From a kind of round-robin email to family:

Great Uncle Willie’s home in Minneapolis–the little fellow with the  yellow door.

 

Video link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ydE-jzczpi8KSpe_d9RDIj1zQDwjcBfJ/view?usp=sharing

There was a tragic accident in Connecticut this morning when a vintage B-17G, “Nine O Nine,” crashed. The plane was a frequent visitor to our area, to San Luis Obispo County. My son and I saw this beautiful airplane, restored to resemble the 1943 original, which flew 140 combat missions with the 91st Bomb Group without a fatality. The chief of the B-17’s ground crew won a Bronze Star because his airplane flew 126 consecutive missions without aborting for a mechanical failure.

That streak ran out this morning, when this ship, built in 1944, lost an engine and went down just short of the runway.

I wrote a book about aviators from my area— San Luis Obispo and northern Santa Barbara Counties.

I learned that a bomber squadron was usually made up of twenty B-17s like “Nine O Nine.” On maximum effort days—in the spring of 1944—there would be eight hundred to a thousand of these airplanes, both B-17s and B-24s, going into the air in shifts all over East Anglia. They would rattle dishes and wedding crystal in the modest homes below as they assembled and headed east.

Typically, B-17 pilots were twenty-two years old. Gunners were teenagers. There were liars among them as young as fifteen. San Luis Obispo County lost eighteen of these young fliers during World War II, both in combat and in horrific training accidents from Texas to Montana to South Carolina.

Among the young men who made it overseas, one, from Arroyo Grande, died when his B-17 flew into the side of Mount Skiddaw in England’s Lake District. Another, from Morro Bay, was shattered in his co-pilot’s seat by a cannon round from a Focke-Wulf 190. A San Luis Obispo navigator died when a Messerschmitt 109 collided with his B-17. A Templeton B-24 gunner took off on a mission that was scrubbed because of weather; when his bomber crashed returning to base, his aircrew were the only Eighth Air Force casualties that day.

At least two local men served in “Nine O Nine’s” 91st Bomb Group.

Robert Abbey Dickson’s B-17, “Wheel and Deal,” was brought down by antiaircraft fire over the Ruhr Valley in 1943. Dickson bailed out and when he hit the ground, the first German he met was an angry farmer armed with a vintage World War I Mauser. The young American was rescued by two Luftwaffe soldiers who rode up on a motorcycle and sidecar and fetched him back to their 88-mm gun emplacement. It suddenly occurred to Dickson that this might be the gun that had brought his bomber down.

But it was lunchtime. The first thing Dickson’s captors did was to offer him a bowl of potato soup.

Henry Hall of Cayucos was a twenty-year-old gunner on “Black Monday,” in March 1944, when Eighth Air Force undertook a “maximum” effort mission, with nearly a thousand heavies sent into the air. At this point in the war, the B-17s and B-24s weren’t just strategic weapons. They were bait, intended to bring up German fighters so state-of-the-art American fighters, like the P-51, could begin to winnow the young Germans down. But the winnowing that Hall saw involved Americans. Hall watched, horrified, as an Me-109’s attack on a nearby B-17 took effect. The plane’s right-wing landing gear dropped lazily. Then it began to go in, and on its way down, it clipped two more B-17s and sent them in, as well. That mission turned out to be fruitless: the target was obscured and Hall’s ship dropped its bombload on a “target of opportunity,” a German village—one, Hall thought, that had done little harm to any Americans— on its way home. It was a terrible day for Hall’s aircrew.

What kept them together, I learned, and kept them flying in unpressurized cabins where hypoxia and frostbite were common, when they endured sudden, terrifying attacks from German fighters so fast that no gunner could track them—those fighters, too, were flown by twenty-two year-olds—and when flak sliced through wings, fuselage, air hoses and human beings, was their devotion to each other.

You could not let your friends down.

I learned, too, that among their best friends were the British schoolchildren who lined airfield fences along the tarmac at the start of every mission.

They were there to wave goodbye to their Americans, who were loud and boisterous, friendly and incredibly generous, with endless supplies of Hershey bars, because these young men had grown up in the Depression, and they knew what the British children, after their six years of war, knew. They knew what deprivation was like.

So those children were there for their Yanks.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=17RhbYpC6RRzouV2PKMd2LZpN09bK57P_

I’ve been retired five years. You would think I wouldn’t have to teach this lesson every year then and every year since.

But it needs to be taught because it obviously hasn’t registered in some dark places.

Using a word like “disloyal” is so pernicious. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, sentenced to Devil’s Island after a court-martial that brought France to the brink of civil war, was accused of disloyalty.

Statelessness would be one of the canards that would be used to excuse the persecution and attempted extermination of European Jewry.  The flip side of that canard is the suggestion that somehow being an American Jew—in other words, an American—requires loyalty to Netanyahu’s Israel, to his particular brand of chauvinism, which has such ironic precursors.

“Jews will not replace us,” the crowd, made up of fine people, chanted in Charlottesville.  Students in an Orange County’s Pacifica High School were recorded, in a video released earlier this week ,giving the Nazi salute.

I don’t understand the kind of stupidity that embraces deliberate forgetting. I never will.

Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.
—Julius Caesar II.i.18-19

I’ve been reading extensively about laws and legality on Facebook lately. Most of what I’ve read would be funny but the people who write these things take themselves so seriously. Their insistence on obedience to the law, at the expense of compassion and logic, isn’t funny. It’s heartless. And it’s terrifying.

So for all of you legal eagles out there, especially those who specialize in illegal immigration, here are things in the past that have been scrupulously legal:

–The Sanhedrin turning Christ over to the Romans for crucifixion. But Christ had committed sedition, once with such delicacy, by saying “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” not a comment on obeying civil law, but a subtle and very sharp dig at the illegitimacy of Roman coinage, frequently debased, and so at Roman authority.

–The Fourth Lateran Council, 1215, required European Jews to wear badges—Stars of David, a precursor to the laws of Nazi-occupied Europe. You can still see bolts of cloth with Stars of David ready for the cutting in the Jewish Museum in Amsterdam.

–A series of laws enacted by the Scottish Parliament in the 1500s and early 1600s that mandated the death sentence for convicted witches. Witchcraft convictions, in duly-constituted civil courts, were particularly common in Scotland and Reformation Germany, where the overwhelming majority of victims were women, immediately suspect in a time of great social and political change.

–The Indian Removal Act of 1830, when gold was found on Cherokee land, was perfectly legal. Until John Marshall’s Supreme Court struck it down. The removal was nonetheless enforced by Andrew Jackson, the present president’s hero, who reportedly said: “Marshall has made his decision. Now let him try to enforce it.”

–Slave codes forbade the legal recognition of slave marriages, making it convenient for slaveholders in the Upper South to break up families for sale to the harsh conditions of places like Louisiana or the Mississippi Delta. One Virginia mother, to be sold South away from her children, defied the law by chopping off her foot with a hatchet to queer the deal.

–The legal justification for the Mexican War was that American soldiers had been killed on American soil. One young Congressman who disputed this was savaged for his lack of patriotism when he urged a series of resolutions, the “Spot Resolutions,” which demanded the government reveal the exact spot—more than likely on disputed territory along the Nueces River—where, more than likely, the war that gave us one-third of Mexico had begun illegally.

The Congressman was Abraham Lincoln.

–The Fugitive Slave Act, part of the Compromise of 1850, required northerners to return runaways to their masters. Thousands of white people flagrantly and shamelessly broke this law.

–In 1872, sixteen women were arrested for breaking the law. They attempted to vote.

–In the South before the civil rights movement, it was illegal for a black driver to pass a white driver on the road. No matter who arrived at an intersection first, the black driver had to yield the right of way to the white driver.

–In 1930-32, the Hoover Administration and local law enforcement officers, including the LAPD, “repatriated” 1.6 million Mexicans rounded up in raids throughout the Southwest. 60% of them were U.S. citizens. Four years later, the LAPD also appeared at the Arizona border to turn away more U.S. citizens, refugees from the Dust Bowl.

–Executive Order 9066, which led to the imprisonment of West Coast Japanese-Americans, was, according to Franklin Roosevelt, completely lawful, despite the objections of two powerful Americans: FDR’s attorney general, Francis Biddle, and the First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt. By the way, it had been long illegal for Issei, first-generation Japanese immigrants, to become citizens because they were not white people. This was based on law, on the Naturalization Act of 1790.

 

My ancestors came here legally.

That’s because there was no way for them to come here otherwise. They weren’t Chinese, they weren’t Filipinas, they weren’t Guatemalans.

They were from England, Ireland and Germany, so they broke no laws, most importantly the Naturalization Act of 1790. By happy accident, they were white people. That gave them substantial claim to legality and far more comfortable train seats.

Would I come here legally if I lived in a place like Guatemala, where my kids’ lives were threatened by street gangs or by government-sponsored death squads? The latter, by the way, have been a longtime South of the Border custom born, bred, trained and armed by the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia.

You bet I would. And that’s what thousands of “illegals” have tried to do: To present themselves, under international refugee law–laws drafted in the wake of the ill-fated ship St. Louis and the logical outcome of that debacle, lives swept up in chimneys in places like Auschwitz–at American ports of entry. Most of them, ultimately, would have been denied entry by immigration courts. That doesn’t matter. They’ve been turned away from the immigration courts and they’re sweltering in Mexico today. Those are the lucky ones. The others are in Immigration and Naturalization lockup.

Would I come here illegally if I lived in a place like Guatemala, where my kids’ lives were threatened by street gangs or government-sponsored death squads?

You bet I would.

Would I come here to work illegally slaughtering chickens in the fetid Mississippi heat if it meant my kids had a chance at a college education? Or at surviving to adulthood? Would I be willing to work and live here if it meant paying American taxes and obeying every American law,  except for the one that forbids me from being a better father? Would I try to be someone as devoted to his children as that slave mother had been to hers?

You bet I would.

Whose job am I taking?  There are now too many jobs and not enough white Americans to fill them. I’ll take one of those. As an immigrant, who am I hurting?

No one.

Who am I helping?

This one. Her father loves her more than life itself. She knows that. She feels, at this moment of missing him, a fear so powerful that we can only pray that we will never feel anything like it.

 

None of this matters, the legal eagles cackle—the law being such a splendid shield to conceal moral cowardice.

The law has been used so skillfully to that end from characters as disparate as Henry VIII, who used the headsman to rid himself of embarrassments like Thomas More, and Henry Clay Frick, who used instant deputies, Pinkertons, to shoot down the steel strikers at Homestead.

What if it’s the law—and those who insist on its application, their power disjoined from remorse—who are evil?

So what would you do in the chicken-slaughterer’s place, a man who, more than likely, did come here legally but who’s overstayed his visa?

That reminds me. My car payment is overdue.

 

 

 

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.

Inside were six new pairs of socks.