by Andy Rooney
Just behind the Desk was the favorite clipping of the city editor’s. It served as text when anyone turned in a paragraph or more of meaningless copy, and it had been clipped from the November 25, 1941, issue of the very Times itself. It read (and there were a couple of staffers who came to be able to recite it by heart):
With a British Armoured Unit
LIBYA, Nov. 23
The battle of the tanks in Libya is still going on furiously. At the
time of writing the issue is still in the balance. The Germans are fighting furiously to destroy the British tank forces and to break through the ring. The British are fighting with equal fury to prevent them. Both sides have given and taken some very hard knocks. The tank battles are an affair of sudden onslaughts in unexpected places. The battle is joined, broken and rejoined. Sometimes small groups only are involved; other times, large groups . . .
It went on like that. When the staff first moved into the offices there was just one electric light in the middle of the room. The Desk wanted a low, green-shaded light over each desk. The meticulous Times maintenance men obliged with a network of wires and lights.
Suspended from all sections of the ceiling and hanging at ruled heights above the desks, the wires presented a maze too intriguing to anyone who’d spent half an hour in the Lamb and Lark, the pub across the street, before coming back to the office late at night for extra work. You’d start one hanging light swinging in great circles, then another and another and when enough of them were wound around each other, the whole complex structure would come down. Next day the maintenance men would be upstairs, surveying the tangled mess, the chunks of ceiling plaster, and the blown fuses. They would say sadly, “The blast of those bombs is enough to shake down almost anything.”
Which was all right and logical on nights when there was an air raid. But sometimes the lights came down after a raid-free night, and they said the same thing, and the staff finally decided they were simply nice, understanding guys who maybe had wanted to do the same thing in the staid Times all their lives but hadn’t dared.
At frequent intervals, we received a formal announcement that “General Somebody” was coming down to the office to look around. There could have been no more absurd place for a military inspection; but one time the staff was told “for sure” that Lieutenant General John C. H. Lee, one of the army’s most inspecting generals, was to visit us. We were ordered to take down the ridiculous display on the walls and clean up the office. Some of the memos and pictures pasted on the walls were part of the office, though, and taking them down was out of the question, even for General Lee.
Ben Price walked over to Fleet Street. He visited half a dozen little bookstores, buying road maps, maps of the canal system in Afghanistan, terrain maps of the territory adjacent to Shanghai, and weather maps showing general pressure areas between Iceland and England. He came back and the staff went to work hanging the maps from hooks or with thumbtacks on the walls.
With straight faces the staff explained to the officer in charge that no one could kick about legitimate maps in any newspaper office. General Lee, of course, like the others, never arrived. Most of the maps came down, and the urgent memos, the cheesecake, and the outdated headlines were visible again in all their dusty yellow uselessness. The weather map of the North Atlantic stayed. Ben said we might need to know someday how the weather was there.
The Times people never really got used to The Stars and Stripes. They tried, and some of the compositors eventually became as one with the staff. But mostly the Times just wondered.
In the first few days strange things happened in the composing rooms with compositors who never had worked for any paper except the Times. There was, for example, the mysterious disappearance of a particularly choice bit of cheesecake that had been sent up to the engravers one night. Somehow the picture and engraving disappeared completely, and there always has been an argument as to whether some venerable Times worker secretly slipped the picture of the seminude Hollywoodite into his pocket to contemplate in some lonely place or whether the Times man was a reforming purist who thought that in the best interests of the soldiers of England’s ally the photo should be destroyed. If he simply wanted the picture for his own he was easily satisfied, because after that first week none ever disappeared again, and if he was a reformer he quickly gave us up for lost.
That first week at the Times was something English type compositors are going to talk about for a long time. On the sixth night, one linotype operator was carried off screaming mad, and he’s in the booby hatch yet shouting about “the language of Shakespeare.” Another compositor, setting heads, saw unfilled orders piling up and piling up and suddenly and stiffly fainted dead away; but in general they became familiar with what the editors wanted, and Jimmy Frost, the composing room foreman, and Bill Jolley, a stone man, got to be so expert in the American way of newspapering that they were worried about their postwar return to the Times.
Just as the Times became a little proud of the army paper it housed, so the army paper was proud of the Times. The staff learned the Times folklore complete through constant contact with the Thunderer’s staff in the building—this was after Times editors decided we’d been there long enough for them to stop bowing stiffly from the waist when we passed in the corridors—and in the Printing House Square pub, Alf Storey’s Lamb and Lark. There was a great store of Times stories, and probably the one the S&S liked best was that of the man with the little black bag.
When a new managing director was appointed by the Times board of directors, he started a thorough check through the books and offices of every branch of the organization. The new manager noticed an obscure little man in an oversized overcoat and carrying a little black satchel entering the building one Friday and made a mental note to find out who he was. The following Friday he saw the little man again and this time started asking who he was. The old-timers admitted they had seen the little man for years, but no one knew exactly who he was or what he did. He came Friday nights, carrying his black satchel, and left Monday mornings.
Over the weekend, the manager was checking some ledgers and came upon a small but inexplicable item. He asked one of the bookkeepers about it and was told the money went for meals brought in Saturday and Sunday from a small restaurant around the corner; the meals went to the little man who appeared each Friday night at the office.
On the third weekend, the manager searched through the dozens of little offices off the rabbit warren of corridors. Beyond one door he found the little man, with a little lunch spread out before him, his little black satchel at his side.
The little man was from the Bank of England. In the little black satchel he had five thousand pounds in cash.
Back at the turn of the century, along about the time of the Boer War, the Times wanted to send a man off to cover a big story on the Continent in a rush assignment. He had to leave on a Saturday afternoon, but there were no boats to the Continent that day because of a storm. Charter a boat, ordered the editor. The business office ruefully replied that there wasn’t enough money in the place, it had been sent to the bank in the morning.
To prevent that ever happening again, the Times had asked that a representative of the Bank of England be on hand Friday evenings and stay until Monday mornings with five thousand pounds in cash.
Long afterward, when the Times had its own boats and had fullymanned bureaus on the Continent, no one had bothered to countermand the order, and the little man was still coming every Friday evening.
Stately Times, whose subscribers will doubt the world’s end until they read it in your pages, institution of British dignity with morals like the collars of your directors, you were very kind; and if you were an old gaffer, the people who came to your house to work were brats, and you were very indulgent. You nodded and smiled when the people in Fleet Street got to calling your musty, cobblestoned old courtyard “Stars and Stripes Square,” instead of the Printing House name it had borne so long. You even asked one of the br
ashest of the Americans to write book reviews for that book review section which is the doubledistilled synthesis of Times conservatism and backed him up when he lampooned stuffed shirts. You gathered up the pieces when they were broken and you set the precedent for all the rest to come. As it was in the beginning, so always was The Stars and Stripes, and so the Times was home.
In 1944 Andy Rooney and Bud Hutton’s Air Gunner—a vivid portrait of the American gunners engaged in the perilous air war against Germany—was published. An engaging account of what was arguably one of the most exciting and dangerous wartime posts, Air Gunner shed light on the at turns dramatic, mundane, and heart-wrenching experience of the twenty-somethings who flew into the eye of the storm, manned the guns, and scattered bombs as they screamed towards their targets. Offering a window into Air Force men (men who fail to be good “parade soldiers because they don’t like to march in a line”) Air Gunner was widely praised for its candid, intimate rendering of what a gunner’s life entailed. In The New Yorker, then-editor Edmund Wilson praised it as, “The first piece of writing . . . which has really given me any idea of what it is like to operate a bomber . . . full of intimate observation of how people speak, feel, and behave.” The following essay from Air Gunner gets to the heart of the matter.
Combat
A lot of air gunners were growing up during the years between 1925 and 1935—a lot of gunners in America and in Germany. All over the world, public opinion was penduluming to the opposite extreme of World War I’s emotional pitch. There were exposés, from time to time, of last-war propaganda. One of public opinion’s favorite stories in the years 1925 to 1935 was of a truce which was declared one Christmas Eve during that first World War. Allies and Germans dropped their guns, the story went, and sang carols to each other across no man’s land. A lot of gunners who were growing up liked that story; a lot of gunners in America and in Germany.
Those Americans who liked that story as youngsters grew up into air gunners who liked the story of Tyre C. Weaver, a top turret gunner from Riverview, Alabama. It maybe wasn’t good for the war that they liked it, but they did. . . .
The copilot on the B17 Ruthie II, on July 28, 1943, was redheaded Jack Morgan and he won the Congressional Medal of Honor for what he did that day. The navigator was Keith Koske, and “Red” Morgan always was embarrassed that Keith didn’t get a higher award for what he did for the top turret gunner whose arm was blown off. It took a tougher kind of guts, a rarer kind, for what Koske did than what won the Medal of Honor, Red was always saying.
The top turret gunner was Tyre Weaver.
Ten boys started out in Ruthie II that day, and nine of them came back. One, the pilot, was dead in the arms of his copilot. The tenth man, the one that was missing, was somewhere in Germany. The crew didn’t know whether he was dead or alive. He was somewhere in Germany without a left arm. The left arm was in the bomber, and Tyre Weaver was somewhere, dead or alive.
Ruthie II was within twenty minutes of the target when the pilot, Bob Campbell, of Liberty, Mississippi, took the controls from Morgan. Within three minutes a flight of German airmen slashed into the formation.
On their first pass, one German plane poured a stick of 20-millimeter shells into Ruthie’s midriff, puncturing the oxygen tanks above the ball turret gunner that supply the two waist gunners, the tail gunner and the radio man. A second later another flight of four F-W 190s screamed nose-on toward Ruthie. A cannon shell and one machine-gun bullet shattered the windshield, striking Bob Campbell in the head just above the temple.
The stricken pilot fell forward over the control column, wrapping his arms around it with a frenzied power. He was not killed instantly; and, partially conscious, he struggled instinctively with the controls.
The Fortress plunged forward out of the formation and Red Morgan wrenched at the controls to set the plane back on its course. By sheer strength, working against the force of the struggling pilot, Morgan pulled the ship level. Over the intercom he called for help but no one heard him. The plane’s communication system had been shot out with the rear oxygen tanks.
In the top turret, Tyre Weaver twisted himself ahead of his mechanical turret, trying to make shots that were impossible from his position. They had all felt the impact of the blow that hit their pilot but none knew what had happened. It had looked as though they were going down; then somehow, someone had pulled them out. That was all they knew or had time to think of.
German planes circled on the fringe of the formation and barreled in for the attack once more. Tyre Weaver was hit. A flow of 20-millimeter shells ripped into his turret, and tore through his arm just below the shoulder, shearing it off close to the armpit.
Weaver dropped from the open half of his boiler-shaped turret into the runway leading to the nose compartment. Koske, the navigator, saw Weaver and quickly went to find out what had happened. Leaning over the gunner, who was not sure himself, for a few seconds, what had happened, Koske tore the white scarf from his neck and tried to wrap it tightly around the stump of arm. Red blood flowed fast into the white neckpiece, quickly spotting it and then, as the spot crept to the edges, soaking it in blood. The tourniquet was no good. The arm was gone so close to the shoulder that there was no pressure point left at which the blood could be choked off.
“I tried to inject morphine,” Koske said, “but the needle was bent. I couldn’t get it in and as things turned out it was best I didn’t give him any.
“He had to have the right kind of medical attention, and right away, I knew that,” Koske said. “We had almost four hours of flying time ahead of us and there was no alternative. There was only one place that he had any chance of getting medical attention quickly. I opened the hatch and adjusted Weaver’s ’chute for him.
“He knew what I was doing all right and he was really good about it. He seemed to know somehow that it was his only chance. After I adjusted his ’chute I put the ripcord in his right hand. He must again have lost his sense of exactly what was happening because he pulled the ripcord immediately and the little pilot ’chute opened in the strong updraft coming from the open hatch below us. I gathered it all together again and tucked it under his good arm, making sure he was holding all the folds together. I got him into a crouched position right over the hatch and just toppled him out into space.
“The bombardier, Asa Irwin, had been busy with the nose guns because they were still coming at us from head-on. When I got back up there he had dropped his gun and was getting ready to toggle (release) the bombs. The target, the chemical works there at Hanover, was covered with smoke and we just dropped our bombs into it and picked up the guns and went to work again.
“Most of the attacks began to come from directly behind us so we couldn’t do much about them up front. I tried to use my interphone several times but I couldn’t get any answer. The last time I remember hearing anything over it was just after the first attack when I heard someone say they weren’t getting any oxygen.
“Except for what seemed to be some pretty violent evasive action we seemed to be flying okay.”
It was two hours and fifteen minutes later when Koske decided that he should go back and check with the pilot to see that everything was all right.
Slumped on the seat and covered with blood, he found his pilot, Bob Campbell. The back of his head had been blown off by a 20-millimeter shell which had entered the cockpit from the right, crossed in front of Red Morgan and hit Campbell.
“Red was flying the plane with one hand and holding Bob Campbell off the controls with the other,” Koske said, “and there was no way he could call for help. The pilot was still alive and struggling drunkenly with the controls.
“Red told me we’d have to get Campbell out of the pilot’s seat because the windshield was so badly smashed in front of him that he couldn’t see out to fly, let alone land. He had to guide the plane by looking out the side window next to him.”
Morgan and Koske struggled for thirty minutes to get the fatally injured pilot out of his s
eat and down into the catwalk at the rear of the navigator-bombardier nose compartment. The door of the escape hatch had been jettisoned when Weaver was dropped out and the bombardier had to hold the pilot to keep him from slipping out the opening.
Koske went back through the bomb bay of the plane to get help from the gunners in the rear of the plane. Opening the door to the radio room he found the radioman slumped on the floor. Stepping over the unconscious gunner Koske opened the door leading back to the waist gun positions and he saw the same seemingly lifeless heaps on the floor. Both gunners were unconscious. Realizing that the tail gunner and the ball turret gunner must also have been unconscious, Koske hurried back to tell Morgan that the oxygen system was shot out back there.
No one but Red Morgan really knows what he went through taking that ship in over Hanover with a crazed pilot. Alone for two hours he battled with a dying friend to save the lives of the others on the plane.
And no one but Keith Koske really knows what went through his mind as he decided to push Tyre C. Weaver through the hatch onto Germany.
It was five months later before anyone knew what had happened to Weaver that July day.
He’d gone out into the sky, and the parachute had opened. He’d come down about twenty-five miles from Hanover, and had been picked up almost as soon as he hit the ground. Some Germans took him to a hospital and a German surgeon treated him. His left arm was gone and he was in a bad way from shock and loss of blood. He got well, which was kind of a miracle, or else he had awfully good care, and when he was able to write he sent a postcard from Stalag IV. That was in December, and some of the men Tyre Weaver flew with that day were still flying. They sat around the hut for a long time and talked to new gunners and told them the story they liked just about as well as that one about the truce on Christmas Eve, the one back in the other war.
That ship of Red Morgan’s had returned that day with more drama and pathos aboard it than any that had ever returned before and any that has ever returned since. Combat, the real details of what happens when a man is without oxygen or without warmth at twenty thousand feet, the real details of what men feel when one of the other crewmen is seriously wounded over Germany hours from home, is hard to catch in words. Something happens to gunners in combat. They are greater men, finer men, and heroism and the ability to endure pain is on a grander scale. Back in their Nissen huts they can still complain about the fifty-degree cold and the absence of hot and cold running water; they still howl in pain if they stumble over a bed in the blackout coming in at night.