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A few hours earlier at the mission briefing, the 448th’s charismatic commander, thirty-seven-year-old Colonel James M. Thompson, had unveiled a huge map of Europe and thrust a pointer at three red-circled spots. Silence enveloped the crowded room as the pilots and crews waited to hear Thompson, whose neatly parted salt-and-pepper hair and trim Clark Gable mustache made him the very picture of a tough pilot and leader, speak in his no-nonsense Texan drawl. From airfields across eastern and central England, 250 B-17s and B-24s, including Harmful Lil Armful, would be escorted by hundreds of P-47 Thunderbolt and P-51 Mustang fighter planes as they unleashed a daylight strike against the Nazi airfield at La Rochelle/Laleu, southwest of the Brest Peninsula. If the clouds over the site proved too dense, the secondary target was another Nazi airstrip, at Châteaubernard.
Thompson, a nerveless pilot who had racked up fifty-five missions over Europe and had earned a reputation for never sugarcoating danger for his men, told the assembled airmen that German flak and fighter attacks all the way into and out of the target run would be intense.
Arthur knew they would soon be “in the soup” over France.
Arthur could never have envisioned that he would see France or England, let alone go to war. Still, the eldest son of David and Rose Meyerowitz had always thirsted for adventure.
Arthur was born on August 15, 1918, in the Bronx, in a tough neighborhood largely composed of Jewish, Irish, and Italian families crowded into old, yellow-brick, flat-roofed apartment buildings that clotted Findlay Avenue. At 1205 Findlay Avenue, built in 1915, the Meyerowitz family lived in a third-floor, one-bedroom apartment. David and Rose had a second child, Seymour, on August 11, 1927. When Seymour was old enough, he and Arthur shared a Murphy bed in the living room.
Forty-three-year-old David Meyerowitz had emigrated from Romania to New York as a boy and had been compelled to leave school at eighth grade to help the family survive. He went on to work as a driver and salesman in the wholesale bakery business and to marry Rose Blumenthal, a vivacious, dark-haired woman born and raised in the Bronx. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, times turned increasingly tight for the Meyerowitz family and their Findlay Avenue neighbors. David always managed to keep his family fed, housed, and clothed, but money was always short. He and Rose were constantly juggling the bills, unable to think about moving out of their apartment.
To survive on Findlay Avenue, Arthur learned how to use both his instincts and his fists. He had to because on the corners of Findlay and adjoining streets, Russian and Eastern European Jews, Irish, and Italian kids claimed patches of local asphalt as their personal turf. In Arthur’s building people watched out for each other, and when a job was lost or an illness struck families, neighbors helped out as best they could.
Raised to respect women and imbued with a strong sense of right and wrong, Arthur was never afraid to stand up to bullies. Once, when the din of a man beating his wife echoed down the third-floor hallway of the apartment complex, Arthur rushed toward the noise and started banging on the neighbors’ apartment door. The husband opened it, red-faced and sweating. In the small living room, his wife was sobbing, her clothes disheveled, bruises rising on her face.
Arthur, clenching his fists at his side, glared at the older man, who backed away a step as Arthur stood in the doorway, saying nothing, his eyes still fixed on the neighbor. Then Arthur leaned forward, jabbed a finger just under the man’s chin, and nodded in the direction of the cringing woman. Arthur turned around and waited for the door to close. He lingered in the hall, listening as the man and the woman talked in low, almost hushed tones. There were no more slaps or shouts.
Over the following days and weeks, it became apparent that the husband had gotten the message: if he threatened his wife again, his tough young neighbor would give him a dose of the same. The beatings stopped.
Arthur graduated from Robert Morris High School, built in 1897 as the first public high school in the Bronx, and the education he received in the soaring Gothic brick structure complete with turrets and spires was rated as one of the finest offered by any of the city’s public high schools. In the school’s sprawling auditorium, Arthur and the rest of the student body gathered for daily assemblies amid the hall’s ornate columns and a commemorative World War I mural that would earn the school a place on the National Historic Register. Arthur saw that masterpiece daily for four school years. The mural had been rendered by renowned French artist August Gorguet and entitled After Conflict Comes Peace. At the time, the vivid images of war-scarred France did not matter much to the teenager.
After his 1936 graduation from Morris, Arthur immediately began working; any thought of college was out of the question with the Depression still battering the nation and the family needing every dollar. He sold electrical fixtures for Jack Meyerowitz, his uncle, and doubled as a receiving and shipping clerk and supervisor of ten men for a wholesale lampshade company in Brooklyn for three and a half years. Although fortunate to have any work in the midst of the Depression, in 1939 Arthur was employed only for twenty-eight weeks, earning $400. Fortunately for the family, his father worked all fifty-two weeks and brought home $1,560, but there was never much left over after the bills were paid.
Wanting to contribute more and finding his life too sedate despite his busy social calendar, Arthur began to think about other avenues for a steadier and more exciting financial future. He had always been interested in airplanes and yearned for the chance to fly, and in late 1940, he spoke to an Army recruiter in Manhattan about the Army Air Corps. The sergeant told Arthur that a college education was not mandatory for aviation cadets so long as they had graduated from a good high school. The recruiter added that once Arthur completed basic training, he “could transfer to the Air Corps if he passed the physical and mental examinations.” 2
Filled with excitement, Arthur, who had never traveled beyond New York and New Jersey, signed a one-year enlistment paper on January 8, 1941. He was formally inducted at Fort Dix, New Jersey, and was soon on his way to basic infantry training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Once he completed basic, Arthur made two requests to his commanding officer: a pass to attend Seymour’s Bar Mitzvah in New York and the application to transfer to the Army Air Corps. The officer turned down the Bar Mitzvah pass brusquely and then set Private Meyerowitz straight regarding aviation training—Arthur had signed up for one year, and the Army did not allow such enlistees to waste its time and money in flight school. The recruiting sergeant had lied to him, and Arthur, furious but trapped, started counting the days until January 8, 1942, when his assignment would be complete. Meanwhile, he sent Seymour one month’s Army wages as a Bar Mitzvah present. He earned stellar reviews from his superiors first as a rifleman and then as a .50-caliber machine gunner.
On December 7, 1941, about a month before his enlistment was up, Arthur was stunned by the news of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s strike against Pearl Harbor. He immediately signed up for three more years, out of patriotism, out of the certainty that he would be drafted anyway, and out of hope that he could now transfer to the Air Corps. He wrote to Seymour that “my life expectancy as a machine gunner will be about thirteen seconds, so I want to fly and fight that way.” 3
Arthur, hard-nosed and keenly intelligent, possessed just the sort of nerve and leadership skills required in the cockpit. On June 8, 1942, his first step toward becoming an aviation cadet came when Lieutenant Colonel E. O. Lee, the commander of the 60th U.S. Regiment, 9th Infantry Division at Fort Bragg, rated him as an “excellent soldier” and recommended that his request for transfer to the Air Corps be accepted, with three nonfamily character references from people who had known “the candidate for no less than five years.” All three letters, from respected New York businessmen, testified that Arthur was a young man “whose character is of the finest . . . is reliable and trustworthy . . . an asset to any branch of the service
he might choose.” 4 All he could do now was wait it out and hope that he would not be shipped off to North Africa or the Pacific as an infantryman before a transfer could arrive.
On July 16, 1942, Arthur was told to report to Lieutenant Colonel Lee. His heart racing as he hurried to his superior’s office, he knew the reason. A few minutes later, Arthur stepped outside and headed to his barracks—with the news that his transfer “for an Aviation Cadet Appointment to the Air Corps [had] been officially accepted.” 5 Elated, he was no longer a “dogface” with Company H. He wanted to give his family the news immediately, but because only one neighbor had a phone, he had to call that number and ask that they tell Rose, David, and Seymour that Private Arthur Meyerowitz was now an aviation cadet, with the opportunity to earn his wings.
The opportunity came more slowly than Arthur would have liked. Before he could claim a spot as a flight cadet, he was required to complete physical training, classroom training, and hands-on runway instruction; if he came through the regimen successfully, another physical exam awaited. Cadets had to undergo a grueling work-up that washed out any number of candidates for everything from punctured eardrums to vertigo. Only then could Arthur make it all the way from the ground to the cockpit.
After a processing stint in Columbia, South Carolina, to await his initial assignment in the Army Air Force, Arthur was transferred for a few months to the Army air base in Nashville, Tennessee, and then near Biloxi, Mississippi. He performed well both in the classroom and on the ground at the Air Corps Technical School, where would-be pilots, airmen, and ground crews—“Paddlefeet”—alike were indoctrinated in aircraft technology and mechanics from nose to tail.
The most nerve-racking moment of Arthur’s training so far came in August 1942, when he underwent the dreaded physical and classroom examinations for aviation cadets, the last hurdles before flight training. Strapped to a mechanized tiltboard, he was tipped in different, dizzying angles at varying speeds to measure his capacity to endure sudden dives, climbs, rolls, and loops in a fighter plane or a bomber. With no way to tell in which direction the board would move, many recruits threw up within a minute or passed out as the board’s pitching and gyrations increased or decreased. If a cadet could not stand up within a few seconds after the tiltboard was stopped, he was dropped from (“washed out”) pilot training. The cadets who managed to wobble from the board and stay on their feet were hustled immediately to an eye chart and ordered to read each line as fast as possible so that the doctors could determine how quickly each man’s eyesight could recover from severe vertigo. If the flight candidate failed to complete the lines within one minute, he was out.
Once the vertigo and eye tests were done, Arthur was poked and prodded from head to toe as the doctors searched for anything from a slight hearing imperfection to slow reflexes, any of which would disqualify a man. He winced as a doctor inserted a long probe into his nostrils to rule out any hint of a deviated septum or sinus anomalies. Still feeling the effects of the tiltboard, Arthur and his fellow candidates had to run a mile in the sweltering Mississippi heat and have their heart rates and pulses measured.
After Arthur made it through the physical, the results of which were sent for review to an Army Air Force medical board at Wendover Airfield, Utah, he faced the Graduation Field Test. This was the final examination to measure how much flight candidates had absorbed in the classroom. Any grade less than the eightieth percentile meant dismissal from the program. Arthur scored an 82, just above the 80 he needed to continue. Now he had to wait several days for the final results of his physical.
On August 2, at Wendover, an Army medical board deemed the young man from the Bronx qualified to fly. He wrote home that he would always consider it to be “one of the best days of his life.” 6
Arthur was assigned to the flight-training base in Laredo, Texas, a dust-choked, rough-and-tumble ranching town that still evoked the Wild West. Intrigued by the sight of genuine cowboys and wranglers on horseback, the city kid and several of his fellow cadets decided to give the saddle and reins a try on a pass into town. It certainly could not be as difficult as learning to handle a plane, Arthur reasoned.
He managed to stay atop his horse during his first lesson. Then, as he was tying the reins to a hitching post, the horse snapped its head back toward him just as he was leaning forward to finish the task. With a sickening thud the horse’s snout slammed against Arthur’s left eye.
Arthur staggered for a moment and sank to his knees, his eye closing fast. The impact sent blood pouring from his nose. His friends helped him to his feet, laid him in the back of a jeep, and sped back to the base infirmary. Groggy from the impact, Arthur gazed with his good eye at the white-coated Army doctor who appeared in front of him. The physician was Japanese. With Japanese Americans rounded up in the wake of Pearl Harbor as potential threats to the nation and languishing in heavily guarded camps on the order of President Roosevelt and Congress, Arthur had reason to balk at treatment from the doctor.
Before he could say a word, the doctor said, “I may be Japanese, but I am American. Your eye needs to be operated on, and you won’t find anyone better than me for the job.” 7
Awash in pain, Arthur simply nodded. He felt sick to his stomach at the realization of what the crack of the horse’s massive snout against his face likely meant. If his eyes had not already been watering from the blow, he would have had a hard time holding back tears.
The doctor proved as good as his word, performing a retinal procedure and draining the fluid and blood pressing against the eye and the orbital socket. For an aspiring pilot, however, 20/20 vision was nonnegotiable. The lingering damage to Arthur’s eye was slight, but even that killed any cadet’s chance to take the throttle of a bomber or a fighter. Even if perfect vision eventually returned, a nation at war and in dire need of combat pilots as soon as possible could not wait for such an injury to heal.
Arthur did not want to return to the infantry, but he didn’t want to sit on the sidelines either. The attack on Pearl Harbor and the rumors of Nazi atrocities that had seeped into Jewish communities across America in the past few years filled him with an anger he could barely describe. He wanted to fight for his country, and if he could not do it in the cockpit, he had to find a way to stay in the air, to “do his bit” aboard a bomber. He did not have much time to figure something out.
On November 13, 1942, Arthur was ordered to appear in Wendover before an Army Air Force Faculty Board, which informed him that he was “physically disqualified for further flying duty because of physical disability.” 8
Arthur then requested that he be considered as an Army Air Force Officer School administrative candidate, noting his stellar record in Air Technical School and in all phases of his training up to his accident. It was a long shot because men with at least some college experience were first in line.
Impressed with “the record of Aviation Cadet Arthur Sidney Meyerowitz,” a board officer asked that if his request was “not favorably considered, is there any type of technical training you desire?” 9
Arthur was ready with his answer, one he had formulated over the weeks of his recovery. “Sir, in that case, I would like to be considered for training as an airplane flight engineer.” 10
The board members conferred and quickly reached a decision, acknowledging that Arthur’s removal from flight training was due to physical reasons, not performance. They assigned him to training as a flight engineer. Since he was already a skilled .50-caliber machine gunner and B-24 flight engineers doubled as the bomber’s top-turret gunner, he stood out as an ideal candidate.
Once Arthur fully recovered from his surgery, his second round of flight training began, but this time as an engineer. The classroom training over the following months proved as intense as the training for an aspiring pilot; Arthur spent long hours in lectures for maintenance fundamentals, hydraulic systems, engines, electrical systems, fuel systems, aircraft instruments, pr
opellers, engine operation under all sorts of duress, and aircraft inspection. He soon learned that pilots and flight engineers were required to know more about the planes they flew than bombardiers, navigators, or anyone else aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress or a B-24 Liberator.
In October 1943, with his eye healed, Arthur completed two intensive weeks of training as a top ball-turret gunner and was promoted to staff sergeant. Assigned to the 715th Squadron, 448th Bomber Group, he entered the third and last phase of his training, at Sioux City, Iowa. All that remained before he was sent overseas were several B-24 practice flights from the airfield at Herrington, Kansas, and final classroom examinations for flight engineers. Unless he performed below required standards in both the air and on the ground, he would soon be heading off to the war. The big question was whether he would be sent to the European or the Pacific theater of operation. Pilots and crewmen were told their destination only after they shipped out.
On October 30, 1943, just four days before flying out from Sioux City, Arthur sat down to compose a letter to his parents.
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As the steam radiators of the third-floor apartment hissed and clanged, Rose Meyerowitz wiped an early November-morning frost off the apartment’s front window. Findlay Avenue began to appear below with each rub of her cotton cloth against the glass. The street was packed with commercial panel trucks and a handful of cars beeping incessantly. People bundled up against the gusts that occasionally rattled the apartment’s windows bustled along the street. David had left for work at 7 a.m., and Seymour had scampered out the door for school a half hour later.
Spotting the mailman walking down the building’s front steps, Rose laid her cloth on the windowsill. She walked downstairs to the row of metal boxes on the lobby wall, inserted her key, and pulled out several letters. Among a few bills was an envelope embossed with the logo of the Hotel West, Sioux City, Iowa; she immediately recognized Arthur’s handwriting on the envelope. She rushed upstairs, settled into the worn fabric of her reading chair next to the window, and stared at the letter. Taking a deep breath, she opened it to find three pages of stationery:
The Lost Airman Page 2