by Tom Blair
With a push on the booster coil and starter buttons the Merlin engine cranked to life. A touch of power and the Spit began its narrow-gear waddle across the Duxford grass. After pausing for the engine oil to warm, I made a quick run-up to check the mags and prop. Then into the wind and power pushed on slowly; I wanted to get the feel. The tail jumped off quickly, and while considering when I should ease the Spit up, it took the lead and we were flying … it was flying.
I hesitated with the gear retraction—had to switch hands on the stick to move the lever on the right. The Spitfire climbed faster than anything I had flown before; we were soon level at 10,000 feet. I tried a few quick rolls: ailerons light to the touch. The rudder and elevator even lighter. A Cuban Eight, a Split S, then just random dips and turns.
The Spit didn’t go where I directed, it went where I thought. It was a butterfly with the speed and ego of a wasp. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome, so back to Duxford, in the pattern, gear down, flaps down, held it off the grass for a gentle three-point … I tried to make Americans look competent. I pulled onto the ramp next to my P-47. Reginald was quickly up on the wing, unbuckling parachute straps. I was babbling like a schoolboy—best flight since my first in the yellow Cub! Pointing to my weary mount, I asked Reginald if he wanted to fly it to see what it was like. He told me he didn’t need to; said that my wide grin after flying the Spit told him how the P-47 flew. God, the Brits could be cleverly cruel.
After an early November morning sweep over Antwerp on the wing of Dewey, we turned west, back over a churning channel of whitecaps. Halfway across, the oil pressure crossed the boundary between green and yellow, then into red. Whenever a dial reported something wrong with an engine, it was easiest to rationalize the dial was failing, not the contrivance with 5,000 parts twirling at 3,000 RPM as the result of 20,000 contained combustions a minute—this contrivance being a Pratt & Whitney R-2800 that kept my 12,000-pound P-47 in the air. But then more dials took their leave, the amp meter to zero and voltage slipping fast. Then the smell of an electrical fire.
I turned south. If the engine quit I didn’t want the headlines screaming YANK’S PLANE RAMS BUCKINGHAM PALACE. After a few minutes the rising engine temperature told the tale: no oil pressure. Then came the shakes, rods and pistons protesting before their execution. Quickly tightened the parachute straps, spun in down trim, cranked the canopy open, pulled the mixture to cut off, and rolled inverted. With a firm yank on the quick release, I was borne into rushing air with flailing arms and legs.
One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three; I’d been instructed to count to ten. After three I pulled the D-ring. A jerk, and swinging under silk. Below me spread a gray cloud cover, a lumpy quilt. A quick pang of fear: what if somehow I had bailed out over water, not the pastures south of London? In the distance a noise rolled up like a clap of thunder; my P-47 slicing into terra firma, not choppy seas.
Down into the gray overcast I drifted. Crossed my legs so that neither a tree branch nor fence railing could threaten my mother’s grandchildren. In an instant a green field below; another instant on my back, in mud, my chute retired from its career, spread limp. The breath knocked out of me, more than a minute refilling my lungs with damp British air, unbuckled my parachute harness and took an unsteady stance.
Over a rise two farmers came running, one with a shotgun. I was pleased to be alive; they were disappointed I was not German. Their second choice would have been a British pilot. I occupied the bottom of their dance card, an American; neither foe nor compatriot.
The older of the two shepherded me back to his cottage. His son hastened off to the village to alert the constable of my arrival while his wife performed the British obligatory: tea was poured. Then the tour; my farmer host proudly introduced me to the pigs and cows that staffed his bucolic factory. I smiled and complimented him while savoring the aroma of great piles of aging manure, making note to thank my parents once again for my expansive education. By nightfall I was back at my base, buying drinks for those who returned with their planes.
I had written Father of my time caressing Darwin’s original notes. I considered not telling him; somehow I had stolen moments that should have been his. I also wrote of Giles’s theory that nations, once achieving greatness, sowed the seeds of their decline when they used their wealth to pay others to do their bidding. As anticipated, within a few short weeks a letter back from Father with challenging questions of doubt. On a squadron stand-down I hopped a train into London and connected with a northbound to Cambridge. During an enjoyable evening with Giles, I posed Father’s questions as if they were mine. With compelling logic and well-chosen analogies Giles dismissed each without even the most meager acknowledgment of the merit of the questions.
For last I had saved my own question, and asked what nation would be the next dominant. Giles quickly replied, “The United States.” I then asked if we would tumble from a position of dominance once it was attained. Giles looked at me as if I had asked Newton whether the apple would rise or fall in its journey from the tree. “Of course,” he replied, “and it will decline faster than England.” Before I could ask he put forth the reason: “The speed of commerce has increased over the centuries and will continue to increase. Just as it took a country with a fleet of steamships less time to move commerce than a nation with a fleet of sailing ships, new technologies will provide for a relentless compression of time, thus accelerating a nation’s ability to move from have-not to have … to displace the dominant.” On the train back to my base later that night I pondered Giles’s pronouncements. If he was correct, correct about the rise and fall of nations, I despondently concluded that I was fighting to achieve American greatness so that once achieved my future adult grandchildren could watch America’s greatness erode while their hired help cut their lawns and washed their clothes.
Never could I weave my thoughts and words in a manner that conveyed to Mother why flying, why snubbing my nose at gravity, was not a choice made after a precise extrapolation from life events, but was, rather, a passion. Another did convey my passion to paper with a modest sprinkle of perfectly cut and polished words. As with many things in life, I found these words not by a quest, but by circumstance of another journey—a journey to retrieve a wayward pilot of our squadron.
Clifford, our flight leader, asked that I take our squadron hack, a T-6 so tired that I expected its wings to droop until they touched the ground, up to Wellingore to retrieve one of our new pilots who had become lost in the English weather. This poor fellow had circled around most of northern England looking for a break in the overcast, then when a chance opened, dropped into the first airfield he saw—as luck would have it, Wellingore, a British fighter base. So relieved was he to find a field that our frazzled pilot forgot to put his landing gear down. In a few seconds his P-47 went from aircraft to tractor. Our squadron pilot climbed out unhurt, probably with a bunch of stunned Brits wondering how the hell they lost the Revolutionary War.
I flew over to pick up our planeless pilot. Once I was on the ground, dark clouds rolled over bearing rains that would have caused Noah to pause. Waiting for the deluge to disperse my pilot squadron mate wanted to hide in his temporary billet, too embarrassed to be strolling about. I felt no such necessity. It was at a nearby pub I saw the poem posted. The pub owner proudly advised that the composition in verse had been written by a British Spitfire pilot based at Wellingore. Verses that I copied, then memorized.
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I’ve climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of—wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
Hov’ring there, I’ve chased the shouting wind along
And flung my eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long d
elirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the windswept-heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew;
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Once back at Wellingore I asked a Flight Officer if the author of “High Flight” was still stationed at the base. Off-handedly he told me that he had been killed in his Spit two years before.
During the Thanksgiving week, a holiday of no significance to the Brits, Giles and I met at the halfway point, London. We had front center seats for Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None, then a superb dinner (somehow the better London restaurants weren’t constrained by meat and sugar rations). While our discussions were expansive in their range, the roulette wheel of topics frequently stopped on dissecting the human race. During dinner Giles poured out yet another cataclysmic observation. In the course of a rambling conversation about the ebb and flow of civilization he casually mentioned, as if noting there was no salt in the salt shaker, that mankind as we knew it was a short-term phenomenon. He made this statement heralding the demise of the human race while meticulously removing the last microns of fat from his medium-rare lamb chop.
My stare, accompanied by silence, demanded elaboration. Giles based his conclusion on the primacy of instinct over intellect. He noted that man, in spite of an opposable thumb, was in fact an animal. In the earliest chapters of man’s evolutionary development, certain primeval traits were imprinted on our psyche, traits that were necessary for survival—the simplest being to flinch with pain; a more complex example the urge to mate, thus procreating to expand the tribe. These traits in their varied forms and importance, Giles argued, resulted in unique tendencies of mankind. One of these tendencies being war. He said that Hitler’s forays into Poland, France, and Russia were, while on a grander scale, no different than one African tribe attacking another to take possession of their hunting grounds. He argued that no matter how eloquently a human might speak, within him smoldered raw animal passions.
Technology, Giles suggested—of course, Giles really never suggested, he stated—would be mankind’s downfall. He believed that technology did two things to the detriment of the human race. First, it allowed any one human exercising a primeval emotion to operate on a scale several magnitudes greater than previous generations. Two hundred years ago an arrow shot into the heart; today a two-thousand-pound bomb dropped on a village. Second, technology dehumanized the event of killing.
When he made this last point, my frown telegraphed my non-agreement. I told him that I felt compassion when the shells from my .50-caliber machine guns raked a German fighter and I saw it enter a flaming death spiral. Giles paused for a moment, then asked how many children did the German pilot that I killed have? Did he enjoy music? Or perhaps, was he a student of the ballet? No, he said, I was not an executioner looping a rope around the neck of someone while peering into his eyes; rather, I killed from afar and feigned compassion.
I remained quiet, abstaining from debate. Then, to make his point that blood never stained my hands, he asked whether, if by some circumstance, I was standing near a German pilot about to take off in his Messerschmidt to shoot down an American bomber, would I, if I had the opportunity, walk up to him and stick a bayonet in his heart? Or would I be more comfortable applying my highly developed intellect to sway him from his mission? Not having a retort of compelling reason, I answered by telling Giles that I would pay a leopard to eat the Nazi pilot.
While I relished the free-ranging intellectual safaris with Giles, there was a price. He was Mr. Atlas and I the ninety-pound weakling when we debated evolution and the itinerary of man from cave to castle. At first his overflowing reservoir of knowledge, which he packaged in small parcels to pummel me, caused self-doubts; was I perhaps best suited to be a field slave? Of course I overstate my intimidation. Giles, I consoled myself, had written a 75,000-word doctoral thesis contrasting Levallois tools to Mousterian tools. He had spent nine months in Java with von Koenigswald confirming that Dubois had in fact discovered Pithecanthropus erectus—better known as our cousin Homo erectus. When the topic was 50,000 years old, had two legs and a sloping forehead, he possessed a titanic advantage. Let Giles slip into a P-47 and try to fly a mission; he couldn’t even bargain the engine to life. But I couldn’t compete with Giles in a game he didn’t play, so aviation was not my ally.
Mother’s teaching rescued my self-esteem. Cleverly, but likely not as cleverly as I thought, I jibed and tacked our banter to literature. Giles held his own initially, as I blundered through Bacon and Shakespeare—both likely direct ancestors to Giles. But American literature, which at first he dismissed as an oxymoron, was my salvation. “So, Giles, don’t you agree that of the three scaffold scenes in The Scarlet Letter, the night setting with Hester, Pearl, and Dimmesdale is most powerful?” My way of suggesting that Giles should stick a copy of Tom Sawyer up Homo habilis’s anus.
My correspondence to Mother and Father pasteurized life as a fighter pilot. Once back home I could regale them with my exploits. I did in several letters, however, elaborate on Giles’s conclusions regarding the human journey. Father at first only responded in a casual manner. In time, though, Father came to see Giles, at best, as an interloper into his son’s mind; at worst, perhaps, as a hijacker of his role as my teacher of all things scientific. Father’s letters often included well-crafted arguments as to why Giles’s hypothesis was flawed.
While Giles might be wrong, it was not a notion that Giles ever visited. I would reformulate Father’s arguments as questions, not challenges, to Giles. “I was wondering, could you help me understand why it’s not this way …?” I became the rope in my father’s intellectual tug-of-war with Giles.
In one expansive letter from Father, with the breadth and depth of a term paper, he set forth a comprehensive explanation as to why Giles was incorrect in his belief that technology would be the downfall of mankind because our ability to kill each other was developing faster than the erosion of mankind’s primeval instincts. Father held that humans are basically benevolent. This notion, when overlaid by the premise that each generation was better educated than the previous generation, was the basis for Father’s belief that Giles erred. For Father, education furnished handholds in logical thinking that would force any rational person to “do the right thing.”
When I posed this notion to Giles as my own thought, he responded with a smile. If cats could smile, they would wear the same smile while playing with a mouse. Giles attacked my argument at the microcosmic and the macrocosmic levels. In the micro he asked why I was an Air Corps pilot risking death. The ability for the Allies to win the war against the Axis Powers, Giles claimed, did not pivot on the fact that I joined the fight. Simply put, he argued that the risk-to-reward analysis made no sense for me as an individual. In the country that I was fighting to defend, many of my fellow countrymen thought I was not a citizen worthy of all of the benefits of the nation. Nevertheless, I was risking my life for this nation, even though my participation in the fight would not be pivotal. Therefore, my superb education did not funnel me to a rational decision, thus proving that education does not correlate to rational thought.
My retort I thought compelling. On December 7 America was attacked; our president and Congress, both elected by individual Americans, chose to go to war. As a country we went to war, and I was a citizen of that country. Accordingly, there was no decision for me to make, rational or irrational.
Giles then crushed me in the macro, lecturing me as to why the various national and global institutions artificially prolong man’s latent primeval instincts. The biggest offender, he said, was the state-church that banded peoples together, then administered false hopes as a tranquilizing opium. “Opium?”
Another sip of Claret and his response. Giles argued that the masses toil in squalor while paying tribute to the state-church leaders—“God Sav
e the King” … “God Bless the Pope”—because the same leaders assure them that the meek shall inherit the earth. To embolden his position, Giles claimed he would rather have a flat in the theater district of London today than take his chances on inheriting the earth after death.
While Giles’s ramblings became confusing at times, the essence was that religion and sometimes governments were artificial mechanisms to unite a group of people, and this mechanism taught certain absolutes: their God was the only God. And certain religions preached that anyone worshipping a God other than theirs should be slain: “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
I didn’t agree. I chose what I thought was the most vulnerable component of Giles’s position. Artificiality of religion is not a given, I asserted, hence his entire argument was suspect. Giles eyed me with apparent pity and asked what religion I practiced. “Catholicism” was my quick response. He then asked how many religions had I considered before identifying the Vatican as my mecca? “Why not the Mormon Church? Why not Buddhism? Why not pray in a mosque, or perhaps a synagogue?” For Giles, an individual’s choice of one of the world’s great religions was of no greater moment than a child deciding—whether based on taste or because it was the only flavor served them as a youngster—what would be their favorite flavor of ice cream throughout life. Some people liked vanilla, others embraced chocolate, and a few worshipped strawberry. The problem being that the people who worshipped strawberry, or whatever flavor, were told that they should kill those who worshipped vanilla. To pay homage to vanilla was to be a heathen and to desecrate strawberry. Giles believed that the downfall of mankind would be religious wars—wars of no logic, just fanatical beliefs, being fought with weapons of greater and greater killing power.
Giles’s declaration that religions were fraudulent was not a notion I communicated to Father, lest he incur an aneurism while contemplating his son breaking bread with a devil’s disciple. While the teachings of the Catholic Church at times stretched my capacity to believe, I never doubted that God existed. For me, God’s existence and the artificiality of religion were not two incompatible beliefs. While religion could not exist without the premise of a God, God could exercise His divine powers without the trumpets and trappings of religion. I planned my counter-attack on Giles, in my quiver carefully sharpened stone-tipped arrows of logical thought as to why God.