Letters to America

by Tom Blair

  Once replenished, I meandered the streets, halting my journey for each whim of curiosity, exploring great public buildings. On one hike through history, strolling through the National Portrait Gallery, a most pleasant surprise. I rounded a corner and froze in the stare from Father’s Intellectual God. Gazing down at me from two dark eyes moored in a pond of light skin, white-bearded, and draped in a brown-black coat over rounded shoulders, with his opposable thumb grasping a well-worn fedora, was Charles Robert Darwin wearing an expression of forlorn sorrow—perhaps sorrow that he’d been the one who told the tale. Told us that we were not biblical mystics, but rather comical monkeys.

  Italy had been for me the hard crust of Europe: caked earth, bleak browns, stale food, and a defeated people. England was refreshingly green and bright with hope, hope of a population smiling and confident in themselves. Dewey and the Doc had saved me from Dante’s Inferno. After Daryl’s death my ambivalence toward risk was no less than my own death wish. Without the forced transfer from Italy I would have become a gnarled thorny bush in the middle ring of the Seventh Circle.

  General James Doolittle had been Commander of the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. When he was assigned the Eighth Air Force in England, he was put in charge of the most powerful group of aircraft ever assembled under a single command. The fact that Doolittle brought Dewey to the Eighth in England, where there were less than a dozen black officers, testified to Dewey’s strengths.

  I was Dewey’s adjutant. Although we were both pilots, Dewey’s assignments from Doolittle, and mine as his aide, were administrative, collecting ready reports and assessing capabilities of the P-38, P-47, and P-51 fighter squadrons. No one in England was saddled with my old mount, the P-39. At first I enjoyed the desk job. After a year in Italy of solemnly greeting each new day as my last, I savored stability and predictability. But then doubts arose; somehow it didn’t feel right. Somehow I wasn’t doing my job. A few times I gently probed moving back to flying status. Always a quick response: Absolutely not, no black pilots in the Eighth Air Force. And then remembrances of the navy petty officer … house slave or field slave?

  In early June of ’44, Eisenhower executed the bloody invasion of Fortress Europe. By August, American and British armies were pushing through France and Belgium toward Germany. The Eighth already had forward fighter bases in France. Our group remained in England; most of us expected the European war to be over in a few months.

  It was late August when General Doolittle, making a round of all the Air Groups, joined several of the officers at our base. Doolittle was famous for his aviation exploits, both as a civilian and a military pilot. These were not the hallmarks my parents would have noted, however; rather, they would have admired his outstanding education, an education not easily attained nor casually chosen. From MIT he’d earned a master’s, then a PhD, both in aeronautical engineering, a daunting science. While most daredevil pilots of the 1920s were hard-drinking exhibitionists, Doolittle had been a doctoral candidate calculating wind velocity gradients. But it was neither Doolittle’s education nor his flying skills that swayed me the most; it was his height.

  After a formal briefing many of us followed General Doolittle to the Officer’s Club for some instructional conversation. Junior officers learned early on that they should limit their interaction with senior officers to responding “good point” and laughing heartily at any humor, no matter how flat. After more than an hour at the bar, the general moved to a table with me, Dewey, and three or four other officers clustered behind us. In time the conversation drifted from operations to stories. Several called out questions about Doolittle’s Tokyo Raid, coaxing B-25s off the Hornet’s deck, the same carrier I had seen in Oakland while a student. After the first bottle of scotch evaporated, another appeared. More conversation ensued—nothing critical, just random subjects.

  Then someone asked Doolittle whether it was true that he had been both a champion bantamweight and middleweight boxer. He responded, with a smile of pride, in the affirmative. Then came the question and answer that sparked my transfer. A young captain asked the general, “Why boxing? Why a brain-pounding sport?” Doolittle’s quick answer was a single word: Prejudice. My head involuntarily cocked toward him. He said that at five-foot-four he was shorter than most men. Doolittle went on to claim that tall men had an advantage in their everyday life; for reasons that had no basis in logical thinking, short men were not considered the equal to males of well-developed stature. Boxing, and winning at boxing, and then attaining a PhD, Doolittle said, had been his way of proving to others that a short man was the equal of any tall man.

  It may have been the scotch oozing through my cerebrum, or it may have been twenty years of frustration, but whatever the trigger, I spoke up in not a whisper. I told the general that he had framed precisely a valid point. He smiled, a junior officer was acknowledging the logic of his statement. But I did not return the smile and offer a toast. Rather I added that I was five-ten and I would gladly trade him a half foot of my height for his white skin.

  Silence. After several long moments a major in our group asked the general when he thought the war in the Pacific would be over. Doolittle didn’t respond. Rotating his posture toward me, he asked if I wasn’t satisfied that the Air Corps had made me a lieutenant and trained me as a pilot. I responded with a quick yes, but added that I’d only been allowed to fly weary P-39s in Italy. And even though I had proved myself by destroying three Me-109s and a 190 with America’s second-rate fighter, and even though I was parented by two PhDs, being black was the overriding consideration of my piloting capabilities. And then—I shouldn’t have, but I did—I added that I had seen numbers of short white pilots flying combat aircraft in England.

  Doolittle turned to Dewey and asked if I was right; was it actually not possible for an experienced black combat pilot to fill a piloting slot in the Eighth? After a long pause while he likely considered a transfer to the submarine service, Dewey said I was correct; it was not possible.

  Two days later I received a transfer to a P-47 fighter squadron. Learning of my rotation, Dewey successfully lobbied for the same. We were transferred to a squadron led by a young captain—a noticeably short young captain—whom Doolittle had mentored. Most squadron pilots greeted us with passive indifference. Real feelings were tempered by the knowledge that we were there by order of the Commanding Officer of the Eighth Air Force.

  Only at a distance had I seen P-47s. When a sergeant gave me a walk-around of my new mount, I was in awe. I’d had a similar feeling as a young boy when I first stood next to a steam locomotive. The P-47 was big, not graceful but functional. To overcome drag and gravity, a 2,200-horsepower air-cooled engine swung a twelve-foot prop. The P-38, P-39, P-40, and P-51 all had liquid-cooled engines, coolant flowing around the cylinders, then down from the engine through a maze of pipes and tubes to a radiator. One small leak in the coolant system, from a blown seal or a Kraut’s lucky shot, and the pilot had an overheating engine, a fire, and a crash. The P-47’s air-cooled engine was simple. As long as it was moving through the air, the engine was cool. A cannon shell from a Kraut FW-190 or Me-109 could blow a cylinder off a P-47 and the engine would likely keep on pulling.

  Another thing about the P-47, it was strong. Republic Aviation didn’t save any money on aluminum when they built these chariots. An empty P-47 weighed as much as the P-39 loaded. Because it was robust with a powerful engine, it could haul a couple thousand pounds of bombs or extra fuel under the wings. Plus, long-range fuel tanks gave P-47 pilots the range to shepherd B-17s and B-24s during their deep penetration raids into Germany.

  Most important for a fighter pilot, no less than eight .50-caliber machines were embedded in the wing. And the “pilot’s office” had a view. Our squadron was equipped with the latest model of the P-47, manufactured with a bubble canopy that offered a 360-degree field of vision. Mounted on top of the bubble, a mirror—much like an auto’s rear-view mirror—that allowed a pilot to see at a glance if a Kraut was in trai
l. With a sinister smile, the sergeant providing my walk-around claimed that any Kraut close enough for me to see in the mirror was the last Kraut I would ever see.

  On the weakness side, at a low altitude the P-47 was a truck, in fact it was nicknamed “the Jug” after Juggernaut. It wasn’t sprightly in its response to control inputs. If you got the plane into a spin much below 5,000 feet, you needed to bail out or have your will witnessed.

  Dewey and I quickly learned that most of the squadron’s missions were escort, shepherding B-17s and B-24s to Germany and back. By the fall of ’44 the Luftwaffe was emasculated. While they were short of fuel and aircraft, their lack of experienced combat pilots was the most deflating. Five years of a two-front war had ravaged their ranks. America and Russia, and England, using the Canadian Territories, could train pilots at bases far from harm’s way. The Nazis had no safe incubators to hatch pilots. On many of our escort missions no enemy fighters were seen; if they did make an appearance, often it was a quick hit and run; newly trained—barely trained—Kraut pilots had no stomach for a dogfight till death.

  On a given day more than a thousand Allied fighters and bombers streamed across the English Channel, flying missions over France and Germany. These aircraft nested at close to a hundred airfields scattered throughout England and Ireland. When the weather turned nasty over England during a mission, it was often catch-as-catch-can when trying to get back on the ground after a several-hour mission. If my fuel was low, I would drop the gear and flaps and plop myself in the first air base that wasn’t weathered in.

  I enjoyed these detours. It was always a sour pleasure to see the jaws drop and the eyes bulge. I would taxi along the flight line with ground crew using hand signals to shepherd me to a tie-down ramp. As I shut down the engine some corporal or sergeant would be up on the wing to help with my gear. Off came my goggles, helmet, and oxygen mask; on went their shock. Most had never seen a black pilot. Most didn’t even know there were black pilots. For many I was a curiosity, pointed out as I strolled to the operations offices from the flight line. For a few, I was a focus of scorn. “How could a black man do what we do? It’s not possible.”

  Weather-caused displacements gave me the opportunity to become a tourist … to explore the nooks and crannies of England. After one four-hour mission to Munich I came back across the channel to see nothing but solid overcast. Most of the bases were socked in. The frequencies were saturated with controllers struggling to put seven pounds of sugar in a five-pound bag. I headed north toward Kimbolton, an airfield that somehow always seemed to be clear. After a few minutes, a tearing break appeared in the cloud layer, and directly below a field with forktailed P-38s parked along the perimeter. A bird in the hand. I pulled back the power, made a long sweeping turn to clear the area, then landed on a wide grass field.

  After my normal shutdown and disrobing routine, I headed to the airfield’s administrative building where I joined pilots milling around from half the squadrons in the UK. Turns out I was in Duxford. This had been an RAF base in the early part of the war. In time American P-38 and P-51 squadrons exercised squatter’s rights. I spent most of two days in Duxford waiting for a stalled cold front to move through. It was a magnificent pause for me. Duxford was only a few miles from the most magnificent cauldron of academia: Cambridge.

  For a full day I visited the colleges of Cambridge University, savoring every moment. I made a point of introducing myself to some professors at Christ’s College, the college that had educated my father’s God, Charles Darwin; his grandson had just retired as Master of the College. When they learned that my father was a biologist with a keen interest in Darwin, they introduced me to a young professor, Giles, who in turn took me to an anteroom off the staircase between the library floors. There Giles, my soon to be friend, handed me a leather case and told me to take whatever time I needed.

  For hours I held and perused, with the care of a nurse cradling a newborn, letters from Darwin. Letters sent from the HMS Beagle during its five-year exploration of the South Pacific. Letters that hinted of Darwin’s first tentative conclusions drawn from observations of the tortoise and finch populations of the Galapagos Islands—conclusions that led to his anti-Christ Theory of Organic Evolution: survival of the fittest.

  So engrossed was I with Darwin’s handwritten papers that shadows became long with no notice taken. My trance was broken by the young professor asking if all was right. Then Giles, in a tone more like an order than a suggestion, a harbinger of our relationship, recommended that we dine together.

  The dinner itself was at Christ’s College, in a dark room of darker woods, overseen by ponderous portraits of academia’s finest. After typical British fare of starches and fatty meat, Giles pulled me through a discussion I’d never before considered. He transported Darwin’s theory of the survival of the fittest from species to cultures and nations. For Giles, unlike most in America, it was as much a certitude that Darwin’s theory of evolution explained man’s existence as Newton’s observation about fruit and gravity. He argued that civilizations, and later in the history of our planet, nations, rise and then fall as the fittest nation becomes less fit.

  I questioned this notion. I asked, if it is true the fittest species tends to remain the fittest, why would not the fittest nation hold its place in the world ranking? His answer gave me pause. Man, he argued, is a unique species. And it is man, or men, that form a nation. My furrowed brow elicited further explanation. The Spanish, Giles lectured, were prominent in the 1400s and 1500s. They were a global power in the world as then known. As a nation they had succeeded; boats riding low with gold from the New World confirmed their exalted world status. In time the peoples of Spain used their wealth not to expand, but to enjoy life while paying others to do their bidding. They became lazy. Giles concluded by stating that it was England that was striving the hardest in the 1600s and 1700s, and by the 1800s and early 1900s Britannia ruled the waves, not Spain.

  To validate his theory Giles asked that I consider the lion, the King of the Jungle, with no other species challenging its dominance. Imagine, he said, what would happen if the lion killed more game than it needed for survival. Imagine as well that African animals had money that they freely exchanged. The lions could sell their excess meat, and then perhaps save the money they received for selling their surplus kill. Some future generation of lions might use this stored wealth to pay leopards to hunt for them, rather than being bothered to stalk gazelles in the blazing African sun. In time these lions would become fat and lazy; not fleet of paw. Leopards, still being lean and cunning, and noting the lions’ laziness, might in time tire of hunting for lions and decide to eat the flabby lions … or to sell lion meat.

  After a few moments of reflection, I asked if Great Britain would decline. “For certain” was Giles’s quick answer, adding that Winston Churchill was spot-on when he spoke of the Battle of Britain being their finest hour. It was not only the grandeur of the event that would make it the finest hour, it would also be the subsequent decline of Great Britain as the world’s greatest power.

  After dinner I took a wandering stroll through the center of Cambridge, past great colleges founded before the Mayflower dropped anchor. On one hidden narrow street I discovered the Eagle Pub; a pub requisitioned by American pilots based at Duxford as “theirs.” It was like all pubs—churning conversations lubricated with ale and the always-married fish and chips aromas. One difference: on the ceiling was a testimonial to American pilots who had scrawled their names and squadron numbers across the plaster sky. Hundreds of Williamses, Thomases, Charleses, Jameses, and the like, many already dead in France and Germany, baked black in cratered soufflés of burning fuel, aluminum, flesh and bone. While sipping an ale I considered standing on a chair and adding my name, but thought best not to further stretch the polite tension that my presence had caused among the regulars.

  By the afternoon of the second day at Duxford the cold front was over France, leaving only blue sky. I sat on the wing of my P-47 so
aking in the warmth, watching aircraft trundle over the uneven grass and lift off toward their home bases. Next to my aircraft was a Spitfire. This sleek fighter was the icon of Britain’s struggle against the Nazis, its curved elliptical wings making it more art than aircraft.

  In time a British pilot officer strolled toward the Spit. We nodded hellos as he began preflighting it, looking for anything not right. When through, he asked if I was based at Duxford. I told him I was a transient and would be soon heading to my base. He stuck out his hand and introduced himself; Reginald was his name. With names like Reginald one knew the British were smarter than the average Billy Bob American.

  For a time we spoke of things only of interest to pilots while staring at aircraft floating off Duxford’s green expanses. Then I asked him. I asked if the Spit was as great as the British pilots claimed. He paused for several moments, then said it was a magnificent kite … British pilots called their aircraft kites. He quickly added that beauty was in the eyes of the beholder. Then Reginald asked if I wanted to take his Spit up. Just like that he asked. No questions about how many hours I had, whether I had ever flown a liquid-cooled aircraft, nothing. As if asking did I want a spot of tea, did I want to fly his Spit. My smile preceded my affirmative answer.

  I hopped up on the wing of the Spit and slid into its tight cockpit. Reginald strapped me in, then gave me a quick cockpit brief: master, mags, trim, boost pump, fuel selector, fuel cock, primer, engine settings. “Don’t get slower than eighty on short final.” Nothing much unlike a U.S. fighter. The big difference was the landing gear, or as they say, undercarriage, selector. It was on the right and didn’t look like anything I had seen before. The other big difference was the brakes. Every U.S. aircraft had foot brakes, usually on top of the rudder pedals. The Spit had a handbrake on the stick; probably for the same reason they drove on the wrong side of the road.