Blue Angels - A Veteran's Day Salute

Climb aboard and take a ride with the very best of the best.

Well done. Carry on Gentlemen.

Winning Your Wings

This is a 1942 AAF recruiting film starring a very young Lt. James Stewart. This film had a tremendous impact on hundreds of thousands young men as it told of a reduction in education requirements for aviation cadet candidates. This reduction opened the possibility of flying to a huge new recruit pool just as WWII began.

Lt. Col. Charles H. Bowman

In doing some reading about the Army Air Corps of WWII, I’ve encountered many poignant stories of young men who flew the bombers from England against Hitler’s fortress Europe. If you ever heard a WWII veteran say that the real heroes are the ones who didn’t come home, these were some of the young men to whom those veterans were referring.

Charles Henry Bowman was a high potential young man from Casper, Wyoming. Shortly after he graduated from high school his father died, leaving Charles’ kid sister and mother alone. Charles was selected for an appointment to West Point and despite the trauma of losing his father, accepted his appointment.

He went on to become a member of the USMA Class of 1939. In keeping with tradition, his roommate wrote a short description of Charles for the West Point yearbook, noting that Charles had the patience of Job, a subtle sense of humor, and was a good dancer.

After his commissioning as a second lieutenant, Charles volunteered for the Air Corps and undertook pilot training as the United States began its military build up prior to WWII. Just after Pearl Harbor Charles served for several months in Australia and Java against the Japanese.

West Point graduates formed the professional core of many of the bomb groups based in England and pilots like Charles who had a few years of service before WWII were well on their way to achieving higher rank than most of the cadet airmen that soon followed them. By 1943 Charles was a 28-year old lieutenant colonel, the 447th deputy group commander, and a B-17 command pilot.

In January 1944, the target was the machine and munitions works at Brunswick and Charles was scheduled to lead the group of 35-planes. However, his plane developed engine trouble and he returned to the base for a replacement. Unable to catch up with his own group he joined another group that was trailing behind his own.

Near Rehburg a Luftwaffe JU-88 flown by Bruno Rupp slipped in behind Charles’ B-17 and launched a rocket. Reports from other planes in the vicinity told of seeing his stricken B-17 dive 5000’ in flames, before 4 parachutes were seen. Then the plane exploded. Two men survived to become prisoners, but Charles was not one of them.

At the time his plane went down, Charles had been in training for his position nearly 9-years. That fateful January 1944 mission was his second and last in the ETO. For the past 66-years Charles has rested beside 5,328 others in the Ardennes American Cemetery at Neupre Belgium. His mother died in 1948 and what became of his kid sister isn’t known. There was no one left to bring him home.

A recipient of 2 Silver Stars, a DFC, and a Purple Heart, Charles is but one of the young men we honor on Memorial Day.

Note: Within 1-week of my inquiry for assistance in getting an actual picture of Charles' grave in the Ardennes American Cemetery, a fine gentleman living near the cemetery sent this photograph to me. Thank you, André.

Treasure peace, fight tyranny, never forget those who fought.

a paix au trésor, de la tyrannie se battre, ne jamais oublier ceux qui ont combattu.

Bruce Catton - Mr. Lincoln’s Army

Bruce Catton Mr. Lincoln’s Army        

            The books which makes up this trilogy began, very simply, as an attempt to understand the men who fought in the Army of the Potomac.  As a small boy I had known a number of these men in their old age; they were grave, dignified, and thoughtful, with long white beards and a general air of being pillars of the community.  They lived in rural Michigan in the pre-automobile age, and for the most part they had never been fifty miles away from the farm or the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything, and nothing that happened to them thereafter meant anything much.  All that was real had taken place when they were young; everything after that had simply been a process of waiting for death, which did not frighten them much—they had seen it inflicted in the worst possible way on boys who had not bargained for it, and they had enough of the old-fashioned religion to believe without any question that when they passed over they would simply be rejoining men and ways of living which they had known long ago.

            This was too much for an adolescent to understand.  Perhaps it is too much for anyone to understand, in a skeptical age.  But there is was: these old gentlemen, drowsing out the greater part of their lives in the backwoods, had once been lifted beyond themselves by an experience which perhaps was all the more significant because it was imperfectly understood.  They gave a tone and a color to the lives of the people who knew them, and they put a special meaning on such a word as “patriotism”; it was not something you talked about very much, just a living force that you instinctively responded to.  I can remember one old man who lost his left arm in the Wilderness, and he used to go about town in the summer peddling cherries and blackberries in a bucket—there was just enough of his left forearm so that he could hook it over the bail of the bucket and carry it conveniently—and it never once entered my childish head to feel sorry for him because he had been a cripple for half a century.  On the contrary, I thought he was rather lucky.  He carried with him forever the visible sign that he had fought for his country and had been wounded in its service.  Probably only a very backward boy could have thought anything of the kind.

            Still, that was what it was like.  A generation grew up in the shadow of a war which, because of its distance somehow had lost all resemblance to everyday reality.  To a generation which knew the war only by hearsay, it seemed that these aged veterans had been privileged to know the greatest experience a man could have.  We saw the Civil War, in other words, through the distorting haze of endless Decoration Day reminiscences; to us it was a romantic business because all we ever got a look at was the legend built up through fifty years of peace.

            We do learn as we grow older, and eventually I realized that this picture was somewhat out of focus.  War, obviously, is the least romantic of all of man’s activities and it contains elements which the veterans do not describe to children.  This aged berry-peddler, for instance, who lost his arm in the Wilderness: he had never told me about the wounded men who were burned to death in the forest fire which swept that infernal stretch of woodland while the battle was going on; nor had any of his comrades who survived that fight and went on through the whole campaign to the last days at Petersburg ever mentioned the lives that were wasted by official blunders, the dirt and the war-weariness and the soul numbing disillusionment that came when it seemed that what they were doing was going for nothing.  There was a deacon in the church, who used to remind us proudly that he had served in the 2^nd Ohio Cavalry.  Not until years later did I learn that this regiment had gone with Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley, burning barns, killing livestock and pillaging with a free hand so that the Southern Confederacy, if it refused to die in any other way, might die of plain starvation.  In a sense, the research that went into these books was simply an effort to find out about things which the veterans never discussed.

            Yet, in an odd way, the old veterans did leave one correct impression: the notion that as young men they had been caught up by something ever so much larger than themselves and that the war in which they fought did settle something for us—or, incredibly, started something which we ourselves have got to finish.  It was not only the biggest experience in their own lives; it was in a way the biggest experience in our life, as a nation, and it deserves all of the study it is getting.

            In any case, these books try to examine a small part of that experience in terms of the men who did the fighting.  Those men are all gone now and they have left forever unsaid the things they might have told us, and no one now can speak for them.  Here is my attempt to speak about them.

                                                            Bruce Catton, 1962

Bonham - Carmack - Palfrey

This picture was taken just after WWII, perhaps still at Rattlesden, perhaps stateside...don't know.

Goldfish Club

The 447th started flying their missions in late December 1943 and by the end of the war in May 1945 (roughly 17 mos.) had lost 97 aircraft. Approximately 490 aircrews cycled through Rattlesden while it was assigned to the ETO.

According to the records in “Bits and Pieces” there were only two 447th planes that ditched where the entire crew was recovered and returned to the base safely—Henningsen’s (Aug 25, 1944) and Tetreault’s (Nov 2, 1944).

Before Henningsen went into the water in late August, the 447th had lost 68 B-17s, or the equivalent of 113% of the entire Group during their first 8-months in the ETO. Only 23 airmen had been picked up and returned from those 68 downed planes. During the 9-weeks between the 2 ditchings, the 447th lost 7 more planes and no one returned from those aircraft.

After Tetreault returned, the 447th flew missions for another 6-7 months. About 20 additional aircraft were lost during those months and only 2 more airmen were returned to the base from those 20. These numbers are gleaned from old, imprecise records and can be considered as close estimates, but are by no means exact.

Wings of our Fathers

A few years ago I started a small project to construct a framed display featuring our fathers’ crew picture in the center, surrounded by an example of a WWII vintage wing that each of our fathers would have worn on their uniforms. I had Dad’s wings and with a little study could determine what wings your fathers would have worn—there were 5 different wings worn by members of an average combat crew.

That early interest introduced me to an amazing collecting activity that I had never before considered. A resource such as eBay brings the ability to find almost anything at a reasonable price for the patient. As a life-long collector of first one thing or another, I was inexorably drawn into this collecting activity way beyond what I had anticipated and have since written a collector’s guide for other newbie collectors. There is a huge problem with fakes and undisclosed restrikes that plague wings collectors. It was dealing with this problem that I hoped to help new collectors avoid becoming fleeced and discouraged. I thought our fathers’ service deserved more respect than it appeared to be getting from others.

The wings, as you likely know, were very significant to our fathers. Pictured is a variety of the wings, some form of which, our fathers undoubtedly wore when they donned their dress uniforms. Most likely they did not wear them while they were dressed in their flight gear for a mission.

Most of these period wings were made from sterling...silver was plentiful during the war, while most other metals were not. As a result, we are left with a beautiful piece of a remarkable legacy that is no longer made in the same manner. Today's Air Force wings are mostly made from a plated zinc pot metal. Hope you still have your Dad's.