Bear with me on this one. In AP European History, one phenomenon we studied was the mid-Victorian custom in middle-class homes of photographing dead children. What we got around to learning was that this macabre (to us) practice was actually a by-product of the Agricultural Revolution. Largely because of improved diet, more and more children were surviving to adulthood. In the 18th century and on the American frontier, both Mrs. J.S. Bach and Mrs. William G. Dana lost half of the twenty or more children they gave birth to.
Because of improved diet and improved health, by the mid 1800s children were surviving, even thriving. This meant that parental bonds between parent and child were growing stronger: you could afford to invest your love in something as precious as a child because you weren’t going to lose her. In fact, this is when the forerunners of the Dr. Spock books appeared and were almost guaranteed to be best-sellers.
So the photography of little boys and girls who had died was visible evidence of something very poignant: By the 1850s, parents loved their children so much that they didn’t want to let them go.
Which brings me to pit bulls.
While they weren’t exactly “Nanny Dogs”—it’s never wise to leave a child alone with any dog for too long—pits were the single most popular family dog in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Since parental bonds were by then far closer and more enduring, my guess is that you wouldn’t leave your child alone–or photograph her, for that matter–with a dog that’s considered vicious. I did read a study that claimed that, after Goldens, pits were the most patient breed who would endure the most pokes from children. And we did have a pit cross, Honey, who was one of the sweetest dogs we’ve ever owned. But she’s anecdotal.
Still, it again makes me wonder if the problem is less with dogs and more with humans. There are strains of the pit that have been bred to fight; the “toughening” of dogs like these, and the former quarterback Michael Vick is an example, involves inflicting pain on them. I’ve known people innocently walking their dogs who were attacked by a pit, and it’s a singularly terrifying experience. They are trying to kill your dog. Or you. Or both.
It’s not only terrifying, it’s disheartening. Some pits may have a killer instinct, but it’s a trait that’s been bred into a dog, or trained into a dog, by a human who has no heart. (Or, in the recent case involving a Belgian Malinois attacking and killing a local man, a wonderful man, a dog owned by a human who has no brain.)
It’s not my intent to argue for or against the breed here.
What I am trying to say is simply this: These photographs are fascinating.
But they may demonstrate that the traditional views we hold of dogs—or of other human beings—need to be subject to examination and reflection. I’m afraid that we are much more comfortable with tradition. It’s almost as if our prejudices have been bred, or trained, into us.
The statistics are as somber as Memorial Day itself: for every American infantryman killed in World War II, three were wounded; for every American airman wounded, three were killed.
Twenty-six thousand Marines died in the Pacific; the same number of Eighth Air Force airmen died over Europe.
Other fliers died here. P-38 fighters would have been a common wartime sight over San Luis Obispo County; today’s Santa Maria Airport was an Army Air Forces base that specialized in advanced training of pilots about to head overseas. There were eight fighter crashes near that base in January 1945 alone.
One pilot died when his plane went down in the Oceano dunes. Two fighters collided over Corbett Canyon, but only one pilot survived. Three died—a pilot and two civilians– when another P-38 fell into a Santa Maria café.
Meanwhile, accidents claimed about half the eighteen county airmen killed in World War II. Those deaths seem especially capricious and cruel.
In 1943, Clarence Ballagh, a B-17 co-pilot, was merely hitching a ride north on another bomber for a few days’ leave in Edinburgh. That B-17 flew into the side of an English mountain. Fragments of the plane remain on Mt. Skiddaw today, 5,000 miles away from Ballagh’s Arroyo Grande grave.
Templeton’s Norman Hoover died, ironically, when his bombing mission was scrubbed in January 1945. His B-24 crashed returning to its Yorkshire base. It was the only plane lost that day.
Sgt. Charles Eddy of Templeton died in Idaho. Eddy’s B-24 was on a practice bomb run when it suddenly fell from 20,000 feet. The pilot and co-pilot fought desperately to regain control of the plane. They did, at one hundred feet. When they banked gently to return to base, the bomber plummeted into the ground and exploded.
Three county airmen, combat casualties, remain missing.
In 1943, a German fighter’s cannon round killed Clair Abbott Tyler of Morro Bay in his co-pilot’s seat. His B-17, returning from a mission to Lorient, France, went into the sea and took Tyler’s body with it.
French civilians reported seeing Cholame’s Jack Langston bail out when German anti-aircraft guns set his P-38 afire over Cherbourg in July 1944. His body was never found.
In Germany, near the war’s end, famed San Luis Obispo P-51 pilot Elwyn Righetti was never seen again after he’d crash-landed his crippled fighter and radioed that he was all right.
In a tragic coincidence, Righetti, Tyler and Ballagh all left behind little girls who were just beginning to walk when they lost their fathers.
Details like those are haunting.
Clair Tyler’s mother made wonderful enchiladas and Alex Madonna was the best man at his wedding.
Clarence Ballagh’s wedding band was returned to his wife in 1949. Lost B-17 gunner Donal Laird’s wristwatch was returned to his San Luis Obispo nieces in 2015.
Jack Langston played the saxophone; Lt. Ted Lee, shot down near New Guinea, was a trombonist.
As a little boy, lost B-29 pilot Jack Nilsson had been invited to Patsy Berkemeyer’s sixth birthday. Since Patsy’s parents owned a San Luis Obispo bakery, the cake must have been spectacular.
So is the life of P-47 pilot John Sim Stuart, a retired Cal Poly professor still married to Mary, the girl he met in 1944.
Despite being shot down twice, Los Osos retiree Al Findley, a B-24 radioman, was a joyful man who filled his life with friends. He died, at 96, April 28.
Another retiree, Morro Bay’s Jack Gibson—the father of County Supervisor Bruce Gibson–died in 2016 at 95.
Gibson was a B-29 crewman who got a letter from his mother, a knitter, about socks. Did Jack want argyle, striped, or plain? He wrote back that he didn’t care as long as she was the one who knitted them.
Soon after, the Japanese shot his bomber down. POW Gibson endured beatings, starvation and dysentery, but he survived. When he finally came home, he opened a dresser drawer in his bedroom.
My friend Judy Cecchetti–we go back to Branch School together– posted on Facebook about how much she enjoyed the story “Sheila Varian’s Perfect Horse” from the new book.
That meant the world to me.
That story happened because of the Elizabeth Letts book The Perfect Horse. Letts has become one of my favorite authors. Lynne Olson (Citizens ofLondon, Troublesome Young Men) is masterful at using the colorful and telling anecdote to bring a historical character alive. My favorite popular historian is Laura Hillenbrand, whose word choice is so incredibly vivid; her writing also has a marvelous rhythm. You’re so absorbed that it’s stunning to realize how much Hillenbrand is teaching you-about the world of Thoroughbred racing, for example. She wrote Seabiscuit, which is phenomenal, during an agonizing and courageous struggle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome–she was in constant pain–and Louis Zamperini’s story in Unbroken.
All three writers, obviously, are young women.
Laura Hillenbrand
I hope that the long-overdue emphasis on STEM, on teaching science and math to girls and young women, doesn’t completely overshadow our need for good writers–journalists and novelists and historians– who also happen to be young women. (That’s one reason I’m such a fan of Trib reporter Kaytlyn Leslie, a student of Janine Plassard’s when she taught journalism at Nipomo High.)
Janine Plassard
It reminds me, too, that JFK read Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, about the failure in leadership that led to World War I, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Tuchman’s book helped to guide his thinking in October 1962, so it’s not hyperbole to say that we may very well owe our lives to a great historian who happened to be a woman.
Barbara Tuchman
The Sheila story began with me asking if there might be any connection between Varian Arabians and one of the central characters in Letts’s book, Witez II. He was a famous Polish Arabian, a championship stallion, whose story was shaped by World War II, the war that began with Hitler’s invasion of Poland in September 1939.
When I found out that Sheila’s mare Ronteza was Witez’s daughter, I nearly fell out of my chair. My big sister, Roberta, had ridden with Sheila, but Roberta’s Morgan mare was a product of Sid Spencer’s Lopez Canyon ranch. It was Sid who taught Sheila and her Arabian, Ronteza, how to work cattle.
Sid Spencer, Roberta, Anne Westerman on her Welsh Pony, Lopez Canyon, about 1965. Photo by Jeanne Thwaites
The story of the American Army’s rescue of Witez and the Lipizzaner, alongside the story of Ronteza and Sheila and their miraculous Cow Palace performance, took weeks to write. It’s so hard to interweave two stories and still keep the narrative logical and understandable, so it took many, many rewrites, too.
So Judy, it’s one of my favorite stories, too. The best part might be that it happened both in World War II Europe and in, of all places, Corbett Canyon, California. And–what a coincidence!–it just happened to be a story, too, about a courageous young woman.
Finally, I am fond of the way that story made up its mind, thanks in great part to the band U2, about the way it wanted to end:
Varian remembered a moment from the Cow Palace competition vividly: at the start of one round, she could feel distinctly Ronteza’s heartbeat through the panels of the saddle. She knew then that her mare was ready. When the signal was given, when horse and rider entered the Cow Palace arena, two hearts beat as one.
THANK YOU FOR REMINDING US THAT THE COST OF FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.
A local woman responding to an article I wrote about a World War II veteran
* * *
“That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.”
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
The bullet that kills a soldier passes first through his mother’s heart.
A veteran of the North Vietnamese Army (NVA)
This is a course in history, not patriotism.
Cary Nerelli, my master teacher, Morro Bay High School
Exhausted French soldiers, Verdun
I taught history for thirty years, and I never, never ceased to get angry every spring when I taught the First World War. It was this war and its peace treaty that did so much to make World War II possible. In 2010, I took some of my students to Western Europe’s World War II battlefields but also to Verdun, site of a horrific 1916 battle that lasted over ten months. The stacked bones in the ossuary there once belonged to boys like my two sons, whose parents had cheered when they scored their first football goal.
I made it my business to help all of my students understand that idea—that war cheats us all so cruelly—and so I led them, every year in my classroom, into dark places, like Fort Douaumont at Verdun, so dark that it swallowed the light of five hundred years of Western culture. To go inside Douaumont, where 100,000 young men were killed or wounded, to study war doesn’t mean we glorify it. A few years ago, a student told me the First World War was her favorite unit. (Not mine—I much prefer La Belle Èpoque.) I asked her why, and she replied, “Now I understand how precious human life is.”
She understood precisely why I became a history teacher.
–From the introduction to World War II Arroyo Grande
But American artillery units still found many of them there—artillery spotters were nearly incoherent because there were so many targets to call in on their field radios—and the slaughter they inflicted was horrific. Seventy years later, one of the 607th’s soldiers, Frank Kunz, remembered the results in an interview with his hometown newspaper: “Christ help me. There were 6 to 8 inches of bodies and horses ground up on the road. There was nothing you could do. You had to drive through it.” People, Kunz added, don’t understand what war is.
From a member of Arroyo Grandean Frank Gularte’s 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion, on what happened to the Germans who failed to escape through the Falaise Gap in Normandy. From World War II Arroyo Grande
A column from the 607th crosses the Saar River into Germany, 1945. Gularte was dead by the time this photo was taken, killed by a sniper a few days before his first and only child, a boy, was born in San Luis Obispo.
200 Arabians fled Janow Podlaski and headed west, away from the Soviets. Among them were Stained Glass and Grand Slam, two of Witez’s brothers. The exhausted horses arrived in Dresden on the night of February 13, 1945, just as the Allied command unleashed the notorious fire raid, involving over 700 British and American heavy bombers, on the ancient city.
After a wave of bombers had dropped its incendiary bombs, one of the Polish handlers watched, horrified, as Grand Slam’s tail burst into flames. He held on as best he could to the powerful horse and closed his eyes. When he dared to open them again, the flames that had engulfed Grand Slam’s tail had sputtered out and the bombers were gone. So were over half of the Polish Arabians, incinerated in the fires or asphyxiated by the oxygen-consuming firestorm the incendiaries had been intended to produce. By the time the surviving animals reached their ultimate destination in western Germany, fewer than fifty remained.
“Sheila Varian’s Perfect Horse,” from Will This be on the Test?
Dresden, after the firebombing.
Two torpedoes struck Northampton in the engine room and stern, and the explosion that followed was so violent that men at their bridge stations on the nearby light cruiser Honolulu reacted immediately. They burst into tears.
The night action near Guadalcanal that killed Donald Runels of Nipomo, a crewman on Northampton, from World War II Arroyo Grande. The anecdote belongs to Samuel Eliot Morrison, the official United States Navy historian of World War II
Artist’s conception, the torpedo hit on Northampton. A destroyer escort would be named for Donald Runels
That was Hall’s first mission. He was twenty years old when he saw the three Ragged Irregular bombers plummet to earth together. Many members of his bomb group were even younger. Some of them, thanks to crafty misdirection aimed at recruiting sergeants pressured to meet their quotas, were as young as sixteen. Far below them, in German cities like Hamburg and Dresden—or in relatively obscure Japanese cities like Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, or Kagoshima (the seat of the prefecture from which most San Luis Obispo County Japanese had emigrated) the size of Richmond, Virginia—the ashen bodies of schoolchildren stained sidewalks and streets.
On B-17 crewman Henry Hall of Cayucos, from Central Coast Aviators in World War II
A doomed B-17 over Germany, 1945
It was yet another battle, like Gettysburg, that seemed to take on a life of its own. After four days of combat, it was Adam Bair and the 60th Ohio’s turn. On the morning of June 3, the Union army, shrouded in mist, moved across the open ground that led toward the Confederate entrenchments.
The 60th was to assault Lee’s left. Unlike the general staff—coordination and communication throughout June 3 would be chaotic, and staff had not adequately scouted the ground to Lee’s front—private soldiers were fully aware of what they were up against; many wrote their names on pieces of paper and pinned them to their uniforms.
Adam Bair, later a rancher in the Huasna Valley, fought with the 60th Ohio at this 1864 battle, Cold Harbor; 7,000 Union soldiers were killed or wounded that day. From Patriot Graves: Discovering a California Town’s Civil War Heritage
Burial detail, Cold Harbor
I met my pilot, Byron Johnson, from Oklahoma; my copilot, James Gill, from California; my navigator, Robert Cramer, from California; my bombardier, Nolan Willis, from California; my engineer, Morgan Fowler, from South Dakota; my nose gunner, Homer Smith, from Texas; my left gunner, Theodore Mabee, from Illinois; my right waist gunner was James Walter…and he was from some eastern state that I don’t recall, and my tail gunner was Johnny Gates—he was from some eastern state, also. That was the crew. Plus me.
It’s hard to fault Findley for not remembering every one of his crew members’ home states. The Los Osos retiree was speaking from memory in 2013, nearly seventy years after he’d met the men who became “very dear” to him.
–Findley could not remember the home states of two B-24 crewmen he had known for two years. They were killed on his 26th combat mission in February 1945. Findley would make the Air Force a career, retiring as a Command Master Sergeant. From Central Coast Aviators in World War II
Once a Bavarian woman approached Mr. Kamin, our [Arroyo Grande High School] German teacher, and his students near Munich and thanked him and them for the kindness World War II GI’s had shown her when she was a little girl. There were tears in her eyes. Of course, many of the young Americans she remembered with such emotion had died before Mr. Kamin’s students were born.
A little Berlin girl meets her first American, a GI with the occupation forces, 1945
Young Americans, including young men like those soldiers, may be the best evidence we have of the faith we’ve had in ourselves—the faith that we will ultimately do the right thing. In my experience, there are few images more evocative of this than visits to places like the American cemeteries in the Ardennes, at Colleville-sur-Mer above Omaha Beach and in the Punch Bowl on Oahu. Those visits never made me want to wave flags or blow trumpets.
I always think instead of men who were once wavering toddlers, who took their first steps to a little smattering of applause from their parents. They waited expectantly and sleeplessly on Christmas Eves stalked by the Great Depression. When they did sleep, it would be with a dog close by. I think of boys whose hands shook when they tried to pin the corsage on the dress of their prom date. And then they aren’t boys anymore: They’re young men fresh out of Basic whose last moments in America, maybe a few free moments in San Diego or Philadelphia, were marked by ribald laughter and 3.2 beer or poker, by any distraction that would somehow increase the distance between themselves and the troopships waiting to take them into the crucible.
So I never think of patriotism at places like Colleville-sur-Mer. I think of baby shoes and I think of mothers.
–From Will This Be on the Test? Reflections from a History Teacher
From Jean Hubbard and Gary Hoving’s Arroyo Grande: Images of America (Arcadia Press)
I got the nicest thank you from the Companions of Our Lady–that’s the widows’ organization at Nativity Church in San Luis Obispo. I have to admit that I really enjoy speaking to older people, although the borderline between “me” and “older people” is eroding rapidly. I’ve made six or seven presentations at senior homes and at least three to the widows/widowers group in the South County.
Thomas was helping me, and the women loved having him. They loved it especially when he won the door prize, a succulent that he promptly named “Frazier.”
I really felt for one woman. She and her husband had lived in the same house on the North Coast for thirty years. They’d come down here and perused some mobile home communities to look for a place to live when they couldn’t take care of a big house and yard anymore.
Then he died, of course. And she still misses him, of course. There was absolutely nothing self-pitying in the way she said this. So she moved into one of the trailer parks down here and she’s having a hard time fitting in. I gave her my card and told her to give me a call for some coffee some time.
Of course, she won’t call. I’m going to have to go backwards and she if I can find out her phone number instead.
It made me wonder if there is something we’ve lost.
In Patriot Graves, the Civil War book, here’s what would happen every Decoration Day (Memorial Day) in Arroyo Grande.
The old veterans and local schoolchildren would start a little parade and then march to the cemetery to honor their comrades who had passed on. Their would be patriotic songs and speeches and recitations–like “Barbara Fritchie,” the poem that Churchill recited once from memory to an astonished FDR– and all the things they made kids do in 1905. They were the kinds of things we still did at Branch School in 1958.
When that was all over, the veterans and the schoolchildren would walk (or ride, for the older vets) back to the IOOF Hall or the Grand Army of the Republic Hall, then across Bridge Street, and have a big chicken dinner.
The thought charms me: I can see the image of an silky-bearded veteran of Chancellorsville or Gettysburg or Missionary Ridge sitting next to an eight-year-old girl missing those top front teeth and both of them getting a little messy eating their chicken.
Maybe that never happened, but I think it did.
The idea of two generations so distant from each other–one ascending the arc of their lives, the other nearing its end–sitting down to table together seems to me to be such a healthy and vital idea.
Civil War veterans suffered terribly from PTSD and from drug and alcohol addiction; a decade after the war, 80% of the inmates in American prisons were veterans. The psychic damage the war had inflicted on them is what brought many veterans to Arroyo Grande. This was a place where they could start over again. For some, this was their third and final chance to start over: a third of the veterans buried in our cemetery had moved at least twice before coming to Arroyo Grande or Nipomo. They’d run out of continent.
So they were restless and troubled men and kept most of this hidden, of course.
Marching alongside children and then chatting with them over chicken dinners must have healed, if just a little, so many of the wounds so many of them carried.
Their wounds were invisible, for the most part–although many local veterans died decades after the war from wounds or disease they’d suffered as young men, and they’re not counted among the 620,000 lives we lost in that war. But, of course, the invisible wounds were deep and painful and, most of all, they were fearful.
Having a child–her littleness next to your relative bigness–sitting next to eat you can either be terror-inducing, or it can be enchanting, once you begin to chat.
Then you weren’t thinking about the eighteen-year-old brother you saw die in the Shenandoah Valley in 1862. All your attention would have been riveted, as you smiled with the teeth you had left, at the little girl with the gap in her teeth trying her best to eat her drumstick.
Here’s what children meant to one of those veterans: Richard Merrill, buried in our cemetery, fought at Antietam, the deadliest battle in American history, and at Chancellorsville. He contracted a disease, possibly dysentery, and was, according to a family history, “a great sufferer” for the rest of his life. He married, but his job history is a checkered one. He never joined any veterans’ group. So far as I know, he never talked about the war, not even with his wife.
His last job was at the Arroyo Grande Grammar School, on the site of today’s Ford agency. When Civil War veteran Richard Merrill, the school janitor, died in 1909, the children asked their teachers if they could have the afternoon off on the day of the old soldier’s funeral. Permission was granted them.
“Mr. Merrill,” his obituary concludes, “was a great favorite with the children.”
My friend and former AGHS history student Eddie Matthews and I talked recently about the seemingly contradictory nature of friendships. They don’t always depend on length or frequency of contact. Sometimes someone comes into your life just a few times and Eddie’s point, over our coffees, was that even a casual friendship like that can still evolve into one of the most meaningful friendships of your life.
That’s just the case with another friend, Al Findley Jr, of Los Osos, once a B-24 Liberator radioman who survived having two of his aircrew’s bombers shot down during World War II. The second time, he lost four of the most meaningful friends of his life.
Findley next to his B-24.
Al died on April 28, at 96. His time had come. He’d had a long and extremely successful Air Force career and then became fascinated with antiques and that would become his retirement avocation. He retired to a beautiful place, Los Osos, and he left behind many friends.
I only met and talked to Al maybe four or five times. He was one of my sources for a book called Central Coast Aviators in World War II. But I count him as one of the best friends of my life. And so I miss him.
That’s what happens when you write books. In fact, the people you write about don’t even have to be alive to become close to you and important to you.
Two friends, Gregory and Findley, at the Estrella Warbirds Museum.
In old newspapers, I’ve been able to follow some local World War II servicemen throughout the course of their lives. Others left letters that were funny or poignant or even enchanting. Many were killed in action, but they became–not friends, exactly–to be honest, these soldiers from my parents’ generation became my sons.
In the 1930s, American social critics condemned that generation’s teens as self-centered, pleasure-seeking and lazy.
There’s just the slightest chance that those critics were right.
But then 400,000 of those young Americans died. That’s 400,000 military men and women. In 1942, as our industrial production surged, more Americans died in factory accidents than on the battlefield.
So I am so very proud to have known a World War II veteran who had no business living beyond his twenty-second birthday. And then he had the audacity to not just live such a long life, but to become a joyful person whose optimism was contagious.
A B-24 trails smoke after a flak hit.
By contrast, much of my research begins in cemeteries. But that’s where you start to forget about death and instead begin to reconstruct lives. I write history to give lives back to the town and to the county where I grew up. I believe that old lives have the capacity to inspire us—in fact, they have the capacity to give life.
I’ve found old lives in yellowed newspapers and on tombstones, in copies of service jackets and in rifle company casualty reports. I found one in a copy of the telegram informing a Corbett Canyon farmer and his wife that their twenty-year-old had died five weeks before on Iwo Jima. I’ve found, in encounters even more fleeting than the ones Eddie and I discussed, my surrogate sons and daughters.
One of them died late last month.
Waist gunners, Eighth Air Force, World War II>
Jim Gregory lives in Arroyo Grande. He taught history at Mission Prep and Arroyo Grande High School for thirty years. Eddie Matthews, an editor at Parthian Books, earned his doctorate in creative writing at the University of Swansea, Wales. Dr. Matthews teaches writing at Point Loma Nazarene University.
Command Master Sergeant Albert Lee Findley Jr. of Los Osos died Sunday, April 28, in a San Luis Obispo hospital at age 96. Findley was a B-24 radio operator in World War II and one of the finest men I’ve ever met. These passages about Al are excerpted from the book Central Coast Aviators in World War II.
Band of Brothers
After finishing gunnery school in Yuma, Arizona, Oklahoma-born Corporal Albert Lee Findley Jr. reported to Hammer Field, just outside Fresno, and met his B-24 bomber crew:
I met my pilot, Byron Johnson, from Oklahoma; my copilot, James Gill, from California; my navigator, Robert Cramer, from California; my bombardier, Nolan Willis, from California; my engineer, Morgan Fowler, from South Dakota; my nose gunner, Homer Smith, from Texas; my left gunner, Theodore Mabee, from Illinois; my right waist gunner was James Walter…and he was from some eastern state that I don’t recall, and my tail gunner was Johnny Gates—he was from some eastern state, also. That was the crew. Plus me.
Findley next to his bomber, 1944.
It’s hard to fault Findley for not remembering every one of his crew members’ home states. The Los Osos retiree was speaking from memory in 2013, nearly seventy years after he’d met the men who became “very dear.” The feeling must have been reciprocated, because Findley, in an oral history interview that has become part of a Library of Congress collection, emerges as engaging, well spoken and warm—traits that may have failed him only once, when, two-thirds of the way through his combat tour, he was shot down over Germany.
The first thing a downed airman would do, if he was able, was seek out his surviving comrades. It was an obligation that had begun in the very last stage of training. Finally, the component parts of what would become an aircrew would meet one another and, as Findley did, their aircraft at about the same time. Findley remembered, with a sense of relief, that their brand-new B-24 Liberator came with a ball turret on its underside. Air force commanders in the South Pacific had ordered the turret removed to improve the big bomber’s maneuverability. What Findley and his new crew realized was that they were headed for Europe—a relief because of the oppressive climate and primitive conditions servicemen had to endure in the Pacific.
For most of the war, San Luis Obispo County airmen flew in two types of heavy bombers—the B-17 Flying Fortress or the B-24 Liberator. (By 1944, some would fly the B-29 Superfortress over Japan.) While crews devoted to their B-17s derided the more ungainly B-24 as “the box the B-17 came in,” Liberator crews were just as dedicated to their ships. More B-24s were manufactured—nineteen thousand, with eight thousand built by the retooled Ford Motor Company at its Willow Run plant alone—than any heavy bomber in history. If the B-17 has a more glamorous image, it’s largely due to both its sleek looks and to Hollywood: newly-minted Major William Wyler, who had directed Jezebel, Wuthering Heights and the stirring wartime drama Mrs. Miniver, immortalized the crew of the “Memphis Belle” in the 1943 documentary of the same name. Belle’s crew was the first said to have completed the required twenty-five missions over Europe (a milestone more likely attributed to a B-17, “Hell’s Angels,” part of Morro Bay’s Clair Abbott Tyler’s 303rd Bomb Group, but “Angels” had no Hollywood directors aboard), and so the B-17 became immediately and intimately familiar to Americans. Despite Wyler’s documentary, it was, in the final analysis, the Liberator that may have won the most famous Hollywood advocate: James Stewart, who’d already made films like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Philadelphia Story, became the commanding officer of a B-24 squadron and flew twenty combat missions over Europe. “He was a hell of a good pilot,” one of his bombardiers remembered.
Perhaps the best way to deal with the debate between B-17 and B-24 enthusiasts is to simply leave it alone. Each plane had it advantages: the B-17 could take substantial punishment and was far easier to fly in formation—B-24s demanded considerable muscular strength from their pilots—but the Liberator was faster and carried a heavier payload. The B-17 was more numerous in the European theater while the B-24 was the more common heavy bomber, until the advent of the B-29 Superfortress, in the Pacific.
* * *
Flak
Enemy antiaircraft fire may have been even more dangerous [than German fighters]. Radioman/gunner Albert Lee Findley flew his first mission in his B-24 on September 5, 1944. As he and his crew approached the target, Findley was suddenly enchanted:
I saw a lot of silver things floating out of the air, and I thought “if that’s flak, it’s very lovely.” Shortly after that, I saw the flak, big black bursts, and it shook the airplane. The silver things I saw were chaff that some of the airplanes dropped to foul up their radar. It didn’t work that day, because a lot of the aircraft were hit over the target, including us.
In fact, Findley’s bomber was so badly damaged by flak—radar-directed ground fire from German batteries (the chaff he’d seen was made up of slivers of aluminum foil)—that the pilot had to crash-land the plane in France and, fortunately for Findley and his aircrew, on French soil that had just been liberated by American ground forces. “If this was the first mission,” a smiling Findley remembered decades later, “I wasn’t sure I could make thirty.”
A B-24 doomed by a direct hit.
Flak, from the German word Fliegerabwehrkanone, or “antiaircraft cannon,” was psychologically devastating to World War II fliers, because, unlike their encounters with fighter planes, there was simply nothing they could do to fight back. The twenty-pound enemy shells, fired from ground batteries that were dense around key targets, exploded in angry black puffs that sent steel fragments slicing through wings, fuselage and crewmen. Flight engineer Al Spierling of Arroyo Grande counted over one hundred holes in his B-17 after one mission; on another, shards of flak sliced the oxygen lines necessary to survival at twenty-five thousand feet; the waist gunners and tail gunner in Spierling’s ship kept passing out—symptomatic of anoxia—until he could repair the system. Bomber crews could hear the flak fragments hit as the shell exploded close by, like gravel scattered on a tin roof. They would watch in amazement, as Spierling did on several missions, as gaping holes appeared in the airframe or, in Albert Findley’s case, as an engine caught fire from a flak hit.
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Forty below
As if enemy fighters and flak weren’t enough to worry about, bomber crews also had to deal with the elements: the oxygen supply, of course, was critical at missions flown in unpressurized cabins at twenty-five thousand feet. Masks were donned once the aircraft reached ten thousand feet, and it was the bombardier’s responsibility to do “oxygen checks”—to check in, via intercom, with each crew member every five minutes. But the cold—Radioman Findley remembered temperatures at forty below zero—impinged on breathing, as well; any moisture inside the oxygen mask froze, blocking the air supply, something a crew member might not notice until one of his comrades lost consciousness. (Urine froze as well, so the “relief tube” provided each bomber crew frequently proved useless; veterans used buckets or just relieved themselves inside their clothing..
An airmen demonstrates the kind of layering required for survival at 25,000 feet.
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Powdered Eggs and Creamed Chipped Beef on Toast
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 GI powdered lemonade to wash their socks. Still, even in the AAF, 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 GIs swore they would never eat them again.
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Vive les Américains !
Al Findley was the B-24 Liberator radioman who had the distinction of being shot down on his first combat mission. Luckily for him, his pilot, fellow Oklahoman Byron Johnson, was [a talented pilot] and he brought the bomber down near a French town in Champagne, Epernay, that had just been liberated by the Allies. The good people of Epernay were delighted with their unexpected guests, and…they insisted on wining and dining the young Americans—one of the villagers, Jean-Louis, became pen pals with Findley’s mother back in Oklahoma. The good times lasted for a week, when their squadron commander buzzed Epernay and dropped a testy message: Lieutenant Johnson and his crew were to report to Reims immediately and hitch a ride on an Army C-47 back to base in Attlebridge. The second shootdown, over Germany, would lack the first one’s charms.
Epernay
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“For You, the War Is Over”
The second time B-24 radioman Al Findley was shot down, in February 1945, was on his twenty-sixth mission. The target was Magdeburg, a city once famed for Martin Luther’s preaching but now important to the German war effort for its production of synthetic fuel from lignite coal and so integral to Spaatz’s “oil campaign.” Findley’s bomber had released its payload and was on its way home, over the Ruhr Valley, when it was hit by flak bursts on the tail and on the left wing. Three gunners were injured. Control cables were severed. The pilot ordered Findley and the uninjured aircrew to throw out everything that was loose to lighten the load, but the radioman realized how serious the situation was when he saw the copilot putting on his parachute. “Bail out!” he yelled at Findley. Findley obeyed and, on his way down, saw two more parachutes. He landed hard, was knocked unconscious and woke up to see three German farmers—two with pitchforks, one with a shotgun—standing over him
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Both Findley and [San Luis Obispo] B-17 copilot 2nd Lt Robert Potter] Dwight were captured as the war entered its final months. Findley would later learn that he’d lost four crewmates; five others, besides Findley, became prisoners of war—it was two weeks before his pilot, Byron Johnson, was captured. The twenty-year-old radioman was put on a train to an interrogation center in Oberursel, north of Frankfurt, where he spent eleven days in solitary confinement, living on a diet of coffee, brown bread and “some kind of soup.” He was finally interrogated by a Luftwaffe major who asked him about the impact of the new ballistic missile, the V-2, that was the last of Hitler’s “miracle weapons” to be unleashed on Britain. Findley responded with his name, rank and serial number. He was a little rattled, as most captured airmen were, when his interrogator, in a little show, started talking about Findley’s bomb group, the 466th—“he probably knew more about my outfit than I did,” the American remembered.
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Once downed fliers had been interrogated, their usefulness was at an end, and they then became part of the Luftwaffe-administered prison camp system. Al Findley was part of a prisoner-of-war shipment bound for an overcrowded camp, Stalag XIII-D, near Nuremberg, Bavaria, sited on a parade ground that was once the scene, in Hitler’s heyday, for Nazi Party rallies. Findley remembered a camp that was overcrowded—Allied airmen in other camps had been brought to this one as the Red Army began to overrun eastern Germany—and rife with dysentery, bedbugs and fleas. “I think I spent half my time in the chow line,” he remembered ruefully, where standard fare was soup with bugs in the beans, which he and his comrades decided were their meat supply. (In reality, the diet for German civilians wasn’t much better.) The poor conditions were relieved by a reunion with his B-24 crew, with the pilot the last man to come into the prison camp. Pilot Byron Johnson cried when Findley and the other survivors told him about the four lost crewmen, including the lost flight engineer, the only married man with a child among the crew, who had gone back to get the gunners out and wound up dying with them.
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Findley’s confinement ended on April 4, 1945, when the prisoners of Stalag XIII-D were ordered out and into the countryside as George Patton’s Third Army closed in. While on the march, Findley and his fellow prisoners had to endure friendly fire: they were strafed by American fighters who mistook them for German troops. (Findley’s boxcar, on its way to Nuremberg, had likewise been strafed by Allied fighters.) At their stopping point the next day, the prisoners garnered enough toilet paper to spell out “POW” in the field where they were to sleep. Fighters passed over them, but this time the planes waggled their wings and departed. The bedraggled column finally stopped at Moosburg, ninety miles south of Nuremberg, where they were united with prisoners of war herded from Stalag VII. A week later, Findley and the mass of prisoners realized one morning that the Germans were gone. Third Army arrived at Moosburg at about noon, and Al Findley was free. Both Findley and Dwight would be flown to a recuperation center near Le Havre, Camp Lucky Strike, where their injuries would be tended to (Dwight’s shoulder would eventually require surgery) and where, as Findley noted, “they fattened us up again.” They were then put on ships and sent home.
Al Findley’s POW photograph.
Al Findley and me at the Estrella Warbirds Museum, about a year before his death.
A Work in Progress 