One reason no one talks about their war experience is simply because they never examined their experience sufficiently to understand it. Another reason is that no one can face what it felt like. And I’m not only talking about the emotional trauma of facing death on a daily basis, but also the emotional trauma of inflicting death on a daily basis. The trauma of knowing you are dropping bombs on defenseless men, women, and children. I volunteered for the Air Corps because I knew I could never kill a man face to face. The Air Corps was nice and remote . . . but I still knew what I was doing. That knowledge takes it’s toll. For men who have experienced combat, the easiest way forward is to try and bury yourself.
As you know, I have been writing books for the past thirteen years. These books have essentially been memoirs in which I have woven events from my life into stories in an effort to discover why certain things happened.
The following letter, addressed to my children, is extracted from the Prologue of my first book titled, The Box in the Attic. It trys to address the impact of WWII on my life.
26 November 1994
Dear Brian, Helen, and Phil,
My life was in tatters when World War Two ended,. In effort to start over I tried to wipe the slate clean, and in a sense I did. I placed the memories of my youth in this box and sealed the lid. Essentially, I buried myself and with your mother I built a new life, a happy life. Then, in '94, Mom and I traveled to Britain for the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of D-day. Memories of my youth and the war returned. I thought perhaps you needed to know more about your old man before he died. It seemed a easy matter. I’d simply retrieve the box from the attic and reveal the contents to you and your mother. But, when I opened the lid, the Genie escaped. Long suppressed feelings came flooding out. My lost emotions took command and wracked my body, my soul.Tears I should have shed fifty years ago, flowed down. Buried skeletons, forgotten nightmares, locked up memories of lost youth, hope, and joy danced in the night. It was months before I recovered enough courage to face The Box.
Finally at peace with the man-in-the-box, I wanted to release him from exile, to share him with you and Mother. On a trip to Dallas, I let Helen read a short poem I had written. She read only three lines and said, "This doesn't sound like you." That comment has rattled around in my mind ever since. I'm Dad, or Pop, or Father, and each of you has an image for whatever tag you use. Helen read an eight-line poem and decided it didn't fit her image. The father she knew couldn't have written that poem, and she was right. When I closed the lid on that box I locked up my passions, lost my ability to write poetry. We all do it. We become mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, accountants, architects, doctors, carpenters, engineers, teachers. People see the role we’re playing and imagine they know the whole person. That is like seeing the cover of a book and believing you know the contents. I wanted to flip open the lid so you could see behind the facade, see the whole person, warts and all.
It would have been nice if you and Mother could have known the whole man, the man in the box, but, when Mother read a few snippets of my diaries, she had difficulty. Mom was only four years old when I went off to war. Eighteen years later, she rescued me and turned a life that was one disaster after another, into a success story. I hoped that some day she could read the diaries without feeling threatened, but she couldn't and I didn't want to cause anyone pain, least of all her.
The man in the Box.
My first book, The Box in the Attic, re-creates my life from birth through my combat years in WWII to the day I arrived back home, mounted my sweethearts doorstep and discovered she was married.
My second book titled ‘The Tornado Struck at Midnight’, re-creates my disastrous love affair with a woman I call Carmen, who in ‘real life’ became Queen of the ‘46 Carnival in Port of Spain Trinidad, and later, Rita Haworth’s double in the film ‘Gilda’.
My recently completed book titled Russian Roulette, explores, among other things, why I, a passionate anti-war pacifist who was exempt from the draft suddenly enlisted and dashed off to war when I did. (I have had several epiphanies during the writing of this book.)
Here is an excerpt from the body of my first book, The Box in the Attic:
On 11 May 1944, Edward Glotfelty’s crew was one of fifty crews selected to go to Lincoln, Nebraska, to pick up a new B-24J aircraft right off the assembly line, and fly it to England. We christened our ship, "That's All Brother," and had the name emblazoned on the nose along with the obligatory ‘sexy babe’. It was a flip defiant name, in keeping with the cocky attitude men who volunteered for the deadliest assignment of the war, had to assume.
At noon on Mothers Day, fifty bright-shiny B-24J bombers, each with a ten man crew, rose from the cornfield-flanked airfield in Lincoln Nebraska bound for Britain. On 22 May the fifty crews landed in Debach, England, joining another one-hundred equally inexperienced air crews, who along with the rest of the personnel required to form an airbase, came over on the Queen Mary. To help bring the base up to speed, some seasoned men were transferred from operational bases to act as lead crews and ground-crew chiefs. The full complement of about three thousand men formed the 493rd Bomb Group, the last of twelve Liberator groups, who together with forty-one Flying-Fortress groups comprised the heavy bomber arm of the Eighth Air Force. Over a month of construction and checkout of facilities remained before the base would be operational. We expected to fly our first mission in mid July of 1944.
The US had joined the war after Pearl Harbor. Since this was before the allied invasion on 6 June 1944, (D-Day) the war in Europe had thus-far been fought primarily in the air. The US Air Force flew daylight missions and life expectancy was short. Casualties were upward of sixty thousand boys.
The airplanes delivered to Britain were the latest model and had an impressive array of one-half-inch-thick armor plate, painted green and still smelling of machine oil, protecting each crewman's position. Some Rosie the riveter had proudly installed those plates, feeling she was saving some mother's son from death. Little did she know that the first task of the ground crews when the planes landed in England, was to remove these lifesaving shields. They were for home consumption only, and gave some congressman bragging rights in his bid for reelection.
After the shiny new ships were stripped of armor, veteran pilots from other airbases collected the planes and flew them away. Glotfelty’s crew had inscribed the names of their wives or girlfriends next to their combat positions. Some other tail gunner would fly his missions in a tail turret labeled ‘Catherine’. Old battle-scarred clunkers ready for the ‘bone yard’ replaced the planes that they had so proudly christened with their favorite mottos.
There was not a scrap of armor plate in these replacement ships either. Without the armor, the B-24 carried only six to eight thousand pounds of bombs. The armor-plate would have limited their payload even further. In war it is bombs dropped not lives saved that's important. Death is the purpose of war and anything that reduces that toll . . . must go. We happily sacrifice a life to take a life. The overall life expectancy with the Eighth Air Corps was eleven missions.
Early in the war a tour was set at twenty missions. This was a fiction designed to make air crews feel there was hope of going home. Once one or two crews actually completed that goal they increased a tour to 25 . . . then thirty . . . and by the time the 493rd Bomb Group arrived in Britain, a tour was thirty-five. On Christmas eve 1944, Glotfelty’s crew completed their thirty-fifth mission and looked forward to going home, but the Brass had other ideas. Like planes and guns, aircrews were simply inventory, so the brass hated to send crews home. They threatened to hold Glotfelty’s crew for another five. It was nip and tuck for a few days, but we got our furlough, as promised. Then we went into the pipeline for the Japanese theater. The Atom Bomb saved our bacon.
On their first six missions, the 493rd Bomb Group lost six crews or about sixty men. Many of these casualties were start-up losses. As the crews gained experience, the loss rate dropped. The 493rd lost only one crew on their next seven missions, for a total of seven crews in thirteen missions. In addition there were miscellaneous losses like a bombardier walking into a prop, individual crewmen killed by flak or enemy fighters, and we even lost a couple of guys who were riding bicycles. Getting accustomed to driving on the other side of the road was tricky and one cyclist was hit by a GI truck. The other cracked his head on the pavement as he lost control trying to master the handlebar brakes on the English bikes. (American bikes had coaster-brakes, at the time. Of course, this was long before cyclists wore helmets.)
Saturday, 24 June, we heard the sirens wailing as all the emergency equipment drove out onto the field. A plane was coming in for an emergency landing, and everyone on the base ran down to the runway to watch. A bomber, aborting a mission tried to jettison their bombs into the channel, but the bombs hung up, and with an armed time-bomb on board the pilot ordered everyone to bail, including the co-pilot. The pilot could have bailed also, but a week earlier an unmanned bomber crashed into a schoolyard killing sixty-three children and a half-dozen teachers, so he played the hero. With the clock ticking, he brought the ship in himself. He came in hot and hit the runway with the brakes locked, sending up a huge cloud of blue-black smoke. When the right tire blew, the plane ground-looped. Skidding sideways, the undercarriage collapsed, slamming the plane down on the runway. The plane came to a screeching halt, with only seconds to go. The pilot came out like a rabbit, sprinted to the end of the wing, jumped down and broke Jessie Owens’ world record for the hundred-yard dash. Throwing himself flat, he covered his head with his hands just as the bombs exploded. The blast blew off the hangar doors five hundred yards away. One hangar door killed a crew chief who was standing nearby. Swatted him like a fly. The pilot was a hero. He felt bad about the crew-chief, though.
That night, the night before our sixth mission, I sat around the mess hall with a group of other gunners who were also on alert. Jerry Eaton and I listened to the weird, gallows humor and constructed a verse that we titled A Gunner’s Prayer.
(Jerry’s name was actually Jerry Epstein, but the moment we landed in Britain, all crew members whose names indicated they might be Jewish, were offered the opportunity to use a pseudonym on their dog tags. Jerry chose Eaton for his tags.)
A Gunner’s Prayer
by Jerry Eaton and Wes Greayer
The night before we joke and cuss,
Just as gunners always do,
The alert was on - in too few hours,
We would all be in the blue,
So why talk of bullets, blood, and death?
Our life just now has a different depth,
A puff of flak - a gaping hole
And down they go without control,
The lucky will return to base,
The rest remembered with somber face.
A rugged bunch, a damned good crew,
They're MIA, it could be you.
Before morning they'll be replaced
They get the feel of a combat pace.
They're set to go and eager too,
They've flown before but this is new.
They'll join us on the morning bus,
And by eve - veterans they'll be,
But tonight we joke and cuss,
And forget the things we see.
