by Tom Blair
Alas, I did not have the opportunity to string my bow.
As the European conflict’s center of gravity crawled on its belly toward Berlin, life as a pilot in England drifted toward tranquil—not for the bomber crews being shredded by flak, but for fighter pilots escorting them. American P-47 squadrons in the forward bases, in abandoned Luftwaffe airfields in France and Belgium, flew the low-level support missions, each day playing Russian roulette with Nazi gunners. We flew the milk runs, escorting bombers high above the struggle. Often we would return in the precise formation in which we had departed, no marauding Kraut Me-109s or 190s having disturbed the symmetry of our flight. If the bombers hit a well-defended target we would break off in twos or fours to escort the stragglers, lumbering bombers that had lost an engine to flak.
On a November mission to Merseburg I had my humanity hammered again. Sky of God’s indigo blue, only wisps of white at 25,000 feet. More than two hundred B-17s and B-24s had been sent to the target, each with their ten-man crew. As always we rejoined after the bombers laid their TNT eggs, half a score of stragglers limping behind the box formations. Nazi flak had done its job.
We picked our dance partners. Dewey and I joined on a B-17 that was slower than other wounded bombers. One prop feathered, with no thrust, little drag; its engine mate on the same wing was freewheeling, spinning in the airflow, with no thrust and immense drag. The B-17 was slowly trading height for airspeed, the airspeed necessary for flight.
Dewey took his place to the right and behind the crippled bomber, I on the left, as if somehow we could steady the big beast as it wallowed toward England. Even with the power back, my aircraft pulled away. Every couple of minutes I would skid, cross the controls, to chip away at my speed.
Before the invasion the bomber crew would have bailed out miles back. Once on the ground they could have expected a day or two of interrogation, then transport to a stalag with ten thousand other American airmen eating turnips while waiting for liberation. But now it was different. The Nazis had the German civilians whipped to a rage as Yanks were poised to cross onto German soil. Parachuting Allied airmen were welcomed by pitchforks and nooses. Our B-17 was struggling to cross into Allied territory, the boundary marked this day by the Eider River, an agonizing hundred miles or so ahead.
More from curiosity than need, I drifted under our adopted bomber. Sunlight shone through ragged holes in both wings, a portion of the port elevator missing, and worst of all, the lower ball turret, a Plexiglas fishbowl protruding from the belly of the B-17 with two .50-caliber guns and a gunner, was no longer transparent and perfect; it was jagged and blood red.
Slowly I slid back to the side of the lumbering war wagon. From the waist gunner positions came a steady dropping of gear, anything to make the craft lighter in its struggle against gravity, anything to reach the Eider: oxygen bottles, ammunition boxes, a radio, machine guns, and two parachutes. Two of the ten crew members must have been dead. Careful to make certain my wake didn’t tip the balance, I slid my P-47 close to the side of the B-17. As if passing a friend on the street, I gave a wave to the waist gunner. A quick wave back, then more hurried tossing of equipment, desperate to lighten the load.
Looking forward in the cockpit, the co-pilot grasping the control yoke with both arms. The ailerons were at maximum deflection, straining to hold the dead wing. The pilot was slumped backward, no worries for him. Slowly the B-17 lost altitude. Ever slower we crawled toward the Eider. After the Eider they could bail out or, if too low, the co-pilot could slide the B-17 into a barren flat field.
I gazed downward; under the bright clear sky, one large shadow bracketed by two smaller, their paths following the rises of the green and brown mosaic of pastures and fields, at times near or across miniature villages, each with their single exclamation point church steeple. Watching the progress of the shadows dehumanized the struggle a hundred feet from my wingtip.
After a several-mile wooded stretch, the shadows descended into a long, wide valley, then across a snaking river. On the eastern side small gray cotton balls appeared and then drifted away; smoke from artillery, Germans and Americans hammering each other; it was the Eider.
One of the gunners, the one who had been tossing out excess weight and had waved earlier, peeled back his oxygen mask. The weary bomber had mushed well below 10,000 feet, no need for oxygen. It had also mushed past the Eider; the crew knew they would live. Across the expanse of rushing air the gunner gave me a thumbs-up and a big grin. Probably like a thousand other grins he had flashed during his young life, the one to his Dad when he slammed a well-hit ball over the center field fence, or the one for his girl when she told him how handsome he looked in his uniform. From under his flying cap short locks of red hair jerked in the wind. But the grin that was the essence of the young warrior’s being this day.
To share the moment I slipped off my glove and gave the smiling gunner a thumbs-up. Then, as if to crushingly refute my gesture, as if to show who possessed all knowledge and power, the dead wing, the wing with the two dragging engines, dipped. But the dip did not stop. Over the B-17 rolled onto its back, the dirty, oil-stained underside of the cowlings an ugly prelude; then with nose bowed toward the earth, three or four tight spiraling turns, impact, explosion, a churning black cloud of smoke. Silence broken by Dewey keying his mic. “God save their souls”; nothing else said, only a curt call to the tower when we circled to land.
Italy had been a constant, a constant fear of death, a constant of men dying. England was whiplashes of sensory and emotional extremes. Deboned Dover sole presented on fine porcelain with a memorable bottle of white, followed by a musical at the St. James Theatre and a nightcap sherry. Two days later a bright, unblemished sky four miles above Nazi Germany with a front row seat to a theater of B-17s engulfed in flames; dark smoke abstracts against an infinite blue curtain, the final call for the dead and dying crews.
It was time. It was time to transfer, to transfer home. The month before I had exchanged thumbs-ups with the young gunner, I had reached my mission quota. I had voluntarily stayed; now I told the squadron commander I was ready for my transfer home. A few days for paperwork, a week to process, then my orders, thirty days’ leave in the United States, then a training squadron in Michigan. I wrote to my parents, their Christmas present welcomed news that I would be shipping home by early January.
On Saturday, December 16, all hell broke loose. The Germans executed a superbly orchestrated attack across the Allied front. Within twenty-four hours Americans were in retreat, unorganized retreat. The weather gods smiled on the Germans; most all of France and Belgium was blanketed by a solid overcast. No American aircraft could bolster our ground troops. With clear skies, our superior air cover would have saved the day. Kraut tanks and artillery would have been pounded impotent by fighters screaming down with 500- and 1,000-pounders. But it wasn’t to be. The weather continued to comfort the Nazis through Christmas.
By the tenth day of the German offensive, the winds of fate shifted. Skies cleared, and our foot soldiers had regrouped and were counterattacking. But while the skies were clear over our forward bases in France and Belgium, most airfields were covered with snow and ice. P-47s and other fighters, with their high-torque engines, needed firm planting for their gear when taking off. Fighter squadrons in England were thrown into ground support. Three flights from my squadron were launched with 500-pound bombs, one shackled to each wing.
Dewey and I were assigned to orbit St. Hubert, west of Bastogne. Pilot officers assigned as observers with the forward ground troops could direct ground strikes by using a discrete radio frequency assigned each flight. Once over St. Hubert, Dewey and I orbited for close to an hour, waiting to be called if some Nazi tank or artillery unit needed pounding. Through the clear Plexiglas of my canopy the sun slowly drifted from behind my head, over my shoulder, directly in front, and then disappeared behind, each circular journey marking my aircraft’s rotation around our holding point. Below solid white, God’s snowy whitewash
of man’s desecration of his gift. Above, from horizon to horizon, unstained blue. I was suspended in a world of no blemish or sin; a baptismal font of Mother Earth herself. Soon I would be home, home with family, with my life, a new life. Then, from the boredom of long-ago midnight Masses, arose a scripture, a scripture of John: “I tell you the truth, no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again.”
I pulled the mic jack from the radio panel, my voice isolated to me and the perfect day. As the sun once again crossed my shoulder to my face I spoke:
I believe in the Holy Spirit
the holy Catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting.
A crackle of the radio. Our flight of two was directed to a point fifteen miles northeast of Bastogne. German artillery had our infantry under fire in a wooded killing field. Within a few quick minutes Dewey and I were circling the coordinates; no sign below of artillery. Finally Dewey called our target. To the west, in a forest, flashes and puffs of smoke, artillery shells exploding. Just over a mile away, on the edge of an open field, two Kraut artillery pieces, spitting smoke as shells were fired.
Dewey was in the lead, he took the first pass. Overflying the artillery he rolled inverted, then pulled down and around to a steep dive toward the puffing artillery. Suddenly from a quarter mile away globs of light arched toward Dewey: German antiaircraft, but they weren’t leading Dewey enough. At 1,000 feet Dewey released and pulled up. Both bombs arched down, both bombs short of their target.
Dewey keyed his mic. “Sorry.”
I keyed mine. “You buy the drinks tonight.”
I retraced Dewey’s overhead, rolled inverted, and pulled through, the artillery directly in front. Neutralized the controls—didn’t want any lateral forces skewing the bombs. Down below 1,000 feet, I toggled the release and pulled up, four or five g’s pushing down as I rounded from dive to climb. Across my wing, like glowing baseballs, Kraut antiaircraft shells. An explosion and flash. The port wing folded up and over the cockpit, jerked to a twisting roll to the left, centrifugal force holding me in a death grip as my P-47 plummeted. Quickly the windscreen filled with a spinning and rising earth, no sky. I spoke to Mother, words we both knew.
I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Warren
Milly’s Sister
Child labor in America began with the earliest colonists who brought the practice from England. The tremendous expansion of American industry during the last half of the nineteenth century created a heightened demand for child labor. By 1900 it was estimated that 25 percent of factory and mill workers were children between the ages of ten and sixteen. These children were sought after as laborers because their size allowed them to move about in small spaces in factories and mines, they were easy to manage and control, and, most important, children could be paid less than adults.
The conditions under which the children worked can best be measured by certain child labor reforms various states implemented in the 1880s; such reforms stipulated children under ten years of age couldn’t work more than ten hours a day in a six-day workweek without their parents’ permission … this was the reform.
A most cruel by-product of the sixty-hour work week for children was that it rendered the notion of obtaining an education a fantasy.
Because of the demand for child laborers, a bounty was placed on children. Factory owners and managers paid municipal workers consideration for bringing homeless children to them rather than to county or city homes for abandoned children. These children were given a blanket, a meager ration of food, and a machine to tend for ten to twelve hours a day.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 spurned some sympathy for the overworked factory workers. A hundred and twenty women and children died in this fire; many because stairwell doors had been locked by the factory manager to assure that no unauthorized breaks were taken.
MOMMY AND POPPIE BROUGHT ME AND MY SISTER TO AMERICA. I brought my doll Milly. She had button eyes. We went on a ship. The ship was big and made of metal. I ran after my sister in the sun. We watched the waves. We looked for big fish. We lived inside. Mommy helped me sew. Poppie helped me read and write. There were no windows. It smelled bad.
The ship came to a big city. We walked far. We walked to a tall building. It had many rooms. Our room was up many steps. There was one privy for everyone. It smelled bad.
Poppie went to work. Mommy went to work. I stayed with my sister. She got hot and wet. For many days she did not talk. She died. Mommy cried.
I talked to Milly. Milly was my new sister. She was never sick. She was never hungry. She was happy. Poppie and Mommy were not happy. Poppie did not come home. Mommy cried. We did not eat.
Mommy was gone one night. I talked to Milly. Milly loved me. Mommy came home. Mommy had food. We ate. Then we had no food. Mommy was gone many nights. Mommy did not come home. I talked to Milly. Milly loved me.
Big men with gold buttons took me. They took me to a new Poppie. He had many children. He was nice to me. He gave me food and a blanket. He let me keep Milly.
My new Poppie took me to a building. A big building. Many machines. I put thread in machines. They never stopped. Many children were with me. We moved fast. Men yelled at us. Milly sat under my machine. I talked to Milly. Milly loved me.
My new Poppie liked me. He gave me a new job. It was at the top of the building. I cut cloth. I cut the cloth for shirts. I cut it on a big table. Milly sat under the table. I talked to Milly. Milly loved me.
One day people yelled. They yelled fire. The doors would not open. Smoke filled the room. I sat under the table with Milly. I talked to Milly. Milly loved me.
They buried Milly with me.
Milly’s Sister
Jack
From the founding of the first American Colonies in the early 1600s until the end of the Civil War, slavery was a most brittle national topic. While slavery was considered an abomination by a few of the drafters of the United States Constitution, their feelings were submerged in order to solicit the participation of Southern representatives to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.
By the 1850s the issue of slavery was at the forefront of national debates. Northern states leaned heavily toward the abolishment of slavery … for abolitionists it was a moral imperative. For Southern states slavery was an economic reality of the heaviest consequence. The commerce of the South survived and prospered on the backs of slaves. However, the plantation owners’ defense of slavery was not just based on economics, but rather a contrived argument that Southern slaves lived a more content life than Northern laborers.
“The difference is that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment, while those laborers in the North have to search for employment.”
James H. Hammond
U.S. Congressman
U.S. Senator
Governor of South Carolina
In March 1857 no less than the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that slaves were not citizens, but merely owned property.
One year after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, seven Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. Then came the Civil War. A war that took the lives of over 550,000 Americans. The equivalent loss of life in today’s America would be over five million.
This is the story of Jack, the son of a plantation owner, who joins the Confederate Army to defend the life of privilege he knows. After the defeat of the Confederacy, Jack is forced to reassess the South that he cherished.
IN THE FIRST KING CHARLES’S TIME, A WRITER ON GENTILITY ASKED, “A gentleman shoots, a gentleman hunts, a gentleman rides; for what is a gentleman but his pleasure?” And that was Clayton’s Ride before the Northern War, at least for us young gallants: we worked like the d
evil, sometimes, but we played like the devil, always.
Then came the fall to earth; broken bones, broken fortune, broken family, broken future. No charge across country, just a hobble uphill, and with the ruins of the Ride on my back. How slowly I crawled, how close my face to the dirt; how I cursed when I thought of the glory days of the family estate.
But somewhere, somehow, in all of this I remembered something I learned at Harvard that stayed most deeply with me, which was Aristotle’s observation that happiness is the proper employment of one’s capacities. There grew within me not a pride in what I was carrying, not a sense of power rooted in rage, but an almost unwilling, certainly unsought-for, and above all astonished sense that all this toil to support a rabble of old, weary freed black men—as they seemed on bad days, until I remembered that Rebecca had loved them, which made it that bit easier—that all this sweat and frustration and disappointment were the fullest discharge of my capacities in all my life, more so even than when I was with my Confederate Regiment; and, while only a philosopher could call this happiness, it had the fitness and rightness of winning the most agonizing and therefore most magnificent footrace.
Paul talks of having fought the good fight; I still think I did that, for four terrible years in Virginia. And he speaks of having kept the faith, which I did for thirty even more difficult years amidst the ruins of my youth. In the end, I only learned satisfaction—funny, that that was the word used by duelists—amidst the loss of all I had thought would satisfy me.