by Jon Erwin
Red Erwin had a split-second choice to make. He could resign himself to his fate and die along with the eleven other souls on board the plane, or he could try to alter that fate.
The first thing he did was pray. He was a quiet, intensely religious young man, and prayer came naturally to him.
Lord, I need Your help now.
What Red Erwin did next was so courageous and so mind-blowingly difficult that it defies belief. For many years, I wanted to distance myself from thinking about it because I thought I could never measure up to it.
Red’s choice triggered a series of events that shaped his life, my life, the lives of many others, and the history of the highest award for military valor the United States can bestow upon a warrior: the Medal of Honor. Red Erwin decided he would find the burning bomb, pick it up with his bare hands, embrace it with his body, and find a way to get it out of the aircraft and into space—with the help of God.
An instant after he prayed, Red stopped feeling any pain. He could hear voices calling out to him, Go! Go! Go! You can do it! Only he sensed these weren’t human voices, and they weren’t coming from inside the plane. They came from somewhere else.
He leaned down and frantically felt around the floor.
He found the bomb, still burning ferociously and spewing columns of smoke, scooped it into his arms, and hugged it to the side of his chest like a running back cradling a football.
Then Red moved through the plane, blind and completely on fire.
Since 1862 more than forty million men and women have served in the armed forces of the United States. So far, only 3,506 of them have been awarded the Medal of Honor, a distinction reserved for only the most extraordinary displays of courage and valor and awarded by the president on behalf of the US Congress.
My grandfather is one of them.
For some years, as a young man, I felt as if I lived in the shadow of my grandfather. And I tried to run away from it.
This book is the story of my grandfather and his Medal of Honor and my journey to discover who he was and how his life shaped mine.
This is a story of war and of one American’s journey through a cataclysm that engulfed millions of human beings in a clash that would define the destiny of the twentieth century and shape the world we live in today.
This is a story of love. Of one man’s love for his country and his brothers in arms and how it gave him the power to perform an act of supreme courage. It is the story of the love of one woman and how it gave that man the power to struggle through impossible odds and unbearable pain on a journey from the flames of hell toward a life of love and peace.
And it is a story of how a horribly wounded young man decided to honor his country and his fellow wounded veterans by devoting the rest of his life to serving them.
This is a story of one man’s journey from ultimate despair to a place beyond service, beyond honor, and beyond valor to a life illuminated by the light of God’s love.
Chapter One
THE MAKING OF A MAN
RED ERWIN GREW UP IN POVERTY ON THE EDGE of a magic city.
For decades the city of Birmingham was such a boomtown it was called the Magic City and the Pittsburgh of the South for its access to iron ore, coal, and limestone—the main materials used to produce steel. When Red was born, Birmingham was a top twenty US city in size, and it was home to over 30 percent of the state’s population. But his day-to-day reality was one of grinding poverty.
“I came from a poor family in Alabama, had no high school education, no college, and no money,” Red recalled, in one of a series of letters, notes, articles, and oral histories I discovered after he died.
He was born May 8, 1921, to Walter and Pearl Erwin and grew up in a small mining village in Jefferson County, Alabama, near Birmingham. His father was a coal miner in northern Alabama. One of Red’s grandfathers was a Confederate veteran of the Civil War who fought under Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson. He had come to Alabama from Texas and died in 1928, when Red was seven years old. Red was the oldest of six brothers and one sister. His mother called him Gene, and his brothers called him Eugene. Everyone else called him Red.
The family lived in a little house in Docena, a community just west of Birmingham, in the heart of coal-mining country. It was a planned community built and managed by the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, designed to help their employees care for their families while they worked. The company built small frame houses and rented them to the employees. They also built grade schools and dry goods stores.
Red’s father, Walter, had a dirty, dusty job at the coal mine. He was a coal washer, and he rinsed off the seemingly endless supply of coal that was harvested from the ground. Eventually, the coal dust killed Red’s father, as it did countless others who slaved away in the coal mines scattered across Appalachia.
The family struggled to survive while Walter was alive. His tiny salary barely covered food and clothing. But they were a happy house, echoing with childhood laughter and mischief.
“When I was five,” Red confessed, “my younger brother Howard and I dragged my father’s shotgun out of the house, propped it up against a tree, and pulled the trigger. The concussion from the blast knocked both of us down! It scared us so bad, we took the gun back and never told a soul.”
Despite the constant financial pressures felt by the family, Red grew up as a laughing, outgoing, confident boy. He often looked to the sky to admire the aircraft passing to and from the new Birmingham airport, and he dreamed of someday being a pilot.
Red grew up in a flashpoint of American social, political, and economic history. Ever since the devastation of the Civil War, poverty was the constant companion of many Alabamans, white and black, who were shackled to the brutal financial realities of tenant farming, often for unscrupulous landowners.
Poor people, regardless of race, had it bad, but the suffering of African Americans in Alabama was multiplied by generations of repression and racial segregation by both law and social custom. Their rights as American citizens were systematically stripped away through segregated public accommodations, voting restrictions, limited employment opportunities, and a host of other repressive measures. In 1896, the US Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld the legality of segregation throughout the nation, and Alabama’s 1901 constitution sanctified white supremacy as the foundation of the state government and society.
As a mine worker, Walter was a small cog in the machine of rapid industrialization that washed over Alabama in the early twentieth century. But in 1930 the Great Depression hit Alabama extremely hard, and it happened at the same time a tragedy befell Red’s family and plunged it toward the abyss of destitution.
“My father passed away at the age of fifty-two, when I was ten years old,” recalled Red. “My mother, Pearl, faced the greatest test of her religious faith. She faced the world alone with seven young children and no income. The mining company let us stay in our rented home without pay while friends and relatives sustained the family with food and clothes. Pearl began washing and ironing neighbors’ laundry for extra money. She worked around the clock without complaint. In the midst of her pain and loneliness, she would comfort us children by saying, ‘We’ll just trust the Lord.’ But in order to survive, she had to resort to some painful actions. Some of the children were sent to live with relatives. We experienced the agony of separation. Those days would follow us for the rest of our lives.”
According to journalist Robert St. John, who interviewed my grandfather in 1946, “Red grew up strong and straight.” He “firmly believed that a just God watched over the Erwin destinies,” and he “carried his faith, then and later, as a shining shield.”
At the age of ten, Red Erwin was the man of the house, and he soon took a crash course in hard work and personal responsibility.
“We needed money,” he explained. “So I went right to work. After school I worked in the coal company commissary, stocking shelves with groceries, getting between fifty cents a
nd a dollar a night, which was a lot of money at that time. It helped us get along.”
The mining company let the family stay in company housing for close to five years, and it allowed Red to bring bags of groceries home to sustain them. Every Friday night he brought a special treat home: a box or two of glazed donuts, which were savored by the whole family.
Starting in 1938, one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs had a direct impact on Red’s life. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was a national public works relief program for young unemployed men. At the age of seventeen, in July 1938, Red dropped out of high school and joined the CCC to earn money for his family.
“I was stationed first in northern Alabama, planting kudzu in raw red ditches to stop erosion,” he remembered. “Then I traveled out west to Redwood National Forest in California to plant and cut trees, clear trails, fight fires, build outdoor amphitheaters, and work on soil conservation. I was paid thirty dollars a month in wages, and I sent twenty-one dollars home to my mother to help the family. I was promoted to first sergeant. We wore khakis and dungarees for work details. I had charge of 220 men when I was seventeen years of age.”
Red’s powerful work ethic, maturity, and leadership skills won him a strong recommendation letter from his CCC camp advisor: “It affords me much pleasure to commend Mr. Erwin to any who require the services of a fine, sober, Christian and upright young man.” A devout Christian, Red never touched alcohol. He didn’t want to disappoint his mother by drinking.
In late 1941 Red was back in Alabama, where he took a backbreaking job at the Fairfield Steel Works just outside of Birmingham.
“It was terrible work,” Red recalled. “I was what you call a hooker, hooking hot bars of steel as they rolled off the line. Our job was to keep the rolling steel coming through these mills and making sure they didn’t fall onto the floor. We wore facemasks. We would throw salt on the steel. I was getting ninety-three cents an hour, and I felt like I earned my living. It was white-hot steel, and the heat was pulverizing. Molten steel would flare up, sometimes it slinged off sparks of metal that flew in all directions. Sometimes the sparks would lodge in the protective clothes I wore, sending me into a furious dance to get rid of the burning embers.”
But all of Red’s hard work paid off. “At the age of nineteen,” recalled my father, Hank Jr., “he bought his mother and family a small five-room wood-frame house close to the steel mill. To the family, it was as good as a castle. One of the greatest moments of his life was presenting the key to his mother. He took the place of his father, and he took care of the family. He had become a man.”
When the United States entered World War II, Red recalled, “I felt like I had a responsibility to get into the military service even though I probably could have stayed home with a deferment, being the breadwinner in my family. But like most kids back at that time that Japan had attacked us, I felt like I would be shirking my duty if I didn’t enlist like many of my cohorts did. Plus, all my brothers joined the military. In July 1942, I took a college-equivalency test as an entrance examination to join the army air force, and I scored very high. I qualified for the air corps and technical training. More than anything, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I had these Buck Rogers dreams that I was going to be a pilot, shoot down the enemy, and that I was going to win the Medal of Honor, believe it or not!”
But his dream of becoming a pilot never came true. Red joined the army reserve at Bessemer, was called to active duty on February 3, 1943, as an aviation cadet, and went to the army pilot training facility at Taylor Field in Ocala, Florida, to prepare for flight training school. On a series of training flights in small aircraft, Red learned that, no matter how hard he tried, for whatever reason, he simply could not land a plane properly. With Red at the controls, the plane’s tail kept jumping up and down whenever he tried to land. He was rejected for further training due to what was described as a “flying deficiency.”
“A monkey can take a plane off, but landing a plane can be a very difficult proposition,” explained retired US Air Force Lt. Col. Dan Hampton, a pilot, military historian, and combat veteran of the Gulf, Kosovo, and Iraq Wars. “You’ve got spatial relationships, depth perception, wind effects, managing speed, distance, and angle of approach. When you’re coming down to the ground at 100 miles an hour, there’s a lot that your brain has to take in, and to be honest, you either have it or you don’t. If you don’t have it, it can’t be taught. As Erwin advanced in his training, he would have gone from small training planes to heavier, faster, more complex and more powerful aircraft, and things would have gotten progressively more difficult for him.”
The death of Red’s dream to become a pilot was a devastating blow. Fighter and bomber pilots were the dashing superheroes of the war, the stars of motion pictures and magazine articles. They were lords of the sky, taking on the enemy in high-speed combat in beautiful machines. Women treated them like stars, and men wanted to be like them. Red had come so close to his dream; he had actually entered the pilot training program. He was shattered by the rejection.
But he had no idea this unexpected setback would launch a series of events that would elevate him to the pantheon of America’s great military heroes.
The army offered Red a seventeen-week assignment at Yale University to become a communications officer, but he turned down the offer, thinking it would delay him from entering combat.
In June 1943, Red enthusiastically accepted a reassignment for training as a radio operator and technician and what he hoped would be a faster path to combat. He yearned to get into the fight as fast as possible.
Then, on a summer day in 1943, Red Erwin fell in love.
Red was a Bible-believing, observant Christian. His mother was a devout Christian, and he followed in her footsteps, studying the scriptures, volunteering as a youth minister at church, and attending United Methodist Church events.
At twenty-two years of age, Red was a handsome man, and his physical appearance had been sharpened by many months of rugged outdoor work in the California forest and in a blazing steel mill. These two things—his faith and his good looks—combined to change his life.
It happened on a Sunday, at a church fellowship event in Minor Heights, Alabama. A young woman spotted him, and she was startled. Her name was Martha Elizabeth Starnes, and everyone called her Betty. She was seventeen years old and in her last year of high school. And she eventually became my grandmother.
“I just saw him there,” she told me decades later. “I thought he was the best-looking thing I’d ever seen. I reckon he thought I was too. I can still remember what he had on. It was a casual green suit. I can still remember that. He was the handsomest thing I’d ever seen in a suit. And he had the prettiest red hair. I loved the way he wore his cap at an angle. I thought he was really good-looking. He was real smart, and he just looked wonderful. He was just real friendly. I wished he’d come over and say hello.”
To her disappointment, it didn’t happen that day, but the following Sunday, as they were leaving church, Red came over to chat with Betty, and they agreed to go out on a date.
“I thought he was the best-looking thing I’d ever seen. I reckon he thought I was too.” (Erwin Family Collection)
Betty was a sweet, shy country girl from a close-knit, churchgoing family of three sisters and one brother. Her father was a mine worker, just like Red’s dad, and she grew up not far from where Red’s family lived. Like Red’s family, hers was greatly influenced by their faith in divine power and their belief that God would pull them through the tough times. At age seventeen, Betty was maturing into an attractive young woman. She was annoyed by the wolf whistles she sometimes attracted from male admirers, but soon she was even more irritated by the commotion caused among her girlfriends when her handsome boyfriend Red, whom she called Gene, after his middle name, came to visit her.
On their first date in late 1943, they rode the bus and trolley to the Alabama Theater in downtown Birmingham to see the m
ovie A Guy Named Joe, about a star-crossed romantic triangle between two airmen and a female pilot. This time, Red, who traveled down from his base at Pratt, Kansas, wore his army uniform, which sent Betty into an even deeper swoon.
“I thought he just looked wonderful!” she recalled.
Soon he was racing home on weekend furloughs by train from his base to Birmingham, and then taking a bus 20 miles south to the town of Calera, in Shelby County, and then hitchhiking 5 miles to the Alabama State College for Women at Montevallo, where, beginning in the fall of 1944, Betty was a freshman. After a few hours together, he would have to do a reverse mad dash back to Kansas.
As they courted through 1943 and 1944, Red poured out his heart to Betty in letters from training bases and aviation complexes in Alabama, Mississippi, New Mexico, Florida, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Texas, and Kansas, while he was training to become a radio operator on the army’s B-17 Flying Fortress bomber.
“He wrote the best letters,” Betty told me sixty years later. “And his penmanship was so neat and artistic. I still cherish those letters.”
When I discovered the letters, I was amazed at the strength of their feelings for each other and how letters can be such a powerful way of expressing your love for someone. In those letters, he told her:
I’ve been thinking of you all evening, so I’m going to try at least to say hello beautiful, what’s cookin’?
I wonder as I watch the moon, up in the sky so far.
Are you watching too, or is it dank and raining where you are? And when I twirl a radio dial and hear some song that’s new, I wonder if off where you are you might be listening too?
Do you daydream as I daydream and miss me too, My Dear?