Unfortunately, I’m starting my research with dead fliers, who are easier to find in the records, so most of what I find early on is going to be immensely sad. The young men who volunteered for air combat–you had to volunteer–tended to me better-educated and gifted in different ways (they were musicians, artists, teachers, architects). Few of them were over 24 years old. Just a few things I learned about them today:

1. The P-38 was much more difficult to fly than the P-51, my Dream Airplane. One engine going out on a P-38 was almost as bad as the ONLY engine going out on a P-51. Jack Langston, Atascadero High ’39, was flying a P-38–it would have looked exactly like the one in the photograph; it was June 22, 1944, so Allied aircraft still had their recognition stripes from D-Day– over Cherbourg when he, along four other members of his air group, was shot down in what all the young pilots realized was a half-baked suicide mission. Jack was married. He was also a gifted musician, a saxophonist.

2. SLO native and war hero Elwyn Righetti flew a P-51, On his last mission, as commander of his fighter group (he was shot down and vanished), he ordered two fliers to turn around and go home. It was the last mission required of each man, and he didn’t want them to get killed. The word is “mensch.”

Lt. Col. Elwyn Righetti’s P-51D, named for his wife.

3. “Mission Belle” was the B-26 co-piloted by Lt. James Pearson of Templeton, shot down over Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge, Dec. 26, 1944.

“Mission Belle” with her pilot, Lt. Fox, and two gunners. Fox was killed on that December 26 mission, as well as Lt. Pearson.

4. The cruelest loss of all, in some ways, was an Idaho accident. Sgt. Charles Eddy was a part of the crew that perished in an Idaho B-24 training accident. On the plane’s fourth practice high-altitude bomb run, it suddenly fell, in two minutes, from 20,000 feet to 100 feet, when the pilot and co-pilot finally pulled it out of its dive. Once they had the bomber level, they gained altitude and started to make a gentle right turn to get back to base. The plane nose-dived into the ground.

A Consolidated B-24 Liberator from Maxwell Field, Alabama, four engine pilot school, glistens in the sun as it makes a turn at high altitude in the clouds.

5. Lt. Clair Abbott Tyler, Morro Bay, was a B-17 co-pilot killed over the Channel in 1943. The best man at his 1941 Mission SLO wedding to Miss Joanna Renetzky was Alex Madonna.

B-17’s from Lt. Tyler’s 303rd Bomb Group.

More on aviators. I am about halfway through the list of young men we–San Luis Obispo County– lost during World War II in air combat or in accidents.

So, of course, being more or less half-Irish, I had to pull myself up short and ask myself my motives.

What the hell are you doing, Gregory?

There has to be some kind of Cardinal Sin involved in me looking up the names of 106 young men lost fighting fascism and militarism, then paring them down to the aviators, then spending the hours it takes to track down everything from their parents’ names to the airframe numbers of the aircraft that would become their final homes and their coffins.

It’s not morbidity, I decided after a long, long time.

It’s the fact that I have two sons, and most of these young men were younger than my boys.

You see, I had already decided a long time ago that these are my boys, too. So I may have to write a book about them.

You see, I don’t want them to be lost again. Once was enough. That’s what I’m doing, I think. If I’m at all Irish, then we Irish believe there’s nothing quite so close at hand yet so transitory as death.

Whatever my generation has enjoyed, and the two generations I’ve taught history now enjoy and will enjoy, it’s because of these boys. We live because they willed us life, in their deepest hearts, without ever knowing it in the terrible moments when they fell from the sky.

Click the link below to meet some of them, and this is only half. I’ve work to do yet. The table that follows them lists the air accidents that took their comrades in a single day Stateside: March 2, 1944.

The number lost in combat overseas that day is, of course, far larger.

Think on that.

Think about how little, too, the president we have today, who knows almost nothing about our history–or any other nation’s– can register the meaning of lives, like these, given up for us. They represent a generosity and an integrity that he cannot understand.

We deserve better. We owe it to these boys.

Don’t we?

* * *

Here is the link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B05dFICUx2kGV2NmSWF6OEpSaGs

Artist’s conception of Lt. Col. Righetti’s P-51, “Katydid,” named for his wife.

By my count, 106 young San Luis Obispo County men were killed during World War II. Twenty-seven of them were airmen, most in the Army Air Corps and a few Navy fliers; there was a Naval aviation training school at Poly during the War.

I’m not sure why it is, but death in the air seems even more capricious and cruel than death in ground combat, and I think that’s because so many of those 27 county residents were killed in stateside accidents. [There were numerous fatalities in local crashes: a P-38 in Oceano, another that plunged into a Santa Maria cafe; a P-39 Aircobra that left a huge crater in Shell Beach.] Combat airplanes don’t forgive a lot, not even a moment’s inattention:

• Frederick George Gillis was an air cadet who died in Lancaster when his trainer went out of control and flew into a mountain. Both Gillis and his flight instructor bailed out in time. Gillis’s parachute didn’t open.
• A midair collision of two B-25 medium bombers “on a routine training flight” from Tampa killed Lt. Randoph Donalson over Newberry, South Carolina.
• When his B-17 pilot tried to make a crash landing in a meadow near Roundup, Montana, Staff Sgt. Charles Valys died when the plane hit the ground, exploded, and broke apart.

All of these men were in their twenties.

The “old man” among our lost fliers was Lt. Col. Elwyn Righetti, from San Luis Obispo, a P-51D pilot shot down near Dresden in the weeks following the notorious fire-bombing there. Righettti, 30, was the winner of the Silver Star with four oak leaf clusters for both his kills and his superb leadership of the 55^th Fighter Squadron. Righetti survived his plane’s crash-landing. He radioed his comrades that he was all right, yet he was never found and is still listed as “missing in action.” There is a chance that he was killed by German civilians; another downed American was summarily executed the day before Righetti was shot down.

Jack Langston’s P-38 would have looked like this one, with its D-Day markings.

Righetti’s body was never found, and neither  was 2^nd Lt. Jack Langston’s. He was shot down by ground fire in his P-38 during a low-level attack on Cherbourg in the weeks after D-Day. Many of these fliers simply disappeared; Langston’s fighter exploded in the air.

A doomed B-17.

Sgt. Donal Laird was a ball-turret gunner in a B-17 named “Strictly GI,” shot down over Karlsruhe, a city of scientists once visited by Thomas Jefferson. Flak probably claimed 1^st Lt. James Pearson, from Paso Robles, and the crew of his B-26 Marauder over Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge.  An Army Air Corps captain and friend of flight engineer Loren Bubar found his body, later positively identified, a year after Bubar’s B-17 collided with a German ME-109 fighter near Frankfurt.

Loren lies today amid other young Americans in a military cemetery in Luxmebourg, 5,500 miles away from home.

Loren Bubar’s grave.

A preview of the next book. Hopefully, out by mid-summer!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvi7SjWzc-w