An excerpt from the book Central Coast Aviators in World War II.

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Southern England, Spring 1944.

This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars
…This precious stone set in the silver sea
…This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

Shakespeare, King Richard II.

If there was a military historian with a gift close to Shakespeare’s, it was another Englishman named John Keegan. Keegan was a little boy in the English countryside, in Somerset, when the Americans began to arrive in their numbers in late 1943 and into the spring of 1944. Little English boys had lived for years with the deepest of privations—thanks, in large part, to the U- boat campaign that had nearly starved Shakespeare’s “sceptred isle” to death— and then the Americans came. They were, as Keegan later said in narrating a television history of the Great War in the pivotal spring of 1918, when he for once arrived at a loss for words, “…well, they were Americans.” By which he meant they were boisterous, cocky, well-fed, well- clothed, and, thank God, they were friendly, with an innocence and immediacy that was distinctly American. Their World War II counterparts taught English boys baseball and flirted with their big sisters, and married some of them, but most of them not, which meant that little boys Keegan’s age would inherit littler half- Yank nieces and nephews. Most of all, they were generous. There seemed to be no end to their Hershey bars (there wouldn’t be after the war, either, when, during the Berlin Airlift, one of bomber pilot Jess Milo McChesney’s comrades, Gail Halverson, air-dropped Hershey bars, floating on little parachutes, to the hungry children of blockaded Berlin) and no end to the rough affection for children that came with these big, loud men from across the sea.

GI’s introduce British war orphans to baseball.

And then they were gone. Keegan has vividly described the early-morning dark when that happened, when the chinaware and modest family crystal on every shelf in the Keegan home began protesting, rattling an alarm so loud that it woke the family up, if the motion beneath their beds hadn’t already made them sit bolt upright. The anxiety of Keegan’s family, and their neighbors, and of other families all across East Anglia, was relieved only when they went outside. Then anxiety gave way to wonder. They could feel in their breastbones the vibrations—“the grinding forced you to the ground,” Keegan remembered– of the engines of thousands of airplanes, but could see only dim red and amber lights in the sky, heading east, toward France. Some of the Americans Keegan had grown to love so quickly, his heroes, were on those airplanes, and tens of thousands of more, his heroes, were riding deathly pale on landing craft corkscrewing in foul Channel waters, and they were all headed for Normandy.

It was D-Day.

A GI introduces himself to two Norman children, 1944.

For the two years before D-Day, the Americans in England who had been carrying the brunt of their nation’s fight to Nazi Germany were the airmen of the Eighth Air Force. They made up 49 bomb groups and 22 fighter groups and their bases were 71 airfields concentrated in East Anglia, from Norfolk south to Essex, in places that must have sounded quaintly medieval to American ears: Bury St. Edmunds, Knettishall, Little Staughton, Matching Green, Molesworth, Snailsworth, Snetterton Heath, and Thorpe Abbots.

B-17s from the 398th Bomb Group prepare to take off on a combat mission, RAF Molesworth.

Bernard Shaw’s charming line about “two peoples separated by a common language” must have rung true, then, for young men, newcomers to England who’d ferried their bombers from Labrador (or for the luckier men, like Robert Abbey Dickson, who’d shipped out on Queen Mary, or future Cal Poly professor Richard Vane Jones, who’d made his trip on Queen Elizabeth.) Dickson’s luck held: when he first arrived in England, he was sent to the 381st Bomb Group, where he flew two orientation missions as a co-pilot. The 381st’s base was American-built, at Ridgewell, Essex, which meant that it had been built quickly in prefabricated stages by hard-working soldiers, black men, in army construction units. Bases like Ridgewell were marked by Quonset-hut barracks, each with a single, feeble, coal-burning stove, muddy streets, and mercilessly cold showers. But Dickson was quickly transferred to the 91st Bomb Group, based at RAF Bassingbourn, and the “RAF”—Royal Air Force—prefix made all the difference. An Eighth Air Force Base with the “RAF” designation had originally been built by the British, and, given Britons’ stubborn reluctance to give up their island, such bases had been built to last. Bassingbourn had paved streets and central heating. Dickson was delighted. It was, he remembered, almost like a country club compared to the 381st’s home base.

91st Bomb Group airmen serve Thanksgiving dinner to British children, 1944. The GI on the left is Joseph Running Bear, a Lakota soldier. Imperial War Museum.

Army food wasn’t country club fare. Bill Mauldin, the great cartoonist who created the imaginary Willie and Joe, his comrades in the Italian campaign, once remarked, without malice, that his mother was the worst cook in the world. Then he encountered army food, which was infinitely worse. At least airmen understood that they were fed better than men like Mauldin, dogfaces, who commonly used G.I. powdered lemonade to wash their socks. Still, even in the Army Air Forces, the green-hued powdered eggs, along with the ubiquitous Spam, were breakfast standards, and creamed chipped beef on toast—referred to as “shit on a shingle”– followed airmen across the Atlantic from the air bases stateside where they’d first encountered what seemed to be, to the military, a perverse culinary masterpiece. Radioman/gunner Albert Lee Findley Jr. found little relief off-base. “English food took some getting used to,” he admittted tactfully. (Many years after the war, Findley and his wife would live in England as the proprietors of an antique shop.) One vegetable, Brussels sprouts, was as common to English fare as Spam was to American mess halls, and, at war’s end, many English-based G.I.’s swore they would never eat them again.

An American St. Nicholas in Luxembourg, 1944.

There were other features of English culture that the Americans found more to their liking. Airmen almost immediately found pubs near their bases, and the attraction was powerful. Historian Donald Miller writes of the 1943 arrival of an AAF engineer battalion, charged with laying out an airstrip outside the village of Debach, near the North Sea. Their discovery of what English called “the local,” this one called The Dog, resulted in the Yanks buying so many rounds “for the house”—the last round, just before closing time, was for forty-seven drinks—that the next day, a doleful little sign was posted outside The Dog: “No beer.” It was, Miller notes, the first time the pub had been closed in 450 years. The Americans, of course, also found young English women to their liking, as well. The War Department discouraged what were called “special relationships,” and made it nearly impossible, thanks to a bureaucratic maze, for the best-intentioned American soldier to marry, but, of course, the War Department failed. “Special relationships” were as common as visits to the local pub. Al Spierling of Arroyo Grande, a B-17 flight engineer, lost a little of his youthful idealism—Spierling was a thoughful young man who made a special trip to York to explore the setting for Brönte’s Wuthering Heights— when he learned that a gunner he knew, a married man, had taken up with an English girl. He was a little shocked. “For a twenty-year-old,” he said, “I learned a lot.”

These two young Marines cared for this Okinawan orphan until family members were eventually found.

There was the other special relationship, the one historian Keegan remembered, and that was with English children. Airmen seemed to have great affection, just as other G.I.s did, for their smallest neighbors, and the affection was reciprocated. A typical sight at the beginning of any combat mission would be the children gathered at an airbase’s perimeter fence. They were there to wave goodbye to the crews as their big airplanes took off to reach their assembly points high above the English countryside.

Berlin, May 1945.

In April 1967, Robert Kennedy went into a shotgun shack in the Mississippi Delta and saw a malnourished toddler playing listlessly with grains of rice on the floor. He knelt down and put his head on the floor, his face at the child’s level, and talked to him softly. He stroked the baby’s cheek and his distended belly. (“He touched those children [on the Delta visit] as if they were his own,” a writer noted.) He got no response from the hungry baby. When he finally stood, after several minutes, his eyes were welling with tears.

A year later, when he ran for President, he could not keep a pair of cufflinks. Crowds surged around him, reaching out to touch him, propelled toward him by some primitive and powerful emotional urge they felt for him–perhaps they felt validated by him—-and so the cufflinks were invariably lost. When the people so desperate for Kennedy’s touch surrounded his car, a bodyguard—sometimes a Los Angeles Ram– had to grab him around the waist and hold on with all his strength to keep Kennedy in the car, to keep the crowd from absorbing him.

I think he was my favorite precisely because, as a young man, he was so vindictive and mean-spirited. He, the family’s savage runt, was Jack’s protector and enforcer, but with Jack dead, Robert had to find others to protect. He found them, forgotten and isolated,  and so found himself, re-invented himself, in moments when he was surrounded by children, both by his own and by the children he met in the Delta and in Appalachia. These were his children, too.

In the winter of 1937, Arroyo Grande’s Muriel Loomis Bennett learned that children in the “Okie” migrant camp on the Mesa (some of those Okies were from Vermont) were desperately sick in one of the wettest years of the decade. She was outraged and did something about it: She and her son, Gordon, drove up to the camp with pots of hot soup and piles of blankets.

She had the same understanding that Kennedy did. Those children were hers–and ours.

Two photos about the Eighth Air Force’s war in England: 398th Bomb Group B-17G’s taxi on the runway of their base in Hertfordshire, 1944; a young American airman with an even younger British friend.

British schoolchildren adored the Yanks, and, of course, their Hershey bars. At the start of any combat mission, the perimeter fence around any American airfield in East Anglia would be lined with children, waving goodbye as the big bombers took off.

Many of their Yank friends wouldn’t come back, of course. For every American infantry soldier killed in World War II, three were wounded. For every American airman wounded in World War II, three were killed.

My father was no flier–he was a Quartermaster officer, stationed in London for much of the war. But he, too, found that link–that “Special Relationship”–with the English, who treated him with great kindness.

At the war’s end, he found something remarkably similar–a great kindness– in Germany. The photograph of the other little girl, the shy little charmer, validates, in its way, my father’s fondness for the Germans he came to know. Her photo was taken by a GI in occupied Berlin in 1945.

Mr. Kamin, our German teacher, was leading a student trip there when he was approached by a matronly woman who had once been a little girl like the one in the photograph.

“You’re Americans, aren’t you?” she asked.

Mr. Kamin confessed it.

Her eyes welled with tears. “I just want to thank you for the kindness your soldiers showed me after the war.” She shook Mark’s hand, the German teacher born long after her GI’s had gone home.

I enjoy military history, obviously, and it is both tempting and dangerous to romanticize war. But I found, over and over again, in writing the book, incidents of kindness—there’s that word again—on the part of luftwaffe soldiers toward the American fliers they’d captured.

In several instances, they actually saved the lives of airmen who were about to be lynched by outraged civilians. That’s because these people had seen German schoolchildren reduced to ash by incendiaries or buried alive beneath tenement rows, collapsed in unrecognizable heaps by high explosives. The Americans were terrorfliegers, terror fliers, and cold-blooded killers.  The only thing that saved the Yanks from German civilians was the intercession of German soldiers.

One 88-mm crew among them offered a local co-pilot, a man who lived in Morro Bay after the war, a bowl of potato soup for lunch after they’d shot his B-17 down one afternoon. Another one, a luftwaffe sergeant, while taking an airman by train to the interrogation center near Frankfurt, popped open the latches on his briefcase, reached inside, and brought out a thick slice of sausage on black bread that he handed wordlessly to his prisoner.

I don’t know how, and never will know how, to reconcile those Germans with the the SS guards in the camp photo albums who ate bowls of blueberries with their pretty secretaries or sang folk songs in manly choruses just beyond the smell of the children reduced to smoke in the crematoria chimneys of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Those moments when I despair in history–and they are so frequent, and so barbaric– are never balanced completely by moments of decency. So I savor decency where I can find it.

War can reveal, in the briefest of moments, in gentle accidents, our decency, our deepest humanity. That’s when we find, as my father did, our best intentions and most generous impulses returned to us, even from people we were taught to hate.

Berlin, 1 May 1945