Meaning and Inspiration – Page 2 – Literary Art and Illustration

Air Combat at 20 Feet, by Garrett E. Middlebrook – 1989 [Fred Moore]

“May you live unenvied,
and pass many pleasant years unknown to fame;
and also have congenial friends.”
– Ovid

“A tribute which bears full truth and honesty
will refuse to apply the conventional words of courage,
gallantry, heroism and bravery to the acts
which every fallen soldier was performing at the time of his death.
Some of our beloved comrades died embittered, scared and lonely deaths.
None ever “gladly” died because they were inspired by patriotism.
But they all died in the fulfillment of their duty.”
– Garrett Middlebrook

Like R.E. “Peppy” Blount’s We Band of Brothers, Garrett Middlebrook’s Air Combat At 20 Feet is an account of the experiences of a B-25 Mitchell “strafer” pilot in the Pacific Theater of War, an aspect of Second World War military aviation history that’s generated far fewer first-hand accounts than – for example – fighter combat in general, or, the Eighth Air Force’s aerial campaign against Germany. Perhaps this has been because the magnitude of Pacific Air Combat involved smaller numbers of men and aircraft – and thus total cumulative losses of either – than strategic bombing in Europe; possibly because due to factors of distance, climate, and living conditions, the Pacific engendered less attention and both public and media awareness than air combat in Europe. And, maybe this is because – well, just an idea – in light of the above, in the decades following WW II, veterans of “strafer” units felt less impetus to preserve their memories in written form, out of the perception that the public would simply not be that interested in their memoirs. (I don’t know. Well, like I said, just an idea!)

But, there isn’t necessarily a relationship between quantity and quality, for Garrett Middlebrook’s book is almost singular in its nature (Peppy Blount’s book sharing the other half of the literary spotlight), and definitely singular in its historical, emotional, and literary quality. At over 400 pages long and dense with detail, the book’s foremost aspect to me is actually the depth and sensitivity of Middlebrook’s writing, which – though very rich in detail about his military experiences – in a not-so-subtle way, directs a greater focus on recollection of his fellow aviators, both those who survived, and those who did not, in what might be deemed an understandably cathatric fashion. Two such individuals, among many, are Major Ralph Cheli and navigator 2 Lt. Louis J. Ritacco, both of whom were murdered while POWs. Another notable aspect of the book is that it provides a platform for Garrett Middlebrook to present thoughts of a philosophical nature, in forms of either lengthy musings, or dialogues with fellow members of the 405th Bomb Squadron, about the cruelty and comradeship inherent to war, government, economics, and, human nature. To give you an inkling of the depth of his thoughts, this post includes – below – some passages from the book.

As for the book’s cover art, well, it’s unusual. Though the B-25s (on front and rear covers), and Japanese Oscar (on the rear cover; the covers don’t form a continuous painting) are aren’t perfectly proportioned compared to the appearance of the actual aircraft, the symbolism of both covers is very striking, as are the colors that were used to create these compositions. They’re both simple and complex at once, and reminiscent of the style of “Grandma Moses” (Anna Mary Robertson Moses).

My only criticism of the book is its paucity of photographs, for images of the many men mentioned within its pages would give the text even greater impact. And, though the book does feature an image of Garrett Middlebrook’s crew, it’s strangely lacking a good image of Garrett – himself.

This blog post rectifies that: Here’s a portrait of Garrett sitting in the pilot’s seat of a B-25. It’s U.S. Army Air Force photo “A47039 / 4002”, from Fold3.com. The caption? “Captain Garrett B. Middlebrook, Springtown, Texas, Fifth Air Force bomber pilot who has been awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by General MacArthur “for extraordinary heroism in action” in New Guinea.”

“Print received from B.P.R. (Air Forces Group), date unknown.”

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Some passages, with mention of Major Ralph Cheli…

Even though I could not conquer my fear of death,
I felt it would be a sin and a violation of my manhood not to fight to live,
even though I might only extend my life one day or one hour.
It would also have been a grievous sin if I did not give all I had by way of experience,
skill, innovative methods, leadership and calm, collective demeanor to my comrades.
Perhaps if I did all that I could to assuage their fears and motivate them to fight,
one more crew would survive.
Besides, it only made sense that I had a better chance to survive if I did all those things.
I thought of Cheli; I knew he had experienced fear,
but he had controlled it never allowing it to surface in an apparent way.
Perhaps, I thought, notwithstanding centuries of rhetoric about courage,
all it really amounted to was the concealment of personal fear.
In all probability, that was all Cheli had done –
concealed his fear and kept it hidden even when he was going down.

For over a year I had lived within a few yards of the jungle
together with the other crewmen in my squadron.
Although we were all male and far from home and civilization,
we did form a little social community.
Values still existed, morals still prevailed
and it was important to me that my comrades respected me.
Respect was not something they accorded to me ceremoniously;
instead, they showed it only if I earned it through leadership
and I had to prove that leadership again on each mission.

When I came to grips with myself,
I knew I could not lose their respect nor fail to perform my duties to them.
I admitted to myself at last,
that although I fought first for personal survival,
I was also duty-bound to the survival of the group. (pp. 401-403)

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Here’s the insignia of an original (early 1945) Australian manufactured 405th BS “Green Dragon” squadron patch (from Flying Tiger Antiques).

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Images of Garrett Middlebrook with two crews, from the book Sun Setters of the Southwest Pacific Area – From Australia to Japan: An Illustrated History of the 38th Bombardment Group (m), 5th Air Force, World War II – 1941-1946, As Told and Photographed by the Men Who Were There. Most, if not all, of the men in these images are mentioned or described in Middlebrook’s book.

Captions appear below both photos.

The crew of 1 Lt. Garrett Middlebrook. Front, from left, are S/Sgt.Robert J. Kappa, engineer-gunner; Sgt. Robert T. Lillard, Jr., radio operator; Sgt. George R. Pizor, gunner. Back, from left, are 1 Lt. Middlebrook, pilot; 2 Lt. Leonard D. Perry, bombardier; 2 Lt. Louis J. Ritacco, navigator, and an unidentified airman. (George Pizor collection)

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Capt. Garrett Middlebrook and his crew. Front, from left, are S/Sgt. Robert S. Emminger, gunner, and T/Sgt. Robert T. Lillard, Jr., radio operator. Back, from left, are 1 Lt. Everett L. Moffett, navigator, Capt. Middlebrook, pilot, and Capt. William H. Tarver, pilot and aircraft commander. (Garrett Middlebrook collection)

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1 Lt. Louis J. Ritacco. He was a member of Major Williston Madison Cox, Jr.’s crew in B-25D 41-30118 (“Elusive Lizzie” / “Miss America”), which was shot down by anti-aircraft fire during a search and destroy mission near the town of Madang. One member of the crew of six was killed when the plane was ditched, and the five survivors swam to nearby Wongat Island, where four (including Major Cox) were captured later that day. Lt. Ritacco evaded capture for several days, but without food or water, was forced to give himself up to the Japanese.

Eventually, Major Cox was flown to the Japanese base at Rabaul, and from there placed upon a transport ship and taken to Japan where, at Omori POW camp, he spent the remainder of the war as a POW.

Lt. Ritacco and his three surviving crew members remained at Madang, where – with another member of the 38th Bomb Group who was also a POW, 2 Lt. Owen H. Salvage – they were murdered by their captors on August 17, 1943.

You can read much more about this story at the history of B-25D 41-30118 and its crew, at Pacific Wrecks.

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This image shows Louis J. Ritaccco as an Army Air Force aviation cadet…

…and his tombstone, at Saint Mary’s Cemetry, Rye Brook, New York, as photographed by FindAGrave contributor James Mayer.

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And, below is Williston M. Cox, Jr.’s Aviation Cadet portrait.

Williston Madison Cox., Jr. passed away in 1980. Of all the members of the 38th Bomb Group taken prisoner by the Japanese, he was the only man to survive captivity and return to the United States.

The above two portraits are from the United States National Archives’ collection “Photographic Prints of Air Cadets and Officers, Air Crew, and Notables in the History of Aviation”, about which you can read more, here. The story of Major Cox and his crew is addressed at length by Garrett Middlebrook.

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EPILOGUE

The painful irony of war is that, aside from human loss,
suffering and agony, it creates more problems than it solves.
The victors, becoming powerful and dominating,
form new rivalries more intense than those which existed with the vanquished.
The peace treaties which are imposed upon the vanquished
are enigmatic riddles bereft of reason and certain
only to permit clever and ambitious politicians to start the next cycle of international friction
as a means of maintaining power.
Of course, in the process the memory of the war dead from the previous war must be dimmed;
otherwise enthusiasm for the next war would never be tolerated.

But we combat veterans dare not let their memory fade,
for God help a nation which forgets its war dead.
Hence this chronicler acknowledges a debt of immense gratitude to
the fallen World War II Service men and women.

A tribute which bears full truth and honesty
will refuse to apply the conventional words of courage,
gallantry, heroism and bravery to the acts
which every fallen soldier was performing at the time of his death.
Some of our beloved comrades died embittered, scared and lonely deaths.
None ever “gladly” died because they were inspired by patriotism.
But they all died in the fulfillment of their duty.
Courage, valiancy, dauntlessness, heroism and bravery are words used by the living
to try to place the altar of patriotism on the field of battle.
It does not belong there and it will not accurately reflect the sacrifices of our fellow comrades
even if it is erected.

But the Shrine of Duty,
embossed with walls of shining gold,
stands proudly upon that hallowed ground.
It stands because our war dead performed their duty to their comrades
and their commitment to themselves.
We do them a grave injustice if we condemn them for lacking the qualities we have selected for them.
They gave all they had to give
and their names must forever be spoken softly and reverently or else evil will fall upon this country,
for if we do not revere our war dead, we are unworthy of their sacrifice. (pp. 449-450)

References

Middlebrook, Garrett, Air Combat at 20 Feet – Selected Missions From a Strafer Pilot’s Diary (A World War II Autobiography) [2nd Printing – Expanded Edition], Garrett Middlebrook, Fort Worth, Tx., 1989

Hickey, Lawrence J.; Janko, Mark M.; Goldberg, Stuart W., and Tagaya, Osamu, Sun Setters of the Southwest Pacific Area – From Australia to Japan: An Illustrated History of the 38th Bombardment Group (m), 5th Air Force, World War II – 1941-1946, As Told and Photographed by the Men Who Were There, International Historical Research Associates, Boulder, Co. (and) The 38th Bomb Group Association – (or) Albert A. Kennedy, Sr. (or) David Gunn, 2011

Astounding Science Fiction – July, 1947 (Featuring “With Folded Hands…”, by Jack Williamson) [William Timmins]

William Timmins’ straightforward and somewhat uninspiring covert art, though visually consistent with and appropriate for “With Folded Hands…”, belies the depth, power, and literary quality of Jack Williamson’s 1947 story. In 1954, it was expanded as Galaxy Science Fiction Novel number 21, under the title The Humanoids, with cover art by Edward Emshwiller.

I discovered Williamson’s tale years ago, within “Volume IIA” of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

The story was one of fifty science fiction stories adapted by Ernest Kinoy and George Lefferts for the NBC 1950-1951 radio program Dimension X, and broadcast on April 15, 1950. You can listen to the program here, at the American Radio Classics YouTube channel, where, oddly, it’s listed under the category of “comedy”.

“Comedy?!” Nooo… No. It’s not a comedy.

I was reminded of Williamson’s story in the mid-1990s after reading Norbert Wiener’s The Human Use of Human Beings, which I found to be eerily – nay, chillingly! – prescient (albeit now, 69 years too early…), imbued with a sense of compassion, and, composed with an almost poetic sense of language (though obviously not poetry, per se!). Above all, the “tone” of the book is one of deep humility, and, a profound, refreshing absence of the ideologically motivated hubris that passes for intellectuality, so characteristic of the current age. In this, the book’s resemblance to Sir Roger Penrose’s works on the origin and nature of consciousness is striking.

Anyway… I read With Folded Hands once again, and found that Williamson’s story had lost neither its depth nor its impact despite the passage of time. (Other science fiction stories? Not always so much.)

It’s interesting that Williamson’s story and Wiener’s book appeared within three years of one another. This may attest to a commonality of thought about the implications and effect – viewed from the perspective of the mid-twentieth century, the Second World War having ended only a few years earlier – of the intersection of and anticipation of several technological and social trends: Automation, the eventuality of artificial intelligence and machine learning (though I doubt those phrases were conceived of as such, at the time), and computer networks (the humanoids are in constant real-time communication with one another, after all), upon the economic and social “place” of men, both individually and collectively.

Excerpts from Norbert Wiener’s book (1973 Discus edition) follow, a little further down this post..

“At your service,” Mr. Underhill.” Its blind steel eyes stared straight ahead, but it was still aware of him. “What’s the matter, sir? Aren’t you happy?”

(Since creating this post in May of 2019, I’ve acquired a copy of the July, 1947, Astounding, in much better condition than the original – which is displayed at the “bottom” of this post. The “new” copy, minus chipped edges and missing corners, is shown below…)

Underhill felt cold and faint with terror.
His skin turned clammy.
A painful prickling came over him.
His wet hand tensed on the door handle of the car,
but he restrained the impulse to jump and run.
That was folly.
There was no escape.
He made himself sit still.

“You will be happy, sir,” the mechanical promised him cheerfully.
“We have learned how to make all men happy under the Prime Directive.
Our service will be perfect now, at last.

Even Mr. Sledge is very happy now.”

Underhill tried to speak, but his dry throat stuck.
He felt ill.
The world turned dim and gray.
The humanoids were prefect – no question of that.
They had even learned to lie, to secure the contentment of men

He knew they had lied.
That was no tumor they had removed from Sledge’s brain,
but the memory,
the scientific knowledge,
and the bitter disillusion of their own creator.
Yet he had seen that Sledge was happy now.

He tried to stop his own convulsive quivering.

“A wonderful operation!”
His voice came forced and faint.
“You know Aurora has had a lot of funny tenants,
but that old man was the absolute limit.
They very idea that he had made the humanoids,
that he knew how to stop them! I always knew he must be lying!”

Stiff with terror, he made a weak and hollow laugh.

“What is the matter, Mr. Underhill?”

The alert mechanical must have perceived his shuddering illness.

“Are you unwell?”

“No, there’s nothing the matter with me,” he gasped desperately.
“Absolutely nothing!
I’ve just found out that I’m perfectly happy under the Prime Directive.
Everything is absolutely wonderful.”
His voice came dry and hoarse and wild.
“You won’t have to operate on me.”
The car turned off the shining avenue,
taking him back to the quiet splendor of his prison.
His futile hands clenched and relaxed again, folded on his knees.

There was nothing left to do.

( – Jack S. Williamson – )

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Illustration by Hubert Rogers, for Jack Williamson’s story “And Searching Mind” (Astounding Science Fiction, May, 1948 – Part III of III) (p. 118)

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The Human Use of Human Beings
by Norbert Wiener
Avon Books – (1950) 1973

In the myths and fairy tales that we read as children
we learned a few of the simpler and more obvious truths of life,
such as that when a djinnee is found in a bottle,
it had better be left there;
that the fisherman who craves a boon from heaven too many times on behalf of his wife
will end up exactly where he started;
that if you are given three wishes, you must be very careful what you wish for.
These simple and obvious truths represent the childish equivalent of the tragic view of life
which the Greeks and many modern Europeans possess,
and which is somehow missing in this land of plenty.

“Whether we entrust our decisions to machines of metal,
or to those machines of flesh and blood

which are bureaus
and vast laboratories
and armies
and corporations,

we shall never receive the right answers to our questions unless we ask the right questions.”

I have said that the modem man,
and especially the modern American,
however much “know-how” he may have, has very little “know-what.”
He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions
without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind these.
In doing so, he will put himself sooner or later in the position of the father
in W.W. Jacobs’ The Monkey’s Paw, who has wished for a hundred pounds,
only to find at his door the agent of the company for which his son works,
tendering him one hundred pounds as a consolation for his son’s death at the factory.
Or again, he may do it in the way of the Arab fisherman in the One Thousand and One Nights,
when he broke the Seal of Solomon on the lid of the bottle which contained the angry djinnee.

Let us remember that there are game-playing machines
both of The Monkey’s Paw type and of the type of the Bottled Djinnee.
Any machine constructed for the purpose of making decisions,
if it does not possess the power of learning,
will be completely literal-minded.
Woe to us if we let it decide our conduct,
unless we have previously examined the laws of its action,
and know fully that its conduct will be carried out on principles acceptable to us!
On the other hand,
the machine like the djinnee which can learn and can make decisions on the basis of its learning,
will in no way be obliged to make such decisions as we should have made,
or will be acceptable to us.
For the man who is not aware of this,
to throw the problem of his responsibility on the machine,
whether it can learn or not,
is to cast his responsibility to the winds,
and to find it coming back seated on the whirlwind.

Reference

Bova, Ben (Editor), The Science Fiction Hall of Fame – Volume IIA, Avon Books, New York, N.Y., 1973

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Original cover image, from May of 2019…

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder – November, 1927 [Mary Drevenstedt] [Revised post]

This blog post (my first blog post, from August of 2016) displays the cover, and Mary Drevenstedt’s interior illustrations, for the first (1927) edition of Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey.

You can view cover art for paperback editions of the novel here.

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(Frontspiece)

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Marquesa de Montemayor (37)

Marquesa de Montemayor (65)

Marquesa de Montemayor (77)

Marquesa de Montemayor (86)

Esteban (91)

Esteban (113)

Uncle Pio (149)

Esteban (173)

Uncle Pio (205)

Perhaps an Intention (221)

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder – October, 1949 (November, 1927) [Lawrence Butcher]

My first post at “this” blog – well, my very first blog post, “period”, from August of 2016 – showed the cover and interior illustrations of the first (1927) edition Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. That post (now updated and a little simplified from its original version) included an image of the cover of Washington Square Press Edition’s 1967 paperback edition of Wilder’s novel, which has rather subdued cover art. (See below…)

I’ve since acquired a copy of Pocket Book’s 1949 paperback edition of the book, which clearly and vividly displays Lawrence Butcher’s original cover art upon which the cover of the Washington Square edition was based. Butcher’s art strikingly depicts the central thematic elements of Wilder’s story: Brother Juniper, with a somewhat downcast yet deeply contemplative expression; the “bridge” itself, upon which are walking the the five characters (Alfonso G., Nina, Manuel B., Alfonso V., and Vera N.) whose lives, stories, and ultimate fate form the basis of the novel; the hand (or, Hand?) of fate (or God?), suspended over the bridge in an indeterminate gesture – destiny or salvation, or both? – behind which a sky depicted in yellows of varying brightnesses forms a vivid backdrop. (Note that the very brightest shade of yellow – yellow verging into white – falls directly upon Father Juniper.) Casting the sky in yellow, rather than hues of gray, blue, or violet, creates a visually arresting cover:

Arresting symbolically; arresting aesthetically.

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From all this saddening data
Brother Juniper contrived an index for each peasant.
He added up the total for victims
and compared it with the total for survivors,
to discover that the dead were five times more worth saving.

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It looked almost as though the pestilence had been directed
against the really valuable people in the village of Puerto.

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And on that afternoon
Brother Juniper took a walk along the edge of the Pacific.
He tore up his findings and cast them into the waves;
he gazed for an hour upon the great clouds of pearl
that hang forever upon the horizon of that sea,
and extracted from their beauty a resignation
that he did not permit his reason to examine.

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Here’s the Washington Square Press Edition of the novel. The cover art, obviously adapted from the 1949 Pocket Books edition, has identical elements (except for the Hand above), but perhaps for reasons of copyright, and, budgetary constraints, is vastly simplified from the original version.

If the muted blue and green background doesn’t carry the same visual “punch” of the Pocket Books version, the story, and the novel’s message, remains the same; remains constant.

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The discrepancy between faith and the facts
is greater than is generally assumed.

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And, Pocket Books’ 1972 edition of the novel, the cover of which (I think by Peter Schaumann) is deeply symbolic. Note that Father Juniper’s face – his identity? – has been replaced, if not supplanted, by the Bridge of San Luis Rey.

Those Who Fall, by John G. Muirhead – 1986 [Cover by Eric Joyner, Interior Illustrations by Susan Coons]

This post has been updated to include Tom Ferrell’s laudatory review of Those Who Fall, from The New York Times Book Review. The review follows…

‘I Drop Bombs. That’s My Job’

THOSE WHO FALL
By John Muirhead.
Illustrated. 258 pp. New York:
Random House. $18.95.

By Tom Ferrell

The New York Times Book Review
February 15, 1987

PEOPLE who have been in battle have a claim on our attention, as the Vietnam veterans keep insisting. This is not because we are grateful, or even because we should be. There’s a terrible disproportion between risk and gain, increasing with time. The Americans in a World War I cemetery lost all they had to lose, but it would be a bold and speculative accountant of history who might try to show just how we are better off in 1987 for men who died very young in 1917.

John Muirhead isn’t dead, though men were killed in his plane and more than enough airmen went down in flames before his eyes. He too has trouble defining his claim on our attention. This is how “Those Who Fall” begins:

“I suppose I am like most men who soldiered for a time. I think that something unusual happened to me; some particular meaning was revealed to me so I should set it down. Men have been boring their wives, their children, and other men with these kind of stories from Marathon through Chickamauga, and I’m no different from the lot. Having survived it all, I can’t leave well enough alone, but must ponder on it and remember and talk at least about one part of it that was, I think, a kind of glory.”

Mr. Muirhead, whose first book this is, is now a retired engineer. In early 1944 he was a B-17 pilot based near Foggia, Italy, flying missions up the Adriatic and over the Alps to targets like Regens-burg, Munich and Wiener Neustadt. For combat soldiers, the men of his heavy bomber group enjoyed reasonable material conditions: hot meals, dry beds in which they could safely sleep, even hot water at times. Then they would rise, before dawn, to start a long day’s ride over an armed and hostile industrial society, 10 men in a contraption 75 feet long and weighing not all that much more than a New York City bus.

The chief hazards were fighters – Germany still had at that time enough planes, pilots and fuel to mount a vigorous defense – and flak. “We edged past Pola,” Mr. Muirhead writes, “and were saluted with a barrage of flak that for all but a few bursts fell short of the low-left squadron. Three stray shells exploded in the center of the formation. I could see the orange flame in the middle of the black puffs. Two successive bursts erupted off the tip of our right wing and magically an array of star-shaped holes appeared in our windshield. … It never seemed to us that the flak came from anything on the ground. Not from guns that men fired. Flak came from the sky itself; it blossomed there.” Things got rapidly worse and stayed worse for hours; on this trip to Regensburg, a particularly horrible one, Mr. Muirhead’s left waist gunner was killed, one engine was shot out and his group lost 11 of 21 planes.

• • •

Fear and self-induced amnesia became the poles of Mr. Muirhead’s service life. He avoided knowing the other members of his crews. He tells us, repeatedly, that he forgot why the war was being fought and didn’t want to know. “I work in this little parish,” he tells a nonflying officer friend. “I’m employed to fly a bomber from here to there. I drop some bombs there, and then I come back here – if I’m lucky. That’s my job; I’m used to it.”

On June 28, 1944, he was shot down over Bulgaria, surviving with most of his crew. Defeat brought a kind of relief, but apparently not only because capture enhanced his chances of living out the war. “Peace and comradeship,” he writes, could now replace professional relations among his crew and his new acquaintances in captivity. Though he nowhere says so, I suspect he was glad to see his responsibility diminished. Another pilot’s error in formation that had destroyed two B-17s and 20 men returns oppressively to his memory several times in his narrative.

His P.O.W. camp was atop a hill, with splendid views; but life in it was very lousy, literally. Also hungry and unmedicated, though it isn’t clear that his Bulgarian captors were in much better case; the Germans had stripped their unfortunate ally to support their own military machine as their situation deteriorated on both fronts. In September, with the Russians massed on the Bulgarian border, the camp commandant opened the gate and released the prisoners. What happened after that Mr. Muirhead doesn’t say.

WE haven’t been bored; the battle stuff has been keenly drawn, the terror and desperation, some of it quiet, are as real as can be. There’s a lot of soldierly helling around and a lot of funny obscene conversation, funny in the way reflex obscenity can be when it supplants or augments official military jargon (there’s also a lot of effortful, quasi-poetic writing, much of which deserves good marks for trying). And there’s enough nuts-and-bolts matter about caring for planes and running the squadron to fix the whole tale solidly in the slot of 1944 material technology. All excellent of its kind, and it is a kind, the kind that feeds little bookstores and catalogue houses specializing in “militaria” and “aeronautica.”

But what about the glory? Promised at the start, it begins to glimmer in the P.O.W. camp when the men win a tiny victory over toilet regulations. “To endure we sought to win such trifles to measure the day. We had become aliens of the poorest kind, and we had to find more than bits of bread to live on. … The last hour, the last minute, the last second of the last day, would come to pass, opening the way for us. That would be the moment of our glory, our long-remembered glory.” And so it proved, when Mr. Muirhead and two comrades, with four legs among them, walked out the prison gate and across their hilltop – a victory parade without a band. Military memoirs don’t dare to dress themselves in glory much any more, and maybe you had to be there, but Mr. Muirhead has the courage to trust his memories. I’m convinced he was there.

Tom Ferrell is an editor of The Book Review.

I suppose I am like most men who soldiered for a time.
I think that something unusual happened to me;
some particular meaning was revealed to me so I should set it down.
Men have been boring their wives,
their children,
and other men with these kind of stories from Marathon through Chickamauga,
and I’m no different from the lot.
Having survived it all, I can’t leave well enough alone,
but must ponder on it and remember and talk at least about one part of it that was, I think,
a kind of glory.

On the twenty-third of June, 1944,
I ended my time as a bomber pilot flying out of Italy with the 301st Bomb Group,
and became a prisoner of war in Bulgaria.
My last mission was to Ploesti.
Although that name had its own dreadful sound,
the other places and other names all took their toll
whether you feared them or not.
It mattered very little when you finally bought it.
The odds were, one always knew, that something was going to happen.
It was not felt in any desperate way,
but rather it came as a difference in consciousness
without one’s being aware of the change.
In the squadron we learned to live as perhaps once we were long ago,
as simple as animals without hope for ourselves or pity for one another.
Completing fifty missions was too implausible to even consider.
An alternative, in whatever form it might come, was the only chance.
Death was the most severe alternative.
It was as near as the next mission,
although we would not yield to the thought of it.
We would get through somehow: maybe a good wound,
or a bail-out over Yugoslavia or northern Italy; the second front might open up,
and the Germans might shift all their fighters to the French coast.
We might even make it through fifty missions – a few did.
But such fantasies didn’t really persuade us,
not with our sure knowledge that we were caught in a bad twist of time
with little chance we would go beyond it.
Our lives were defined by a line from the present
to a violent moment that must come for each of us.
The missions we flew were the years we measured to that end,
passing by no different from any man’s except we became old and died soon.

I don’t know whether any of this is true or not.
Everything happened that I have said happened,
but it’s memory now, the shadow of things.
The truth lives in its own time, recall is not the reality of the past.
When friends depart, one remembers them but they are changed;
we hold only the fragment of them that touched us and our idea of them,
which is now a part of us.
Their reality is gone, intact but irretrievable,
in another place through which we passed and can never enter again.
I cannot go back nor can I bring them to me;
so I must pursue the shadows to some middle ground,
for I am strangely bound to all that happened then.
We broke hard bread together and I can’t forget:
Breslau, Steyr, Regensburg, Ploesti, Vienna, Munich, Graz,
and all the others; not cities,
but battlegrounds five miles above them where we made our brotherhood.
It’s gone and long ago; swept clean by the wind, only some stayed.
Part of me lives there still, tracing a course through all the names.
I don’t know why.
What is it that memory wants that it goes through it all again?
Was there something I should have recognized?
Some terrible wisdom?
The kind of awful knowledge that stares out of the eyes of a dying man?
I was at the edge then and almost grasped the meaning,
but I lived and failed the final lesson and came safe home.
I linger now, looking back for them, the best ones who stayed and learned it all.
“It was as if in greeting that three of the tiny creatures came out from the boards around the stove and scurried toward me. I was sitting on Mac’s bunk. He used to feed them crumbs every time he came in the tent. A fourth mouse joined his friends and, while they nibbled happily, I began the sad chore of going through Mac’s belongings.” (pp. 66-67)

“I don’t have any damn matches.”

“I handed him mine. He took them without a word; he struck five of them before he got the pipe going. He had forgotten his cigarette, which was still smoldering on the bomb cart where he had placed it.” (p. 114)

“The ground was rushing up at me! I was moving toward a high ridge! I swept over it, and then I plunged through the upper branches of a giant pine; mu chute caught and was held fast while my inertia drove me over a deep, rocky gorge. My forward motion was violently snubbed, and I was sent rushing back toward a massive trunk. I missed it by three feet, but continued to swing wildly beside it. After a time, the motion ceased. I hung there over the steep incline of the gorge. The base of the tree reached deep into the slope; it was much too far to drop.” (p. 194)

__________

In this strange life, we lived in the narrow dimension of the present.
We didn’t seek the future, for it was not there;
and if we could not move into it or beyond it,
we could not return to our past.
We were dull and listless,
but we did not have the true languor of young men
whose dreams were of worlds ahead of them,
and who saw the present only as prelude to it.

If we were without dreams, without a past or a future,
and were caught in the stillness of the present,
our vision then became wise.
There was peace in the absence of clamor;
there was serenity in the days without battles.
If this tattered place where we lived
were to be the full measure of our lives,
we would find some sweetness in it.
A small mouse nibbling a piece of biscuit in my tent
was as wondrous as a unicorn.
The soiled streets of Foggia were full of light,
and one time when I was walking there,
I heard the pure voice of a woman singing.
I learned each day of the goodness of life.
I cherished what was given to me,
holding it just for the moment it was given,
for I knew it was fragile and could not be held for long.

__________

The Muirhead crew prior to departure for Italy. Author John Muirhead is in front row, far left, holding headphones. Notice that the aircraft in the background is a B-24 Liberator, which the author initially flew before assignment to the 301st Bomb Group. (USAAF photo, from dust jacket of Those Who Fall.)

The Missing Air Crew Report (MACR) – #16203 – covering the author’s final mission: Target Ploesti, Roumania – Date June 23, 1944. John Muirhead, as pilot, is listed first in the crew roster.

The second page of the MACR, listing the crew’s enlisted personnel (flight engineer, radio operator, and aerial gunners).

Eyewitnesses to the loss of Muirhead’s B-17, S/Sgt. William E. Caldwell and S/Sgt. Anthony J. Petrowski.

John Muirhead, mid-1980s.

Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow – 1969 (January, 1970) [Unknown Artist]

Mr. Sammler’s Planet, by Saul Bellow – 1969 (1977) [Roy Ellsworth]

And since he had lasted –
survived –
with a sick headache –
he would not quibble over words –
was there an assignment implicit?
Was he meant to do something?

______________________________

“During the war I had no belief, and I had always disliked the ways of the Orthodox.
I saw that God was not impressed by death.
Hell was his indifference.
But inability to explain is no ground for disbelief.
Not as long as the sense of God persists.
I could wish that it did not persist.
The contradictions are so painful.
No concern for justice?
Nothing of pity?
Is God only the gossip of the living?
Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water,
and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more.
And in our turn we will never be seen again,
once gone through that surface.
But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface.
We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow.
There is no knowledge.
There is longing, suffering, mourning.
These come from need, affection, and love –
the needs of the living creature, because it is a living creature.
There is also strangeness, implicit.
There is also adumbration.
Other states are sensed.
All is not flatly knowable.
There would never have been any inquiry without this adumbration,
there would never have been any knowledge without it.
But I am not life’s examiner, or a connoisseur, and I have nothing to argue.
Surely a man would console, if he could.
But that is not an aim of mine.
Consolers cannot always be truthful.
But very often, and almost daily, I have strong impressions of eternity.
This may be due to my strange experiences, or to old age.
I will say that to me this does not feel elderly.
Nor would I mind if there were nothing after death.
If it is only to be as it was before birth, why should one care?
There one would receive no further information.
One’s ape restiveness would stop.
I think I would miss mainly my God adumbrations in the many daily forms.
Yes, that is what I should miss.
So then, Dr. Lai, if the moon were advantageous for us metaphysically, I would be completely for it.
As an engineering project, colonizing outer space,
except for the curiosity, the ingenuity of the thing,
is of little real interest to me.
Of course the drive, the will to organize this scientific expedition must be one of those irrational necessities that make up life –
this life we think we can understand.
So I suppose we must jump off, because it is our human fate to do so.
If it were a rational matter, then it would be rational to have justice on this planet first.
Then, when we had an earth of saints, and our hearts were set upon the moon,
we could get in our machines and rise up …”
(236-237)

Margotte had much to say.
She did not notice his silence.

By coming back, by preoccupation with the subject,
the dying, the mystery of dying, the state of death.
Also, by having been inside death.
By having been given the shovel and told to dig.
By digging beside his digging wife.
When she faltered he tried to help her.
By this digging, not speaking, he tried to convey something to her and fortify her.
But as it had turned out, he had prepared her for death without sharing it.
She was killed, not he.
She had passed the course, and he had not.
The hole deepened, the sand clay and stones of Poland, their birthplace, opened up.
He had just been blinded, he had a stunned face,
and he was unaware that blood was coming from him
till they stripped and he saw it on his clothes.
When they were as naked as children from the womb,
and the hole was supposedly deep enough, the guns began to blast,
and then came a different sound of soil.
The thick fall of soil.
A ton, two tons, thrown in.
A sound of shovel-metal, gritting.
Strangely exceptional, Mr. Sammler had come through the top of this.
It seldom occurred to him to consider it an achievement.
Where was the achievement? He had clawed his way out.
If he had been at the bottom, he would have suffocated.
If there had been another foot of dirt.
Perhaps others had been buried alive in that ditch.
There was no special merit, there was no wizardry.
There was only suffocation escaped.
And had the war lasted a few months more, he would have died like the rest.
Not a Jew would have avoided death.
As it was, he still had his consciousness, earthliness, human actuality –
got up, breathed his earth gases in and out, drank his coffee,
consumed his share of goods, ate his roll from Zabar’s, put on certain airs –
all human beings put on certain airs – took the bus to Forty-second Street
as if he had an occupation, ran into a black pickpocket.
In short, a living man.
Or one who had been sent back again to the end of the line.
Waiting for something.
Assigned to figure out certain things, to condense, in short views,
some essence of experience, and because of this having a certain wizardry ascribed to him.
There was, in fact, unfinished business.
But how did business finish?
We entered in the middle of the thing and somehow became convinced that we must conclude it.
How?

– Saul Bellow –

Give Us This Day, by Sidney Stewart – 1958 [Harry Scharre?] [Revised post]

(This post has been updated to include the back cover of the 1958 paperback edition of Give Us This Day, as well as the front cover of the 1990 edition. (Scroll to bottom.))

Manila:
December 1941

IN THE LAND where dead dreams go lies the city of Manila,
as it was before the war.
Manila, where the white man didn’t work in the afternoon because it was too hot.
Manila, with its beauty and its poverty and its orchids at five cents apiece.

What could a soldier do with a handful of orchids
if he had no one to give them to?
I used to buy those orchids.
I’d pay my nickel for them and stand there awkwardly holding them in my hand.
I would run my finger over the satin petals and then,
embarrassed,
I would give them to the first little girl I met,
because there was something very lonely about buying orchids
when you had no one to give them to.

____________________

I began to plan the things I wanted to do when I went home.
The promises I had made to the boys about seeing their parents.
I thought of the things that home meant to me.
The things that freedom, and being home, would mean.
I thought of seeing women again, white women,
and being again where people laughed,
where laughter was good and life was good.

I wondered if ever again things would worry me.
I thought what I would do with my life.
I had never asked to live, but God had spared me.
Now I knew there was an obligation within me to justify my life.
I must do something.

My mind wandered back to the times
when Rass and John and Weldon and Hughes
sat together around the fire in the evenings.
We talked about the things we wanted to do
when we were free and we were home again.
Rass had wanted to go into the diplomatic service.
John had wanted to be a professor again.

“I’m going to be a writer,” I said.
“I’m going to write novels.”

We used to laugh about it.
They were interested in the things I wanted to write about.
Once, when we were very hungry, John had turned to me.

“Some day, Sid, I wish you’d put me in one of your books.”

“Yes, Stew,” Rass said.
“I wish you’d write a book about this, about all of us.
Will you?
Could you do that for us one day?
Write a book about all of us.
Something that we could keep.”

I remembered what I had promised them.
I would write a book about them some day.
But I felt cold inside and I thought, “No, they’ll never read that book now,
that book I’m going to write about them.
About their faith and hopes, their goodness and their beliefs.”

______________________________

Biographical blurb about Sidney Stewart, from the jacket of the book’s hardcover (1957) edition.

______________________________

1990 edition of Give Us This Day. Artist? – unknown.

Lost Horizon, by James Hilton – 1933 (1967) [Unknown Artist]

“There is a reason, and a very definite one indeed.
It is the whole reason for this colony of chance-sought strangers living beyond their years.
We do not follow an idle experiment, a mere whimsy.
We have a dream and a vision.
It is a vision that first appeared to old Perrault when he lay dying in this room in the year 1789.
He looked back then on his long life,
as I have already told you,
and it seemed to him that all the loveliest things were transient and perishable,
and that war, lust, and brutality
might some day crush them until there were no more left in the world.
He remembered sights he had seen with his own eyes,
and with his mind he pictured others;
he saw the nations strengthening,
not in wisdom, but in vulgar passions and the will to destroy;
he saw their machine-power multiplying until a single-weaponed man
might have matched a whole army of the Grand Monarque.
And he perceived that when they had filled the land and sea with ruin,
they would take to the air…
Can you say that this vision was untrue?”

“True indeed.”

“But that was not all.
He foresaw a time when men,
exultant in the technique of homicide,
would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger,
every book and picture and harmony,
every treasure garnered through two milleniums,
the small,
the delicate,
the defenseless – all would be lost like the books of Livy,
or wrecked as the English wrecked the Summer Palace in Pekin.”

“I share your opinion of that.”

“Of course.
But what are the opinions of reasonable men against iron and steel?
Believe me, that vision of old Perrault will come true.
And that, my son, is why I am here,
and why you are here,
and why me pray to outlive the doom that gathers around on every side.”

“To outlive it?”

“There is a chance. It will come to pass before you are as old as I am.”

“And you think that Shangri-La will escape?”

“Perhaps.
We may expect no mercy, but we may faintly hope for neglect.
Here we shall stay with our books and our music and our meditations,
conserving the frail elegancies of a dying age,
and seeking such wisdom as men will need when their passions are all spent.
We have a heritage to cherish and bequeath.
Let us take what pleasure we may until that time comes.”

(James Hilton)

The Marauders, by Charlton Ogburn, Jr. – 1956 (1960) [Unknown Artist]

“Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life.”

“… I say bad luck.
But in looking back in it I found myself wondering.
For nothing could have been better calculated than that experience to bring home to me a lesson that has to be learned.
It was one I could wish I had been imparted to me early in life.
It was one I believe must have been understood in advance by those who gave Galahad its record of heroism.

It is this.
Being unready and ill-equipped is what you have to expect in life.
It is the universal predicament.
It is your lot as a human being to lack what it takes.
Circumstances are seldom right.
You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have.
You must always make do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen as appropriate for your special endowments.“