War
The Gordian Knot
War does not determine who is right, only who is left.
Bertrand Russell
At the time that this account is being written, I am fully sixty years beyond my high school graduation in the late spring of 1941. Just a few months after I graduated in June of that year, the Japanese would forever imprint December 7th on our national consciousness with their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it "a date that will live in infamy" because the attack hurled the Unites States headlong into the Second World War. Until then we had been trying as best we could to stay out of the conflict. Now the Japanese had forced us into the fray.
My family didn't care for FDR very much. Long before the war years, Hampton Watch Works in Canton was torn down as part of the FDR Administration's efforts to get the country going during the Depression. My grandfather thought that was a bad idea, telling us that such old factories were works of art and should never have been razed. Granddad also told us that FDR backed the unions, and that since they were pretty much Russian sponsored, in his mind anyone associated with them was dangerous. Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice-axe in his office in Mexico City on August 20th, 1940 by one of Stalin's followers, dying the next day, and that made big news in the states. My grandfather thought that if FDR weren't in the White House, none of those sorts of sordid things would have taken place.
Still, when your country goes to war, you forget partisanship and everybody closes ranks. That is exactly what happened that day when the Japanese hit us so hard in Hawaii. It happened on a Sunday. I walked into our little neighborhood store, Bardashes, and an announcer was on the radio with the shocking news that many men had been killed at Pearl Harbor, and that our Pacific fleet had been severely crippled.
"The Japanese aircrews achieved complete surprise when they hit our American ships and military installations on Oahu shortly before 8:00 AM," the announcer said. "They attacked military airfields at the same time they hit the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor."
At that moment, I knew that everything had changed, that all my plans were going to have to be put on hold because my country was going to need me to help fight a war, a war of the just against the unjust. What young, patriotic fellow would not entertain such thoughts? Little did I know then what terrible lessons I would learn about war and its consequences over the next four years.
***
All of us young people were caught up in patriotic fervor. I don’t remember their names after all these years, but two young fellows, twins from our local church, were on the USS Arizona, and were among the approximately 1,100 men who died when the ship went to the bottom of Pearl Harbor after being hit by Japanese bombs. These kinds of events tend to grip people in a fever of anger, sadness and resolve. Right away, some of my friends began making plans for, or actually enlisting in, one branch or another of the military.
Waiting to get drafted seemed like a mistake to me, since then I would have no choice about which branch of the service in which I would serve. My dream was to become a pilot, so in the summer of 1942 I enlisted in the Army Air Force. This was before the days of a separate branch of the service known as the Air Force, and if you wanted to fly you had to do so as a member of the USAAF. A couple of my friends, Lowell Dean and Earl Clark, had already enlisted in the Army Air Force. That was further incentive for me to select that branch. Being two years older than the rest of us who hung out together, Lowell signed up first. He had worked at Republic Steel in Canton, and when he enlisted, he headed off to cadet school to become a pilot. He was the guy we all dreamed of becoming when we got a little older, and we all thought that somehow we might be rejoined overseas.
Signing up for military service on my own also allowed me to take advantage of a delayed enlistment program, so I could squeeze in a little bit of college before having to go off to war. I was able to attend school from September through the beginning of winter break in December at Kenyon College, a private liberal arts school in central Ohio. The college president at the time, Floyd Chambers, was a close friend of Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the US Army Air Force, so my association with that branch of the service was a plus while I studied at Kenyon. To make ends meet as a student, I waited tables in Pearce Hall and did all sorts of other odd jobs to help pay for my education. Kenyon was a fine Episcopalian school of three hundred boys in those days, and would eventually become the alma mater of such luminaries Paul Newman Jonathan Winters.
It was while waiting for the train that would take me to basic training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi in January 1943, that I had my first taste of alcohol. This may be unimaginable to the young people of today, but my background as a member of the Church of God kept me a teetotaler until I was fully 19 years of age. Along with all my fellow recruits, I was awaiting my train to depart, and out of a combination of boredom and curiosity, I drank a fair quantity of wine. I don't think I have ever been as sick as I was on that long train journey to Biloxi, Mississippi, riding in a glorified cattle wagon deep into Dixie. It would seem to make sense that such an experience would deter me from imbibing ever again, but unfortunately I drank again on more than one occasion during my time in the military, until a death in the family brought me to my senses. But that part of my story comes a bit later.
Upon arrival at Kessler Air Field, we stumbled off the train in a daze, with the drill instructors hollering a barrage of directions and commands. When we arrived at our barracks, I remember suffering through a few rounds of good natured harassment from some of the local boys, who claimed they were less than thrilled at sharing a living space with a bunch of "damn Yankees". From that moment on, for the next month-and-a-half, life was a blur of early morning exercise routines, long marches with heavy packs, bad meals, rifle range practice, and the ever popular obstacle course. I had never climbed a wall before then -- who had, I suppose -- so one of my buddies showed me how to do it. I used to wonder how many walls I would be required to climb as a pilot, but I kept my skepticism to myself. We were all 18, 19 years old, and able to take on the physical challenges quite readily, even if we did complain a lot.
Basic training lasted for about six weeks. It's a longer regimen in today's military, but they were anxious to get us trained and into action then, so they accelerated the training process. In mid-February, I left leaner and meaner, a private in the United States Army Air Force. My goal still was to follow in Lowell Dean's footsteps as a cadet, which would have advanced me to the officer's ranks. God had other plans for me, however, and I soon discovered that my eyesight was not the perfect 20/20 vision required for cadet school, despite my attempt to improve my condition by consuming vast quantities of carrot juice. By mid-March, I was back in Kenyon College, with my father pressing me hard to pursue a career in meteorology.
"It would be an interesting career," he told me, "and it'll most likely keep you safe and out of combat."
The entire arrangement was less than satisfactory as far as I was concerned. I didn't want to avoid combat, and I wasn't that interested in the difference between cumulus and cirrus clouds. If I wasn't going to make it as a pilot, I was ready to settle for the next best thing. I told my father, much to his displeasure, that I was going to sign up for radio school. This would assure me a spot in one of the Flying Fortresses built by Boeing, which were pounding the Germans day after day, slowly destroying their ability to make war. I might not get to pilot one of the great planes, but I'd be a member of one of the crews that were already legendary for their dangerous heroics over the skies of Europe.
Radio school proved difficult to get into as well, and my first stop was gunnery school in Yuma, Arizona in the summer of 1943. Here we were immersed mostly in the workings of the 50-caliber machine gun, the basic weapon of defense on board the various B-17 Flying Fortresses. And immersion is certainly what we underwent. During the six week training course, we disassembled and reassembled that weapon countless times, until I could literally do it blindfolded. The 50-caliber is a very accurate and powerful weapon. The rounds they fire are quite large, able to penetrate the metal of the various fighter planes, especially the Messerschmitts, which the German Luftwaffe sent up to meet our constant sorties of bombers.
Of course, it wouldn't have done us much good to know only how to take apart and put back together these weapons, so we spent an equally large amount of time firing them, often at drone targets that were dragged far behind an aircraft so that even the best shot among us would have a difficult time hitting the plane that was pulling the target along. Each trainee was issued a series of bullets painted a particular color in order to measure our individual accuracy on the targets. Our weapons were situated in the center of the plane, an area generally referred to as the waist, and we alternated firing first out of one side of the aircraft, then the other. We also had a go at the tail gunner position, which was explained to us as being both a vulnerable place to be -- I'm not sure that there was really a not-vulnerable place to be aboard a B-17 -- as well as a place where the gunner had the best chance of hitting his target. That was because the fighters liked to come in from the rear, a tactic the Luftwaffe didn't begin to perfect until the waning days of the war.
Other training activities gave the place a sort of amusement park atmosphere. We shot sheet so that we could learn about the physics of leading a target that was in motion while we were also moving. This involved driving around a two-mile track sitting in the back of a moving truck while targets were propelled through the air for us to shoot at. In the abstract, this may sound like it's not too difficult. In practical terms, it was extraordinarily difficult, and a gunner was usually awarded a Silver Star if he actually managed to shoot down an enemy plane in the midst of all the noise and confusion of a bombing run. As a waist gunner, fighters were flying by you at such rapid speeds that it was difficult to get a bead on them before they had come and gone.
We also practiced our night vision, so that shooting at things became a constant activity, both day and night. None of us had any sense of the real horrors of shooting at, and being shot back at, by flesh and blood human beings like ourselves, men performing what they thought was their patriotic duty, while trying to stay alive to return to their families. There would be no amusement park atmosphere to that reality when the time came.
My orders finally came through for radio school, and within a month after graduating from gunnery school, I was on my way to Scott Field in East St. Louis for a course in radio operations that lasted about ten weeks. As with the weapons I had become so accustomed to, here we were required to take apart and rebuild the crystal radio sets found aboard the B-17s we would be flying in, and to do so again and again and yet again.
***
As briefly mentioned earlier, I drank alcohol with much too much abandon during my days in the Army Air Force. Perhaps I was trying to make up for lost time; more probably I was just trying to be "one of the boys". We all knew that once we got overseas, there should be none of that. We knew we would be leaving on missions every morning at 1:00 or 2:00 AM, and you can't have the mental and emotional acuity that aerial combat requires, regardless what time of day or night it takes place, if you're nursing a hangover. We were expected to discontinue our indulgences once we were assigned to our units in Europe. Some of us followed that road, others did not. I don't want to put myself in the position of judging my fellows, but from what I observed, those of us who decided to stop once we got assigned as a crew member made the better choice. Having the chance to see five or six men in a room, everybody passed out, with one or two guys sleeping in the bathtub, was enough to convince me that I wanted no part of that kind of partying. Everything seemed upside down and inside out on such occasions, and I preferred going to a USO (United Service Organizations) Club to possibly meet some nice girl or a group of people that I could soberly socialize with. I remember listening to some of my fellow servicemen trying to piece together the details of their drunken conquests. Usually, they had been so much under the influence of alcohol that they couldn't recall what they had been drinking -- scotch, bourbon, who knew, what did it matter? They would simply drink until they vomited, then start drinking again. Equally, they had no idea what the girl they were with looked like, much less what they did or did not do while with her. Where is the romance in this? There is none. Certainly I subscribe to the idea of living today to the fullest, but not at the expense of tomorrow. Of course, there was a great deal of emptiness being in the service separated from one's family and other loved ones. There was also the fear of what was to come in combat. I suppose that's why so many threw themselves into drinking with such gusto.
Unfortunately, I resumed the habit of drinking again after my harrowing experiences in combat were at an end. One morning not too long before I was slated for discharge in Lincoln, Nebraska, some of my friends had a hard time waking me because of my previous night's imbibing. They were trying to get me up to tell me that my grandfather Williamson had died. This news was so unnerving that I didn't drink another drop of alcohol for eleven years after that day, October 10, 1945. While my drinking, of course, had nothing to do with my grandfather's death, I felt somehow unavailable to him because I had been intoxicated the night of his death. He had always been there for me, and the drinking episode left me with a tremendous sense of guilt.
If there is a purpose to all things, this event served to clarify the minor role that alcohol would play in the rest of my life. While I allow myself an occasional drink before dinner, or some wine with my evening meal, I never would allow myself again to become so intoxicated that I could not be available to family or friends who might need me for one reason or another. If a child or grandchild needed my help, but I was too inebriated to lend assistance, what would this say about my character as a man? Not much. In terms of my life as a Christian, I feel I must always be available to my loved ones, and cocktails cannot be allowed to get in the way of that duty. My sense is that we are all charged with maintaining the God given gift of our health so that we can be ready to assist others when the need arises. We are created to have a full life and that means maintaining some sense of holiness at the center of ourselves. Alcohol takes away the chance to experience that center, the well spring from which all real happiness flows.
Happiness is not a goal in itself. If I approach my day with the goal of making myself happy, well, lots of luck. On the other hand, if I am determined to go out today and perform what I know are right actions, happiness comes along all on its own. My experience is that when alcohol starts putting an edge on me that tells me I'm feeling good, I'd better stop, because it's a false euphoria that very soon will lead to feeling very bad, or to being AWOL from life, if I'm not careful.
***
When I finished radio school, I went into what was called "transition", a time in which nine men are brought together to begin their flight training and to learn how to work as a team, the crew of a B-17. After completing gunnery school, I had been promoted to sergeant, which is three strips up. As I joined my crew, I was promoted to staff sergeant, or E6, which was three stripes up and one down. When we got into combat, I would receive my final promotion to E7, three stripes up and two stripes down, or technical sergeant.
Bigg's Field in El Paso, Texas, was one of several state-side staging areas where crews were assembled and trained. It was there that I first met the group of men with whom I was to share a difficult destiny, one which would prove fatal for some, and life changing for the rest of us. The names and faces of these men, all really no more than kids at the time, will remain with me forever. Sam Rodgers, from Parkersburg, West Virginia, was our pilot; the co-pilot's chair was occupied by Al Hoylt from Atlanta, Georgia; Warren Williams, our navigator, was from Rochester, New York; Charlie Loft, the engineer, was from St. Louis, Missouri; Ralph Lashell, the bombardier, was from Newport, Kentucky; Abe Asoul, was from Oakland, California; George Berbridge, the tail gunner, was from Columbia, Missouri; and I, of course, was the radio man and sometime operator of a 50-caliber machine gun near the waist of the plane.
In many respects, we trained ourselves, because every crew member had received extensive training in his particular job before arriving in El Paso, so the real purpose of this stage of our preparation was to get us to operate smoothly as a team. That was not an easy task. Everyone in the crew came from a more or less ordinary, middle class background, but we each had very distinctive personalities. Warren Williams, the navigator, was a pretty classy guy whom I kept in touch with for many years after the war, probably because I related to him more than I did to anybody else in the crew. Sam and several of the other crew members would go out and really tear up the town when we were off duty. Sam's mother had died when he was really young like myself, but he was an excellent pilot, despite the fact that he enjoyed sowing some wild oats. Charlie Loft and I never got along, and would sometimes engage each other in fist fights in the back of the plane while we were airborne. For the life of me, I cannot recall today exactly what all the antipathy was about, but we certainly did have a volatile relationship. I do remember that Charlie thought very well of himself, thinking he had some kind of special status amongst the crew because he had a strong relationship with Sam. I suppose that rubbed me the wrong way. At age 23, Charlie was the old man in our crew. I had recently turned 20. Of course, we had to count on each other whether we liked it or not. Fortunately, our mutual dislike for one another never got in the way of our performing our duties.
It was in El Paso, over a six month training period, that we got our first chance to learn all about a B-17. The plane we flew in there wasn't the actual machine we would fly when we reached Europe, but was rather a training aircraft. Planes were transported from the states by ship. Nobody flew over. I suppose they didn't want to take the chance of losing an expensive airplane and crew on an oceanic crossing by air.
As this part of our training got underway, I was anxious, like the rest of the crew, to get into the fight. By the time training was winding down, I had a chance to think more clearly and wonder just what it was I had gotten myself into. I was soon to find out. The first indication of what was to come materialized when I received word that Lowell Dean had been shot down January 19th 1944. That certainly was sobering. Lowell was initially in Tunis, Tunisia flying with the 15th Air Force and then was transferred to Naples. He was shot down and killed over Italy just before the invasion of a fifteen-mile stretch of Italian beach near the prewar resort towns of Anzio and Nettuno. We didn't know about his death at that time because there was no way to confirm whether he was missing or killed in action. But he never returned.
***
After our training in El Paso, we were shipped overseas, with some of the crews flying over and others, like ours, slated to travel by ship. To this day I have no idea why they transported some of us by air and some by water, but I do know that I wish I had been assigned to airborne transport. My orders sent me out of New York on a large British ship, the name of which I have mercifully forgotten. What I cannot forget is the painful passage that took eight days which seemed more like eight weeks. To maximize space, most of the people on board were we air force crew members on our way to combat, while the others on board were members of the boat's crew. With this method, bunks were always in use. We rotated, getting a bed for eight hours, then spending sixteen hours on the deck. It was a very uncomfortable way to travel. And while the British are wonderful people, and of course were our allies, they have some simply awful ideas about food. We were served a lot of mutton, a meat that puts out a foul odor and doesn't taste much better than it smells. Few of us kept a meal down during the entire passage.
When we finally mercifully docked at Edinburgh, Scotland, I think we had each lost about ten pounds. There was no time to feel sorry for ourselves because, before we knew it, we were on a train bound for a receiving station called Stone. As anyone who has served in the military will tell you, there is an old axiom that in four words summarizes much of the service experience -- "hurry up and wait". So it was for us as we waited for our orders. Time seemed to drag on and on, and I have no accurate recollection of just how long we were there with nothing to do but wait and wonder what combat would be like.
By this time, October 1944, the Germans were under a great deal of pressure from constant Allied bombing raids. We had advanced our air strikes over all of Germany. Our bombers were systematically destroying everything that the Germans could use to continue their war effort; trains and train depots, oil refineries, air strips, ammunition depots, and boat docks. But the bombing didn't stop there. There was, no doubt, a military oriented target wherever a bomb site was chosen, but a great deal else was being destroyed along with military targets. Entire cities were leveled, either by bombs or the fire storms they caused, or a combination of the two. The carpet bombing of Dresden, for example, with incendiaries that created a fire storm that asphyxiated or incinerated 130,000 people, is one of the more infamous examples of the consequences of our intense air campaign against Germany during the last days of the war.
Finally our orders came, and our crew was assigned to the 94th Bomb Group, part of the 8th Army Air Force's Fourth Wing. We were attached to the 332nd squadron of that Wing, under the command of Colonel Sidney Carter, and we were given our plane which would fly on missions over Germany. We promptly gave her a name -- Piccadilly Lilly. Now it seemed that events began to unfold at a quicker pace. We were briefed by our commander, who gave us an overview of the missions we would be flying and how the rotations would work. One thing that was not mentioned, during the briefing or at any other time, was how many flights were being lost from anti-aircraft flak and fighter attacks. The attrition rate was extremely high, but what was the point of talking about something so terrifying that no one had any control over? We learned that aerial gunners were in short supply, and that volunteers were being accepted from any branch of the service. Again, the reason was obvious without necessarily having to talk about it; aerial gunners were being killed or wounded in large numbers, and men were needed to replace them.
There was some effort made to compensate for the dangers we faced every time we took to the air. While on the ground, we were served meals in what was known as "combat mess". That meant that we ate off real china, and that our tables were waited on by a couple of enlisted men who tried hard to cater to our needs every time we ate a meal. Combat mess was a nice gesture, but the reality of imminent death was immediately at hand as soon as we left all the niceties behind on the ground.
Our living quarters were comfortable but modest. We lived in Quonset huts, each one containing a small stove for heat. The fuel we burned in them, the wooden paste boards used to ship bombs to us, was a constant reminder of why we were there. We were grateful for the wood, though, of which there was always a steady supply. Uncounted thousands of bombs were dropped every day, so there was always plenty of crating to burn. It was quite cold when we awoke in the middle of the night to fly off to a mission, and the first thing we did upon awakening was to stoke up those little stoves. We slept in an open barracks arrangement, so privacy was a luxury none of us would enjoy until and if we got back to the states alive.
Separate Quonset huts contained our showers and toilets, with others set aside to round out our little community's needs, one as a make shift chapel, another as an operations center. Large hangers served as between mission storage and maintenance locations for our planes, and a few parties were held in these big structures as well. Each plane had a crew chief, responsible for a team of mechanics who kept the nuts and bolts tight and, most importantly, the four engines in top operating condition. The airfield near the hangers was laid out in the middle of a farm. The idea was to make the place indistinguishable from ordinary farming country, so that from the air all that would be in evidence was a crop of wheat or rye or whatever it was the local farmers were planting that season. The real harvest from these particular fields was a daily diet of explosive power that my crew and I were about to join in serving to the Germans.
***
The only people I know of who get up at one or two o'clock in the morning are farmers, monks, and B-17 bomber crews. I'm not sure that even farmers get up quite that early. Monks rise in their monasteries to pray; we rolled out of bed to drop thousands of tons of explosive devices on our fellow human beings. Some days we might get to sleep in as late as 3:00 AM, but any way you slice it, we were getting up in the middle of the night to go to work killing people. The British bombers, part of the RAF, the Royal Air Force, returned from their missions at dawn, right around the time that we Yanks were taking off for the daylight bombing runs. How it worked out this way, I don't know, although it was understood by all involved that we were participating in the more dangerous of the missions, in that it was a lot easier for the Germans to see and shoot us down in daylight hours.
Most of us headed for the mess hall for some mud thick coffee and a hearty breakfast after we were awakened. The engineer and the gunners, including those who manned the waist, tail, ball and turret guns, had to report to the plane first to put the 50-calibers into place.
After breakfast, a select few of us were briefed on the day's mission. The radio operator, which in our crew was me, was the only enlisted man that went with the pilot, co pilot, navigator, and bombardier to the operations hut for the briefing, which included getting a primary and secondary target assignment and, in my case, the radio codes for the day. The secondary targets, by the way, were given to us as alternatives in case weather or other factors made it impossible for us to go after the main target. At about 4:00 AM, or as they say in military time, 0400, trucks took us out to the airfield where we boarded our aircraft. Now began another of those "hurry up and wait" periods, as we sat in our places inside the plane, waiting for everyone to get assembled so that we could take off in formation. There are film and still photographic records, as well as artist's renderings of these formations, but I submit that none of these do justice to the enormity of those enterprises as I remember them.
All four engines of our aircraft were roaring as we waited for all the other planes to get ready. The plane's brakes were locked, so the entire machine rocked from side to side as the power of the engines dispersed through the frame of the aircraft, making it feel as though it would tear apart while we were standing in place. When the command came over the radio telling us it was time to go, the pilot slowly released the brakes, and we began to roll down the runway, following the marker beacons positioned along the tarmac to direct us toward our takeoff position. As we were waved off by a signalman on the ground, we gathered speed, until finally achieving lift, we rose into a cold English morning sky, usually just as the sun was making the eastern horizon pink with the first glow of sunrise. It was just as likely, however, that the end of the runway wasn't visible, due to the foggy conditions often associated with a northern British Isles winter morning.
Anyone who has flown on one of today's behemoth commercial jetliners has undoubtedly marveled at the seeming magic of aerodynamics. It defies appearances that such enormous, heavy machinery can ever become airborne. So it always seemed to me with our Flying Fortresses. We were loaded with thousands of pounds of bombs. We might be carrying six one-thousand pound bombs for a given mission, sixty one-hundred pound bombs, or some variation thereof. There was a logic behind how each device was used, whether it was intended to penetrate and destroy large buildings, such as an oil refinery, or simple meant to destroy a railroad track and the cars that rode on it.
If visibility was good, an observer would have noted the RAF bombers returning from their night sorties, while as many as five hundred to one thousand of our American bombers were getting airborne. We rose slowly in a spiral until we reached ten-thousand feet altitude. This took about an hour, and there was nothing to do but huddle in your flight suit trying to stay warm. Radio silence was imperative, so there was no chatter between planes or between the planes and the ground operations.
Mine was the best seat in the house, so to speak, right behind the bomb bay. There was a cat walk that passed over the bomb bay which allowed access to the front of the aircraft where the pilot, co-pilot and engineer were located. There was a small tunnel that led to the navigator and bombardier, also in forward the area of the plane. I thought of my spot as best because it had the most room to move around in and because there was a window permitting me to take in whatever was going on around the plane. I learned quickly that this wasn't always desirable, particularly when flak was exploding all around use.
Because of the continued need for radio silence throughout the mission, there wasn't much for me to do. At one time, there was a 50-caliber machine gun in a turret above the section of the plane where I sat, used when the aircraft was under attack by fighters. By the time I arrived on the scene, this gun had been removed because there was a tendency of the gunner to shoot off the tail of the plane which would have been directly in the gunner's sights when he swiveled the turret to face fighters coming in from the rear. Who knows how many B-17's lost their stabilizers in this manner, finding themselves spinning toward the ground out of control? There was still a 50-caliber machine gun that fired from the left waist area of the plane, and it was this weapon that I manned when the occasions presented themselves, which was every time we went on a mission.
Once every plane reached ten-thousand feet, we created our formations and headed off to the primary targets for the day's mission while slowly increasing our altitude. It was at this point in the flight that the phenomenon of "prop wash" became a factor. Flying in formation meant, of course, that planes were wing to wing and nose to tail. With several B-17's flying just in front of you, the air turbulence created by the propellers of their four great engines was substantial, and it shook the plane's behind it something terrible. I thought for certain we were going to find ourselves rocked right out of the sky that very first morning. Instead, it was just another opportunity to let go of the morning's breakfast.
The very first mission of the Piccadilly Lilly took us over Nuremberg in central Germany, a city destined to become the site of one of the world's most well known war crimes trials. I don't recall the size of the ordinance we carried that day or the nature of the target. Weather conditions were always problematical, the single biggest factor that determined the success or failure of a mission. We flew over our targets between twenty-three and twenty-five thousand feet in altitude, and because radar had not been perfected yet, the bombardier had to rely on a simple Norton siting device, sort of akin to looking into the crosshairs or a siting scope on a rifle. I will never forget how cold it was at those altitudes. We had sheep skin lined flight jackets, but the cold just cut right to the bone. We wore oxygen masks, since breathable air is a bit thin between four and five miles up.
Normally it took about six hours to arrive at our targets, so the Germans became accustomed to being hit most days around noon. As I looked out the side of the plane, I could see hundreds of B-17's stretching off as far as the eye could see. At this late stage of the war, every bombing run was a maximum effort aimed at pummeling the Germans into surrender, sooner rather than later. While our ground forces pushed towards Berlin, and the Russians rushed in from the east, we in the air were reducing the rest of the nation to rubble. In some cities, such as Cologne, nothing was left standing except part of the cathedral.
As we approached the European mainland, our fighter planes joined us for a portion of the run. It was their job to see to it that the enemy fighters didn't stop us from reaching our targets, so I had many chances to watch "dog fights" all around us. These fighter pilots were valiant, fearless men, and I will always be grateful to them for fending off the Luftwaffe planes that would surely have taken many more of us out of action had not our boys been there to protect us. Their fuel capacity was limited, so they were only able to accompany us part of the way before being forced to turn back to their bases. By the time we began getting nearer to our targets, always somewhere deep in Germany, we were on our own.
If weather was the primary variable to a successful mission, fighter planes and antiaircraft fire ran a close second. Once our fighters turned back, we had to fend off the German Messerschmitts ourselves, and they got better and better about picking us off by approaching us from the rear. If we made it through this gauntlet, the next big hurdle was the antiaircraft batteries on the ground.
One of the theories that governed our operations was that there was safety in numbers, that we had a better chance of making it through the critical moments of mission if we could drop our bombs and then get back again into a tight formation, flying almost wing tip to wing tip. As a consequence, we made the run at our targets in a box like pattern, making a couple of sharp right turns until we were ready to make a pass over the target. The further back in the formation we were, the greater was the chance that our plane would take a direct, perhaps fatal, hit of flak. That's because the antiaircraft gunners on the ground would shoot in a square grid, filling in an imaginary box with fire, slowly perfecting their aim. By the time the last planes flew through this unseen box, the boys on the ground had gotten very good at filling it in with live rounds. They could see the explosions of their previous shots, and slowly zeroed in on us while we tried to maintain approach discipline over the target.
To look out the window and start thinking about getting hit was to invite pure terror. The sky was pocked with explosions of flak, and it just seemed miraculous that a plane could fly through the stuff without getting knocked out of the sky. It was my job to confirm to the captain that our load of bombs had been successfully released over the target. On that first mission over Nuremberg, for some reason I couldn't raise Sam on the intercom, so I decided to move back to a headset in the waist area of the ship and call the captain from there. Without thinking, I made my move without an oxygen mask, and the next thing I knew, I was falling face forward into the ball turret. I woke up several minutes later by the waist gun where one of my crew members had dragged me. No sooner had I come around than I noticed that we were being jolted by flak that was exploding all around us. When we returned to the airfield that day, I had my first opportunity to walk around the aircraft and put my fingers in the countless holes that the flak made in the body of the plane. Each evening, there were more holes from that day's run.
***
The crew of the Piccadilly Lil flew twenty-two missions, only one of them with any sort of major incident. It has been too many years ago to recall which exact mission it was, but I believe it was somewhere around the eighteenth or nineteenth time we had taken to the sky when we ran into trouble over Bremen, Germany. We lost one of our four engines and Sam couldn't stop the prop from windmilling, the motion of a propeller on an engine that's not running caused by the rush of oncoming air. When a prop windmills, the plane loses a lot of speed, forcing the pilot to drop the craft to tree top level in order to avoid becoming a sitting duck for any fighter planes in the area. With their newly perfected tactic of coming in at our bombers from the rear, blasting away with their 20-millimeter canons, we were especially vulnerable to these fighters as we flew at a greatly reduced speed. Even under optimal conditions, the guys would get rattled when the German's used this tactic, particularly the tail gunners and the ball turret gunners. There were so many fighters coming at you, who do you pick to stop before they can get you?
While admittedly better than being picked off by one of these fighters, watching the German countryside pass below us as we whizzed along no more than two-hundred feet above the ground was a heart pounding experience. That time, we were lucky, making it back, as the expression goes, on a wing and a prayer. More likely, a whole bunch of prayers. It took us hours longer than usual to make the return flight, every bit of it just barely off the ground and, during the crossing of the English Channel, close enough to the water, or so it seemed, to churn up foam. Our fuel ran extremely low, so this was another headache throughout the entire ordeal of the return home. The engine's turbochargers only operated at higher altitudes, and we used up much more fuel than usual, an irony considering that we were running on three engines at a vastly reduced speed. As daylight faded into darkness, I tried to raise our base on the radio so they could light up the field for us, but I had no luck doing so.
As we approached the field, Sam had to make an educated guess about the landing because he had no lights to tell him exactly where the landing strip was. We made an initial pass over the field, and as I looked out the window, I looked up into the control tower. We were indeed close to the ground. Only God and Sam know how we avoided crashing, but somehow Sam -- and God -- brought us in safely.
***
On mission number twenty-three, over a small town called Hoff, about halfway between Munich and Berlin, we weren't so lucky. This was the last time Piccadilly Lil would ever take to the skies. We had been told during the briefing that morning that this one should be a cake walk, an easy mission. Our target was the marshalling yards, or rail yards, in Hoff and resistance would be minimal. But the Germans must have been ready for us because it seemed as though they knew we were coming. Our plane was, on that day, April 8, 1945, in what was called the deputy lead position in the formation, which meant simply that we were the third plane in our particular formation to pass over the target. That put us in one of the more unenviable spots in the invisible box, a place where the antiaircraft boys on the ground could hone in on us by using the planes that went before us as reference points.
Almost the instant after we let loose our load of bombs on the target, Ralph Lashell, the bombardier, could see a explosions of smoke coming toward us, and called out over the intercom.
"Flak at twelve o'clock!" he yelled.
That meant the fire was straight in front of us, and all the gunner on the ground had to do was stay on that same line and he would hit us for certain. And hit us he certainly did. There was a tremendous jolt, and when I looked through the window, I could see that one of the engines on the starboard side of the plane was on fire. Without warning, a piece of flak exploded inside the plane very near to me, and I was instantly blinded in my left eye. The next few moments were filled with noise, smoke, and confusion. I remember praying that, just as with our previous mission, Sam could maneuver the aircraft to a lower altitude, and we could limp home. This time, however, the Piccadilly Lil was mortally wounded, and we began to fall like a stone. There are a critical few minutes after one of these large aircraft begins to fall out of the sky before the plane goes into a spin that makes it impossible for anyone to abandon ship.
Somehow, in the midst of all the chaos, I managed to locate and don my parachute. We didn't wear them during the ordinary course of a flight; they were too cumbersome. Perhaps even more interesting, none of us had ever received any training in how to jump out of an airplane. I guess unlike parachute troops whose job it was to jump out of airplanes, because our job was to stay in the plane, they didn't want us thinking too much about what it might be like to leap from our craft while it was crippled and rapidly descending from 25,000 feet. And so, my first time parachuting out of a plane would be from a craft that was on fire and nosing toward the ground while I was blinded in one eye.
Everything was in turmoil, but I suppose these are the circumstances that test the true mettle of a man. We were very fortunate to have Sam Rodgers at the helm that day, because he stayed with the plane long enough to keep it steady enough for most of the rest of us to get out. His heroism would cost him his life. An alarm buzzer had been steadily sounding from the moment we were hit, and I remember Sam hollering over the intercom.
"Abandon ship, abandon ship!"
I immediately kicked out the escape door near the waist of the aircraft. George and Eddie were nearby, prepared to jump, so I yelled to Sam over the intercom that we were bailing out. First, I took one good, hard look out the open door, and was stunned at how far away the ground looked. It was going to be a long way down.
I was the first one out the door, followed by Eddie then George. Al, Charlie, Ralph, and Warren all jumped out the front hatch. A total of seven of us made it out of the plane that day that I know of. The pilot, Sam Rodgers and the ball turret gunner, Kurt, were the only ones left on the plane as best I know. Of course, I will never know with absolute certitude. Sam was probably trapped when the Piccadilly Lil went into a spin. Kurt may have been injured or killed by the flak before he had a chance to escape.
***
All the noise and commotion of a moment ago was suddenly replaced by silence. I noted with an almost casual interest as I began to tumble end over end that there were a few cumulus clouds, little white puffy billows, hanging in the air. Naturally, I was frightened, but a strange calm came over me. The little bit of instruction we had been given to deal with these circumstances advised us to count off ten full seconds before pulling the parachute's rip cord. This is because, when the chute pops open, it lurches back up into the air, and it could catch on the tail assembly of the plane. My guess is that this data was gathered the hard way during earlier missions.
My silent counting seemed to go on forever. One thousand one; one thousand two; one thousand three. All the time, somersaulting, so that the sky and the ground kept alternating in front of my one functioning eye. At last it was time to pull the rip cord, and with a tremendous thump that I thought might dislocate both shoulders, my chute exploded open. Then I found myself swaying from side to side, occasionally looking down to see how fast the ground was coming up on me. A great many things went through my mind, but one thought predominated all others. I kept wondering if my dad was awake yet back in the States, where it was at least six hours earlier there. He usually rose at around 6:00 AM, so I thought it entirely possible that he was just getting out of bed. This idea comforted me because I knew that the first thing my dad did in the morning was to drop down onto his knees to pray. If he was praying at that moment, he was probably praying for me. And at that moment, I certainly needed every prayer I could get.
***
Peering over my shoulder, I watched with sadness and horror as the Piccadilly Lil spiraled into the ground and disintegrated with a tremendous impact. Now I began to pray that the good Lord would help us, sparing those of us that made it out of the plane. I usually keep my cool pretty well, so I wasn't a basket case, but I was very much on the alert. I was thinking of what I had been trained to do under these circumstances. All of a sudden, the reality of all we had been through during our various training sessions came home to me. As young men in our late teens, few of us ever really thought we would have to put that training to use, but here we were, about to be captured by the enemy, maybe injured or interrogated and who knew what else.
Reality was rushing through my mind as rapidly as the ground was rising toward me feet. Another sobering actuality was the sound of small arms fire. Someone was firing rifles and pistols, and it seemed logical to me that there were Germans on the ground trying to kill those of us descending by parachute from airplanes that had just bombed their town. Ours was only one of several B-17's to get shot down that day, as indeed the Germans were anticipating our arrival, I'm not certain how. They had their own forms of intelligence, of course, and on this day it apparently had paid off for them.
Since I couldn't see evidence of anyone shooting at me, I figured that perhaps some or our forward crew members, the men who had escaped from the door nearest the nose of the plane, were taking the small arms fire. Maybe they had jumped sooner than George, Eddie and me, and they were already on the ground. As I swayed roughly from side to side, I wondered what the impact would be like when I hit the ground. It promised to provide a dreadful jarring, and in the next moment, I was proved correct. When my feet impacted the earth, I thought my hips were going to jam up through my shoulders. The instinct to survive must have provided my body with what it needed to quickly shake off the effects of the landing, because in the next moment I was curling up my parachute so I could hide it as best I could, despite the fact that I had come down in an open field.
Eddie and George had landed not far from me, and I noticed that perhaps one hundred yards or so beyond us was a small stand of woods. Without stopping to say a word to one another, Eddie, George and I broke into a ran for the trees, hoping they might provide cover. When we reached the woods, I was astonished at how different they were from any stand of tress I had ever seen before. There was simply no foliage of any kind on the ground. It was as if some great hungry beast had devoured everything except the trees themselves. This wasn't far from the truth. Apparently, Europeans have been in search of firewood for so many generations, that many of their forests are like this, devoid of combustible materials that have long ago gone up in smoke. It was a strange sensation, to stand surrounded by pine trees that grew out of a forest carpet which had the appearance of a well-swept floor in a building.
Beyond the small forest, we could see rolling hills. The countryside was truly beautiful, but topographical aesthetics was the last thing on our minds at this moment. George, who had managed to get himself demoted to private after countless drinking bouts and fist fights between missions, was beside himself with fear. His one concern was how we were going to get out of there before we were captured. He had lost his sidearm, a .45-caliber pistol, and hadn't taken the time to bury his parachute before bolting for cover. Standing with Eddie and me in the little patch of woods, he was hysterical, especially when we heard the unmistakable sounds of an angry mob approaching us. All of our imaginations began to wrap themselves around the possibilities of what a group of out of control people would do to the men responsible for bombing and burning them out of house and home. Our target, in fact, was right in the middle of Hoff, and that is where this bunch of worked up people was coming from, all yelling and screaming things in German, the meanings of which we could surmise well enough.
Eddie always carried two pistols, his Army issued .45 and a smaller .32-caliber pistol he carried around in his boot. The .32 is a bit of a pea shooter and not much good for combat, but Eddie handed it to George just to shut him up, which didn't seem to work very well. I tried to calm George down as we all rummaged through our packs, looking for anything that might assist us in an escape. George became increasingly emotional. I'd heard about what people acted like when having a nervous breakdown, and George's actions seemed to fit the definition.
"What are we going to do, huh? What the hell are we going to do?" he kept asking over and over again.
"Let's just stop for a minute here and collect ourselves," I suggested.
I suggested further that we bow our heads and say a prayer that the good Lord would get us out of this. My prayer was sincere, but I also hoped that this might settle George down a bit.
"We're going to be captured," I said. "That's pretty obvious. The trick is to not let that mob get their hands on us."
There was little doubt they would have torn us apart. We had been warned many times in our briefings that if we were shot down, we should do all in our power to surrender to anybody in a uniform, and in World War II Germany, there were plenty of those folks around. I just hoped one would find us before the villagers did.
I offered that we crouch down in the corner of the woods so we could see exactly who was coming, keeping a sharp eye out for any German army or Luftwaffe personnel. We lay on our bellies, looking all around us, pistols in hand. I could hear George continuing to babble incoherently next to me. Suddenly, he erupted, screaming at the top of his lungs.
"Here's a guy coming after us!" he yelled. "Let's shoot him. Let's shoot him!"
Well, first of all, we were too far away to shoot anybody. You can take a .45-caliber pistol and, unless you're a couple of feet away from what you want to hit, you're likely to miss it. George, of course, had a little .32, which isn’t accurate or big enough to do much more than make somebody in an angry crowd even madder. Eddie and I had to resort to threats before George would relent.
"We're going to surrender," I told him between clenched teeth, "and we'll shoot you before we let you go and shoot anybody else."
“Are you crazy?!" Eddie chimed in. "You go shooting at somebody, and you'll get us killed for sure."
This got through to George a little, and realizing that we meant what we said, he shut up. At that moment, a man appeared above us, holding a rifle and barking orders at us in German. None of us spoke the language, but it wasn't necessary to be a linguist to get the gist of what he wanted. He waved his weapon at us, a signal for us to lay down our sidearms and to stand up. As we complied, I noticed with great relief that he wore the distinctive uniform and insignia of a member of the German Luftwaffe. Apparently, soldiers from their air force had taken to manning the antiaircraft guns during these last days of the war. Eddie, George and I exchanged nervous glances. It was official; we were American prisoners of war, deep inside enemy territory.
***
We gingerly handed the young man our pistols. Gesturing for us to once again lay down flat on our stomachs, he frisked us to make certain we carried no other weapons. The crowd of civilians got ominously close, and we all jumped several inches off the ground when the Luftwaffe enlisted man fired his rifle into the air. We immediately looked up to check on one another. There had been stories we'd heard about American flyers being shot when taken prisoner, and our first thought when we heard the rifle report was that one of us had been executed. What the fellow apparently had in mind was a show of authority to the crowd.
"These men are my prisoners," his shot signified, "and no one is to touch them!"
Which was just fine by us, because right after he fired that single round, the crowd of about two hundred men appeared. Some of them sported shabby outfits with "USSR" printed in bold white letters across their backs. These were Russian POWs whom the Germans used for field hand work as slave laborers on their farms. My sense from their expressions was that they disliked us as much as the did the Germans. I don't remember seeing one woman in the entire gathering. Some members of the mob began shouting at the Luftwaffe soldier, and he shouted back. This sort of animated exchange went on for several minutes, and it's likely that the crowd wanted to do us in on the spot. But the soldier held firm, letting everyone know that we were his prisoners, and that was that.
With the noisy crowd in tow, our captor marched us single file to a big white building that appeared to serve as a dwelling for many of the village elderly and children. My guess is that it was some sort of shelter, either a permanent one or a place they evacuated people to before the bombs started falling. Not much took place there with us that I can recall. I suppose the young man contacted his superiors in some way to let them know he had three American POWs in hand, but my memories of what happened there have faded. We were soon on the march again, this time walking alongside a highway, one of the Autobahns that Hitler built to get his troops from one end of the country to the other.
After a time we arrived at a village, no more than perhaps twenty homes, and our captor was met my the town mayor, or Bürgermeister. We were taken into a garage, and there on the floor were Al Holt, the co pilot of the Piccadilly Lil, and Ralph Lashell, our bombardier. Al's face was twisted with pain; Ralph didn't move at all. Running over to our compatriots, we gave them a quick inspection. Al immediately directed us to help Ralph, who we noticed was bleeding profusely from a large wound in his leg.
"Help Ralph first," he said. "I'll be okay."
Eddie and I immediately applied a makeshift tourniquet to stem the flow of blood from Ralph's leg wound. George was still not capable of much because his fear had completely taken him over. Upon closer inspection, we saw that a far more serious bullet wound was evident in Ralph's neck, and another hole was evident through his hand. We will never know for certain what actually happened, but it seemed that he had been shot execution style. I don't know enough about ballistics to know whether the shot came from the front or the rear, but I assume one of the angry villagers shot him from the back. They just plugged him. Eddie tried to give him artificial respiration to help him breath, but this was of no help to his neck wound which required the attentions of a doctor.
What happened next has remained with me as a poignant memory. The guys had always ribbed me because I went to chapel whenever possible. My faith in the Lord was obvious to everyone, but they thought it made me an easy target to poke fun at when we were in training and back at the base. Yet the first sentiment that came to mind as Ralph lay dying was devotional. Al turned to me and seemed to speak for the group.
"Lowell, have a prayer with Ralph," he said solemnly. "He's dying, I'm sure of it. And have a prayer with all of us."
Naturally, I complied. Moments later, Ralph drew a final, deep breath and died. The young Luftwaffe soldier who had captured Eddie, George and me in the field barked something to the villagers, and several of them reached down and picked up Ralph's lifeless body and carried it away. We never found out what kind of burial he received. We all stood about for a few minutes in a state of shock. A couple of other Germans picked Al up, who had suffered some flak wounds and a broken pelvis, and we followed them and the Bürgermeister out of the garage toward an adjoining house, probably the mayor's home. My watch was gone, and I had lost all track of time, although it was still daylight at this point.
The next stage of our capture had us being shoved into the back of a Ford truck outside the Bürgermeister's house. Imagine that, a Ford. I wondered when I saw that truck, what was the war all about?. The Germans made us hoist Al into the back of the vehicle with us, and I was beginning to get really worried about his condition. None of us had yet received any medical attention, including me. The Germans gave me a towel to clean up my eye, but that was all. Thankfully, my eyesight returned the following day, and there were no aftereffects.
Bouncing along in the back of the truck, we had no idea where we were being taken, and our imaginations ran through a series of grim possibilities, especially after witnessing Ralph's demise. His fate, however, was the unhappy result of his having encountered angry civilians before he was able, like the rest of us, to surrender to someone in the German military. As if to tempt fate further, the truck drove right through the middle of Hoff, the object of our bombing raid, which was still aflame from the attack. Civilians who were trying to deal with the fires recognized us as American airmen who had bombed their city that very afternoon, and they began following the truck, screaming insults at us and waving their fists in the air.
At the far end of the city there was a hill. The truck stopped at its base and we were ordered to disembark and start climbing. Still carrying Al, we climbed about halfway up the hill toward a building that we would learn was being used as a hospital of sorts for French POWs. The townspeople formed a taunting gauntlet, shouting and spitting at us as from both sides of the road as we passed. I'm certain the only thing that prevented them from dragging us away and killing us outright was our Luftwaffe captor who kept hollering commands, occasionally shoving one or more of them back with his rifle.
At the makeshift hospital we were ordered to leave Al amongst the other wounded POWs. I was given a bit of dressing for my eye injury, and then we were made to move on to the top of the hill. It was the last time we saw Al, and I never have seen him since or learned what happened to him after that moment, although he may have died there, because his wounds were serious and I doubt he was able to receive the care his condition warranted. Trudging to the top of the hill, we saw at its crest a Bastille-like structure which probably had been there since the Middle Ages, its stone edifice towering above the landscape. The sun was just beginning to set, so all that had occurred to us had taken place within the span of a few hours. It seemed to me as if we had been captured weeks earlier.
***
The "castle" was as damp and cold as an old graveyard. We were placed in a large room in the lower portion of the building with other men I recognized from our unit, Warren Williams, our navigator, among them. One by one, we were interrogated in a separate small room by a German who spoke curiously "Americanized" English. All of us adhered to the Geneva Convention standard of giving only our name, rank, serial number, but that didn't stop our inquisitor from trying a number of ploys to loosen our tongues. One of them, in which he blurted out details about our units, our personnel, and our mission, was meant to make us think the Germans already knew all about us, so what difference did it make it we corroborated information that was common knowledge? Surprisingly, the fellow did seem to know a great deal about us, which is what made me conclude that they were well prepared for our raid, the reason why they had been so successful at shooting so many of us out of the sky that day.
The interrogator's glib tactic didn't work, and we all kept our counsel. Back with the group after we had both been questioned, Warren had a strange look on his face.
"What's going on, Warren," I asked. "Is everything okay?"
"I know that guy, Lowell," he replied. "He's from Rochester. I'll bet the bastard is one of the American born Germans who returned to the Fatherland so he could become a good little Nazi. And when they found out he spoke real good English, they put him in charge of giving us the third degree!"
We tucked this information away for safe keeping, and years later after the war, Warren discovered through his association with the American Legion, that the man was trying to sneak back into the United States. Warren blew the whilst on the guy, and that was the end of that immigration attempt.
Darkness had fallen right after we reached our stone prison, and we settled in for our first night in captivity. It was a singular feeling of isolation and gloominess. We were each left with our own thoughts in the blackness of the cells in which we were being held. No one could fall asleep, and my thoughts kept returning again and again to my dad. I was haunted by the idea that he would hear I was missing in action and wouldn't know if I was alive or dead.
Without preamble, a small group of us was rousted up in the middle of the night and packed, once again, into the back of a truck. Only about twenty of us were moved at this time, and I never learned why only a few of us were selected or what method was used to choose one man over another. This time our transportation was a military vehicle of some kind, and we traveled the rest of the night across a variety of roads, sometimes swaying back and forth at high speeds. More than once, I was convinced we weren't going to make it through that ride without the truck turning over, spilling us and our German guards across the pavement.
At dawn, we arrived at what was unmistakably a Luftwaffe air base. The place was impeccable. Modern, clean buildings were in evidence, and everywhere we looked, young Nazi airmen were busy doing precisely what we did at our base -- coming to and from briefings and missions and otherwise carrying on the duties of airmen at war. What was different here was that these men didn't fly great bombers like ours; this was a Luftwaffe fighter base, and the plane most clearly in evidence on their airfields was the dreaded Messerschmitt Bf 109, a craft we were accustomed to seeing coming at us with the business end of a 20-millimeter cannon blasting away. Like our own base, this one was well camouflaged, made as much as possible to not be seen from the air.
The buildings were extraordinary, silent testimonials to the German penchant for efficient engineering. I found the architecture of them very impressive, especially when compared to the dismal Quonset huts we utilized at our base. We were moved into what looked like the reception area of a large building that could have been the administration building on a college campus. We remained in this place for several hours, under the careful scrutiny of two armed guards.
For the next leg of our journey, we were taken to a nearby train yard and placed aboard rail cars. As usual, no one considered it necessary to tell us where we were going. We would find out in due course, and no one except our interrogator from the previous evening had spoken a word of English to us. For me, this train ride was the most terrifying part of the moving about. All I could think of were the bands of roving American P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, as well as the B-17 bombers, who found rail lines and rail cars an irresistible target in our Allied efforts to destroy the German infrastructure. Dying from a strafing attack by our own forces seemed to me a particularly pointless, ironic way to die. What a tremendous relief it was to look up whenever we heard the sound of a fighter and see that it was a German plane! I had never imagined that I would be happy to see an enemy aircraft rather than one of our own, but this was only one of many surprises that my experience as a POW held in store for me.
***
It took us several days to travel across the German countryside. One night around midnight our train stopped on a bridge near Ravensburg because an Allied bombing raid was taking place against the Messerschmitt plant in that city where the infamous ME-109's were built. As we sat on the tracks inside the train car, I prayed that the RAF bombers wouldn't also find the bridge we sat on another enticing target. We could clearly hear the air raid sirens in the distance, as well as the unmistakable sounds of exploding bombs.
From Ravensburg we went on the next day to Munich. Here we caught sight of a breeding farm for humans where Hitler's Aryan "physicians" worked at increasing the genetic stock of their "master race." I saw many blond young ladies, extended bellies, walking around outside the place, so it didn't take a genius to figure out what the intent of the place was, but I didn't learn for certain until after the war that girls stayed at this farm, willingly or otherwise, to have children for the Fatherland. The matter of the biological father was arranged by the state.
That night, we stopped outside Munich and were allowed off the train to sleep in an old barn. The smell of manure was pungent, but it was good to get off the train for a few hours. We spread newspapers over the horse apples and suffered through the cold night without bedding or blankets. The same two guards who had routed us out of sleep at the little castle in Hoff had remained with us during the entire journey. I find myself wishing on occasion that I could find those two men and throw my arms around them in gratitude for how well they treated us. They truly were as kind and considerate as the circumstances would permit. I hope they survived the war and were reunited with their families.
Finally late one morning a day or two later, our destination was revealed to us; we were ordained for internment at a POW camp designated as Stalag 7A. This camp, one of many in the Stalag system, was built shortly after the beginning of World War II, in September 1939, established as a POW camp officially called Stammlager, or Stalag, VIIA. Located north of the small city of Moosburg in southern Germany, Stalag 7A was originally designed to hold 10,000 prisoners. By the time I got there at the end of the war, some 80,000 Allied soldiers, mostly French and Soviet citizens, were crammed into it. The portion of the camp that held we Americans was also occupied by British and French POWs. There were New Zealanders, Australians and South Africans in the camp as well, all prisoners from the North Africa campaign.
Many of the POWs who had been there for an extended period were forced to work in industrial, agricultural and other businesses outside the camp all over Bavaria, south of the Danube River. My brief but poignant stay of thirty days wouldn't permit me to experience this aspect of camp life, thank God. The conditions in the camp itself were loathsome. It only took a few hours of residency to end up covered in lice and fleas. Food availability ran between scarce and none. There was no regular mess. If it was a good day, we got a little food in the morning, maybe a small piece of stale black bread and a thin, watery soup. From what I have read about other camps in the Stalag system, this one was a particular cesspool. How those prisoners who had been there for weeks, months, or even years managed to survive, I shall never fathom.
In our section of the camp, there was one water faucet for 8,000 people. The latrines were disgusting beyond belief, since most of the prisoners suffered from chronic diarrhea. Because there were so many prisoners beyond what the camp was originally designed to hold, most of us slept in tents, with so many of us squeezed into each tent that there was no room to stretch out when we slept. When someone became ill, they simply got sick all over the person laying next to them. On an average day, the guards got us up early, somewhere around five, with reveille. We fell out and the guards took a head count every morning without fail.
The number of administrative and guard personnel had increased at Stalag 7A over the course of the war to about 2,000. The Lagerkommandant, of camp commandant, a man by the name of Oberst Otto Burger, occasionally came through the camp to check on things, and I always got the impression that he was appalled at how we had to live. However, there simply wasn't much he could do about it. There were no resources available to make life any better for us, or for his own men, for that matter.
The guards were professional soldiers, and most of them treated us quite well too. There were some among them who were maniacal Nazis, but not many. Not that they understood us as we taunted them in English, but sometimes we would razz the ones we knew as the fanatics.
"Wait till Uncle Joe and his boys get here," we would tell them, referring to the advancing Russian troops of Joseph Stalin. "Then we'll see how good your blood oath is."
We were referring to the vow that some of the more dedicated Nazi's supposedly had taken not to return home alive, but to kill as many of the enemy as they could, no matter how hopeless their situation became, then to die at their posts. It was this handful of zealots that made us nervous about what would happen when the German war effort finally collapsed and we were trapped with no means to defend ourselves against a few crazed National Socialists. At the other end of the spectrum, one guard told me that his family had been killed in a bombing, yet he seemed to harbor no hatred for we airmen whose job it had been to drop bombs on his people. Their generally good treatment of us was probably a combination of things. The discipline of army training, some human compassion, perhaps, and certainly the knowledge that the war was winding down very much not in their favor. They know it was likely their actions would be judged sometime in the near future.
Much of the time during the day, I hung out in the compound where the Polish prisoners were held because there were many former singers and musicians from the Teatr Wielki opera house in Warsaw, Poland, including the impresario of the Opera Narodowa. They were wonderful people, and it was consoling to surround myself with others who loved music as much or more than I. Most of them spoke English and we would talk for hours about our favorite compositions and performances. Most of these fine people had been there three, four, or even five years, from the days immediately following the German invasion of Poland in 1939. One fourteen year old youngster had come to the camp when he was nine years old. It was inconceivable to me what it must have been like to grow up in such a hellish place.
Conversing with them was my only relief from the filth, hunger and boredom, and they were very gracious and patient, in view of how long they had endured the horrible camp conditions. My sense was that they enjoyed the conversational escapes as much as I did. Occasionally, the musicians who had been fortunate enough to bring their instruments with them, or somehow acquired an instrument after they were imprisoned, put on small performances. These were special moments that introduced elements of humanity into the daily survival grind that characterized life in Stalag 7A.
The Russian POWs, who were not subject to restrictions placed on prisoners from nations that were members of the International Red Cross, were made to work on farms as forced laborers in the surrounding countryside. This supposed humiliation gave them access to precious food stuffs that the rest of us could never get our hands on, and they were able to smuggle these previous items into the camp from their farm labors. Potatoes and bread were the most common food commodities they trafficked in. The single most valuable currency the rest of us had to deal with was cigarettes which came in fits and spurts to those soldiers, like ours, whose countries were members of the IRC. At any given time of the day, it was common to see hundreds of small columns of smoke rising from around the camp where prisoners had built small fires to roast potatoes or cook other smuggled food they had bartered for. The old timers in the camp had become excellent tinsmiths, fashioning small cooking utensils out of old cans and other discarded pieces of metal.
The preoccupation of many modern day Americans with weight loss often brings back memories to me of how quickly we shed pounds in the camp. It doesn't take too many days of little or no food and the bad water that causes diarrhea to become a shadow of one's former self. The Germans didn't seem to have a lot of food either, and I noticed how unhealthy many of the guards looked as well.
As the month of April wore on, a sense that the Germans couldn't hold out much longer began to sweep through the camp. There was talk about what would happen once the guards realized all was lost. Would they be given orders to exterminate all prisoners? We learned later that indeed the SS had developed plans to move into POW and labor camps across the country to kill all those being held prisoner before they could be liberated. It was intelligence about this plan that, when it reached General George S. Patton, prompted him to rush a single armored vehicle ahead of his advancing troops to get to Stalag 7A before the SS had a chance to carry out their ghastly plans. One armored vehicle to face down any German who dared get in the way.
***
On the morning of April 29, 1945, the whole mess came to a head. The fragile structure of life around the camp simply fell apart. When we woke up that morning, all the camp guards were gone. There were two columns of people moving along the road outside the front gate, one headed east, the other going west. The Russians were advancing rapidly from the east, and after the Germans betrayed their pact with Stalin and invaded Russia in 1942, many Germans knew reprisals were inevitable, so they wanted to get as far away from the advancing Russian army as possible. It was the "Uncle Joe and his boys" phenomenon unfolding that we had taunted the crazy guards about. I have no idea who the people were heading east, or why they would choose walking towards the Russians rather than the advancing Western Allies. Maybe they were Russian nationals we had already escaped from some other camp, I don't know.
Late that morning, the single armored vehicle sent by Patton entered the camp, under the command of a fellow by the name of Tom Gibbons, who came in and immediately raised the American flag. Tom's account of these events can be found in Tom Brocow's book, "The Greatest Generation." There was only Tom and three other GI's on board the armored vehicle, sent on this special mission to thwart the SS from killing us all. The vehicle was designed to travel at high speeds, and they had come to us well in advance of Patton's army, a very brave thing to do. At first, I found it inconceivable that just four guys would come crashing into the camp, and I looked all around for the rest of the army. They weren't there.
Euphoria spread like a grass fire through the camp. People were yelling, crying, laughing and just generally carrying on. I buttonholed one of the American soldiers, asking him if there was any way he could get a note I had written into the hands of someone at the Red Cross who would, in turn, get it to my father so he would know I was alive. He looked at me a bit dumbfounded; I suppose thousands of other fellows in the camp wanted, as badly as I, to let their loved ones know they were okay. Later I would learn that when I was shot down, the Army sent word to my home that I was officially MIA, missing in action. My sister, Donna, was home by herself when the telegram arrived. She rushed to a small restaurant where my dad always ate lunch during the week, and collapsed in tears when she found dad because she knew that Lowell Dean, and then Earl Clark, had been missing in action, then discovered to have been KIA, killed in action. When Earl was shot down, his parachute didn't open.
About a week or so after we were liberated, my sister was home alone again when another telegram arrived telling my family that I was alive and would be coming home soon. Once again she ran to the restaurant, and when she loudly announced the contents of the telegram to our dad, the whole place exploded with congratulations. It was decided on the spot that when I got home, everyone there would come back to the restaurant for a celebration, which is exactly what happened.
But on that crisp, cold, wonderful mid-spring morning, that joyous event lay in the future. Our first concern was getting something to eat. Officers from the compound where they had been held within the camp tried to establish some semblance of order, commanding us to stand fast in the camp, because if we wandered too far afield, we were taking a chance that units of the SS or Hitler Youth would find and kill us. Hunger was so overwhelming for some that they disregarded these orders, especially when rumors spread about the availability of chickens, pigs and other edible livestock on nearby farms. Some of those men were indeed caught and killed by still armed groups of the SS and Hitler Youth.
A few of us actually found a chicken who was unfortunate enough to wander into the camp during the confusion of Liberation. Not long afterwards, someone found a pig who had also wandered off from a nearby hog farm into our hungry haunt. We had no means of cooking anything at that point, so while it may sound unappetizing to someone who is eating regularly, we were ready to eat raw, bloody animal flesh, and that is exactly what some of us did.
We were forced to remain in the camp like this for more than a week. The initial excitement was replaced by frustration, but no one grumbled too much because we knew it was only a matter of time before Patton's army could arrange for our shipment out of there. At last, we were rounded up and moved to a local airfield. The little grass runway outside the village was jammed with hundreds of small planes which high ranking Nazi's had flown into the area to give themselves up to American occupiers rather than face Russian captors who were seizing the eastern portion of Germany. When we arrived, planes were still landing, and a crush of souvenir hunters would surround each aircraft after it came to a halt and was abandoned. There are no doubt Luger pistols, Iron Crosses, and other pieces of Nazi memorabilia in drawers across America today that were acquired from that tiny airfield.
***
From the chaos, order finally emerged, and we were flown to Paris on C 47's, the military version of a twin engine DC-3, one of the safest planes ever built. It was the most exciting airplane ride of my life. We arrived in the capital city of France, which had been liberated nine months earlier. We all looked fairly shabby after our time in the Stalag, so new clothes were in order after a thorough delousing. The Parisians welcomed us with open arms, and we were put up as guests of the French people in various hotels around the city. I was housed in a local hotel and like everyone else's, my attention turned to food. We spent the next three days eating, bathing, sleeping and making certain that our families had been informed of our whereabouts. There was a place we could go and sign in and get $50 dollars walking around money, and we felt like rich men.
The days that followed our Parisian experience are a blur to me. I cannot recall how we got there, whether we traveled by train or plane, but our next stop was LaHarve, France, outside of which we ended up in a place called Camp Lucky Strike. Cigarettes were several decades away from being demonized as nicotine delivery devices that caused cancer, so it was considered a most American thing to do, naming a camp after a popular brand of smokes. I think there was also a Camp Chesterfield.
There were thousands of us in these camps awaiting repatriation. Our charming stay in Paris was replaced by a daily grind of standing in one long line after another, hour after hour. In the morning, it began with a seemingly endless stay in the breakfast chow line. By the time we finally got to eat, it was time to stand in line for the second meal of the day. I didn't have to worry about chow lines for too long, however; I became violently ill with dysentery. This alternated with intractable constipation. Within days of arriving at the camp, I ended up in the 77th Field Hospital where I remained for thirty days, the same amount of time I had spent in Stalag 7A. The nurses hooked me up to an IV to keep me from dehydrating, and every three hours or so I had to stick my backside in the air for another shot of penicillin. The placed was filled with guys who had the same problem. I guess the digestive system gets out of whack after going from no food, to plenty of good food, to army food, which is in a category by itself.
During my stay in the hospital, I lost track of Eddie and George. Once I got back on my feet, I was able to enjoy a few days visiting the countryside around LaHarve with some of the other guys. Having a chance to mingle with ordinary people, especially of the female variety, was a great pleasure. It takes having an experience like the one we underwent as POW's, albeit a relatively short one, to make the simple pleasures of live so meaningful. Having a decent meal, engaging in casual conversation, walking along a country road before sunset; it was wonderful to be alive, the survivor or a war that had claimed millions of lives, was still claiming lives in concentration camps where people were dying as a result of the extended abuses they had suffered at the hands of the Nazi's.
***
We sailed home across the Atlantic on a ship called the Admiral Mail. What a contrast this Coast Guard vessel was to the British vessel that had brought me to Europe. For one thing, there wasn't one piece of mutton on board. Best of all, of course, was the direction in which we were heading -- back to the United States. A well-known movie star of our day sailed with us, returning home from his tour of duty. Victor Mature had starred in movies like One Million BC and Song of the Islands before the war, and would go on to further stardom in such films as Cry of the City and Kiss of Death when he resumed his career in the late 1940's.
We docked in Boston Harbor eight days after setting sail from France, and the place was alive with about four hundred screaming girls, all there to see Mr. Mature. Unfortunately, there were none waiting for me. But it was June, the beginning of summer, and I was alive, and young, and on my way home to see my family. I felt nothing but pure joy and gratitude the day I walked onto that dock to begin a sixty day leave.
Up until the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan, there were plans in the works for a massive invasion of Japan by American forces, and there was no reason to suspect that I wouldn't return to combat over the skies of Asia. When the Japanese Emperor Hirohito accepted the unconditional surrender of his people on August 14, 1945, it was all over. I was discharged about six weeks later from Lincoln Army Base in Nebraska. For me, and for uncounted millions of people around the world, World War II was at an end.
My country was very generous with regards to the recognition I was given for my time in the service. I received a number of medals and citations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters. This medal is awarded to any officer or enlisted man of the armed forces of the United States "who shall have distinguished himself by heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight". I really don't think I did anything heroic. My biggest achievement was surviving, but I accepted the honor with gratitude. In addition to that medal, I was given a Purple Heart for the wound I suffered to my eye the day we were shot down, as well as a Meritorious Service Medal, a Presidential Unit Citation, a Good Conduct medal, and the Army Air Force World War II Victory Medal. Of course, I don't want to forget about my Caterpillar Club membership, awarded by the Irving Aeroshoot Company, manufacturer of the parachutes we used, to those whose lives were saved by one of their parachutes.
***
When I returned home safely, I never talked with anyone about my experiences, and no one pressed me for the story. There was a sense back then that so many people had not returned home alive, the rest of us shouldn't make too big a deal about our supposed heroics because we had been given the ultimate reward -- getting out with an intact skin. It wasn't until many years later that I had any inclination to talk about my war experiences. Enough time passes, I suppose, for us to become reflective about such life changing events, and members of my family were increasingly curious about what took place then. It was the only period of my life that I had not talked extensively about, and my wife, children and close friends wanted to know more. Gradually, I relented, and I'm glad I did because it has allowed me to think through, out loud, the deeper significance of all that occurred.
Putting this chapter in the book, then, isn't meant to impress future generations of my family with my heroics. A complete history of my life cannot be told without including what happened to me between 1941 and 1945. More important, to me, is the fact that my ideas about war and its glories were so dramatically altered by my experiences that I wanted to pass along what I learned, for what it's worth. Simply stated, it is this: war is a waste. It solves nothing, and leaves far more unsolved problems in its wake than were there before it took place. The lives that were lost or destroyed during World War II can never be accurately calculated.
I was as enthusiastic as any young man about doing my duty before I went overseas, fighting for my country, all of those noble, naive motives. I wanted to do something worthwhile in my life. But the experience of actually going to war allowed me to see that the war portion of my life, in and of itself, only had meaning in terms of how it made me determined to do something with the rest of my life. My dad used to tell me, when I was excited about cramming so many experiences into my young life before I joined the service, that I should take it easy. There would be plenty of time to do many things, he told me. As I was falling out of the sky after jumping from the mortally wounded Piccadilly Lilly, and as I sat in Stalag 7A wondering what would unfold, I used to think about what my dad said. Would I live long enough to accomplish all I wanted to do, to have all the experiences I dreamed of having? I saw firsthand that life can be very short. We who returned were the fortunate few. For that we should feel nothing but gratitude and humility.
Self-effacement is one quality there is far too little of when it comes to our personal and collective reflections on past wars. It is irksome to me now to watch certain politicians who have impressive war records use their experiences like some sort of resume that they can use to advance their ambitions. Part of the package of service to country should be humility as well as pride. As long as there is human ambition, I suppose we will hear about the heroics of those former warriors who want to impress the voting public with how wonderfully well they served their country, and thereby deserve the votes of their fellow citizens.
Real heroes have always been self deprecating rather than self promoting. Take, for example Joe Foss, who shot down twenty-six planes in the early days of the Second World War before most of us ever went into the service, tying Eddie Rickenbacker's World War I record. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor. When he got home, he said the real heroes were the ones who didn't make it back. Then there was Mitchell Page, who single handedly wiped out a machine gun nest on Guadalcanal, saving the lives of scores of his fellow GI's. He too returned home a humble man who saw his fallen compatriots as the real heroes.
I have been to two reunions organized by the 94th Bomb Group. I was reluctant to go because the guys sit around and tell a bunch of war stories, but I wanted to see the fellows again, at least one more time. One reunion was held in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1980's sometime. Dorothy's mother lived there, Wright Field is there, and it's also where Dorothy started in show business performing at the Officer's Club in the Vera Hotel, so we both had history in Dayton that drew us back there as much as the reunion. The second get together was in Tucson, not far from our home near Phoenix. Eddie was there. It was the first time I had seen him since the war. He warned me ahead of time not to discuss anything in front of his wife about the crazy partying we did when we were younger. George had died some years before, so I never had an opportunity to see him after we were separated once we left Stalag 7A. Our former commanding officer was there, and it was a delight to see him. It was obvious that he was attracted to Dorothy -- what sane man wouldn't be -- because he wouldn't leave her alone the entire time we were there.
"I don't remember seeing you in the Offices' Club," he said to me.
"Well, no, I was a sergeant. You guys wouldn't let me in there," I laughed. "I suppose if I had had Dorothy with me in those days, you would have let me in!"
***
It is important to me to emphasize that, in the final analysis, I have concluded that war isn't worth a darn. It doesn't solve any problems. When we returned from the battlefronts of World War II, our former enemies became our new friends and allies, and our old allies became our new enemies in a so-called Cold War that went on for decades, creating yet more suffering around the world. We returned from this enormous effort to beat the Germans and the Japanese, and there's just as darn many problems as when we suited up and went, probably more complicated problems than the ones that led to World War II.
From one perspective, wars -- hot or Cold -- doesn't deserve to be talked about, at least not if it's to glorify them. The important question becomes: How do we end war in a way that we don't have to have anymore of them at all? That deserves a lot of conversation. It would be a conversation about how to change some dark aspect of human nature, and it's a conversation that is long overdue. Most men with combat experience come to this conclusion. Who better to turn to for a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of war than old warriors? At least the ones who don't want to finesse their experiences into a way to feather their caps and further their ambitions.
On August 9, 1945, Captain Fred Boch piloted The Great Artiste, a plane carrying electronic measuring instruments to gather data after his own plane, the Bockscar, which he wasn't piloting that day, dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. I met him by chance at an American Legion meeting that another old warrior, former fighter pilot Bruce Porter, a veteran of the Asian Theater, invited me to. I'm not usually one for going to American Legion meetings for all the reasons I've stated here. But I'm very glad I went to that particular meeting, because having a chance to talk about these ideas with Fred was an invaluable experience.
When I was introduced to Fred, he struck me as being different than any military man I'd ever been around. We discussed his education at the University of Chicago which was, ironically, the birth place of the fledgling American program to build an atomic bomb program. We talked about how he was affected the day he watched the "Fat Man" atomic bomb explode over Nagasaki. A science reporter for the New York Times, William L. Laurence, was onboard Fred's plane that day, and later wrote about the explosion in his award-winning book Dawn Over Zero.
"We watched a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes," he wrote. "Even as we watched, a giant mushroom came shooting out of the top to 45,000 feet, a mushroom top that was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down."
It was a creature that Fred Boch regretted every having a part in unleashing. The Japanese didn't surrender right after we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so Fred found himself on another mission just a day later over Tokyo. His plane dropped a 10,000 pound conventional bomb on the Toyota plant in that city. Years later, he told me, he wrote a letter of apology to the then mayor of Nagasaki, saying that the atomic bomb should never have been dropped. He had visited the city, and felt compelled to write the letter upon his return to the United States after the visit. The mayor wrote him back, saying he was sorry that he did not know at the time that Fred was visiting, for he would have wanted to meet him. The mayor then thanked Fred for his healing sentiments. Soon thereafter, Fred also wrote a letter to Toyota expressing his regret for the bombing he took part in on August 10. He received a letter from the company which informed him that the day of that air raid, everyone was evacuated from the plant in time, and no one died. Fred was so very relieved and grateful to receive that information.
Fred had come to the conclusion that all men are brothers, and that if we are to accept what Jesus Christ came here to teach us, there is no excuse for taking human life. While he believed in honoring the men and women who made great sacrifices during warfare, he did not think war should be celebrated. Fred had come to embrace the brotherhood of man. Both Dorothy and I were greatly influenced by this great, wonderful man. I share his conclusions, as a direct result of my experience dropping bombs on the German people. Who were these Germans that I should have found it so easy to kill them? Hitler and his henchmen were criminals beyond measure, but I'm certain that many of those who died in our raids were just ordinary people. There is little doubt that the Piccadilly Lilly killed many during the course of her twenty-three missions. I was a part of that, and so I feel I must spend the remainder of my life helping convince others of the utter futility of war.
The experience is the same in the microcosm as well as the macrocosm. I remember once declaring a war of sorts in my old neighborhood with some kids who were goofing around and annoying me. I took them on, and because there was only a couple of them, I was able to run them off after giving one kid a pretty good shellacking. But then, about five nights later, they tracked me down, and a bunch of them jumped me. When they were through with me, I was just blood from end to the other. Let me tell you, I didn't do that anymore because while you may beat up one guy, he's going to come back with ten others. And I don't think that big wars are any different than little occasions like that. They end up at the same kind of the place after all is said and done.
For me, the challenge of the human race is to figure out how to untie the Gordian knots, of which war is the most problematical. I don't have the answer; only that war is not it. I suspect that forgiveness, rather than an endless cycle of revenge and self-righteousness, is the key element in any equation that eventually leads to the end of war. To help move me along this path, I visited the town of Moosburg in 1993, and tried to let go whatever resentment I may have held in my heart for what happened to me when I was a prisoner.
Returning to Germany was a very emotional experience because, as I sat with an old German friend and his wife in Cologne after the visit to the camp, he talked at some length about the devastation our bombers caused in his city. He seemed to harbor no ill will towards me as we sat quietly in a restaurant overlooking the city, rebuilt from the ashes of those air raids. The entire city had been completely demolished from to the kinds of bombing raids that I participated in. In fact, my crew and I pulled a mission in Cologne. I was one of the guys that created that devastation. Here was a man that I now loved, having had a chance to meet him. I should have loved him during the war, sight unseen, because that is the kind of love that Jesus tried so hard to teach us about.
One of the recurring missions of our national life should be to help the people of the world, not to add immeasurably to their suffering. We should be constantly accessing how we can assist others, because we have so much to give. How do we help the people of Iraq, of Israel, or wherever people are in need? How do we respond appropriately wherever need is perceived? We sang a song so well in Sunday school, "Jesus Loves The Little Children", all the little children of the world, not just American children. Red, yellow, black and white, they are all precious in the sight of Jesus. Loving all the little children of the world; now that is church.
When I was dropping bombs on people, I had lost my understanding of what I had sung as a boy. I should have stayed home, or gone as a missionary, figuring out how to help the German people, not how to kill them. I don't think bombers or tanks or missiles or anything other kind of weapon helps anyone. They are designed for one thing; to create death and havoc, which don't fit into the message of Jesus as far as I can figure it.
Forgiveness, then, is the key. I don't see how else we can survive unless we learn how to let go and let God, how to forgive one another their trespasses, as we would have our trespasses forgiven.
