserve commission), moved back to Peoria with Gwen, and tried his hand at selling fridges. Like millions of other discharged soldiers, he morphed into Mr. Suburbia.

  While Gene was peddling appliances to Illinois housewives, more bad news arrived. After Gwen attempted to get pregnant for months without any luck, they went to see a doctor. He did some tests and told the couple they were unable to have children. It was a shock. “They would have been awesome parents,” said Gene’s sister-in-law Donna. Gene was good with kids; they were drawn to him. “He was a delightful uncle,” said his niece Pam. The fact that his brother Gil had become both a father and a war hero seemed to emphasize that Gene was destined to be the unlucky Hambleton boy.

  On June 25, 1950, at four o’clock in the morning, North Korean troops with their Soviet tanks, artillery guns, and even their Russian-stitched uniforms poured across the 38th parallel and invaded the South. The Korean War was under way, and Gene was called back to service. He entered the United States Air Force and was sent away to retrain as a navigator on the B-29 Superfortress, the state-of-the-art four-engine bomber whose development had cost more money than the Manhattan Project itself.

  Here was another chance at glory.

  He missed Gwen. He sent her frequent, adoring letters. “I love you so damn much,” he wrote her in one, “and am waiting for you as patiently as possible.” His loneliness was a constant theme; he always wanted his wife next to him, begged her to join him, in fact. During training, he wrote her from the barracks at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston. “No matter what happens, honey, I would like to have you down here . . . That I will love . . . All the other fellows have brought their wives down and moved to town.” He would go to Air Force dances and look at the women there and walk back to his bunk and compose a letter to Gwen. “I have been down here so long that some of them are even beginning to look as good as you,” he wrote in one. “But not quite . . . I suppose you know I love you dearest and do hope that you get here soon.”

  Gene was posted to Korea and flew forty-three missions, directing the pilots on their runs to the North, the B-29s loaded with thousands of pounds of high-octane fuel and heavy loads of incendiary, fragmentation, and delayed-fuse bombs, dodging flak and the new MiG-15 fighters supplied by Joseph Stalin. It was Gene’s job to get the plane to its drop spot and back, and he was good at it.

  When he’d graduated from navigator’s school, he’d told friends that he was going to stay in the service “for five years or five stars.” That is, if he wasn’t on his way to making five-star general by the time he hit his fifth anniversary, he would leave the Air Force. That didn’t happen. By his own estimation, he’d reached the top echelons of his craft, but his career hadn’t turned out the way he’d imagined. There were no medals, no string of rapid promotions, no headlines back home in Illinois. He was just another airman in a distant war.

  After completing his combat tour, Gene was rotated out of Korea and assigned to the Strategic Air Command. The SAC controlled two of the three legs of the nuclear triad: bombers armed with atomic weapons, and land-based interc
ontinental missiles, or ICBMs. Hambleton would serve in both. After arriving back in the United States, he went to work as an intelligence and targeting officer, and then as a radar-bomb navigator on B-47s at bases in Oklahoma and Texas. In 1961 he received orders to report for navigator duty on the B-52 bomber; at the same time, a friend and fellow navigator was assigned to missiles. Gene didn’t want the B-52s, so he and his buddy decided to swap assignments. The Air Force agreed to the switch.

  That summer, Hambleton flew to Madison County, Alabama, to begin classes at the famous Redstone Arsenal. During World War II, Redstone had been used as a chemical weapons plant which produced 27 million bombs and other munitions containing lethal poisons such as phosgene and mustard gas. After the surrender of Japan, Redstone switched its focus to missiles. The nature of warfare was evolving, and Hambleton was at the forefront of the change. He’d gone to Redstone to become a Rocket Man.

  Beginning at the end of World War II, the secret American program known as Operation Paperclip funneled German scientists who had worked on Hitler’s missile programs to the States, including the mastermind of the V2 rocket, Wernher von Braun, and more than 1600 German specialists. They arrived at Redstone and went to work on a series of rockets that would lead to the Saturn V, which would lift American astronauts to the moon. But traveling into space wasn’t the first objective of the German scientists and their American colleagues. A potential nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union was. Redstone began producing an array of new weapons: surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, medium-range, and intercontinental missiles.