To Kingdom Come (38 page)

EPILOGUE

T
here are few traces left of the air bases in England that once served as home to the Eighth Air Force bomb groups that took the air war to Germany in 1943. The author had a chance to visit a number of them in the course of researching this book. They would be unrecognizable to the Americans who were stationed there during the war.

Most are quiet, windswept places, stripped clean of the concrete runways, hardstands, repair hangars, and half-cylindrical Quonset huts with their distinctive corrugated metal roofs.

Small granite commemorative monuments, similar to the ones erected by postwar generations at Gettysburg and Antietam, mark the empty airfields that once launched intrepid flight crews on their missions to Germany.

Grafton Underwood, from which the 384th’s Jimmy Armstrong and Reb Grant took off on their last combat mission, is now a landscape of woods and pasture, with a few concrete perimeter tracks being the last hints of the airfield that once was.

The 388th’s base at Knettishall, where Ted Wilken, Warren Laws, and the Greek were stationed, was newly constructed when they got there, with fifty-yard-wide runways and enough concrete hardstands for two groups. Some decaying buildings are all that is left.

Thurleigh, the home of Andy Andrews’s famed 306th group, is now a business park, although it also hosts a small museum dedicated to the men who served in the bomb group.

Molesworth, where the 303rd Bomb Group was based, remains a U.S. Air Force facility, although there are few reminders of the base from which Bob Travis and Bud Klint completed their combat tours.

The Eighth Air Force in Europe is a distant memory, but an indelible one.

Its battle losses were astonishing. According to Donald Miller in
Masters of the Air
, the casualty rate among the American bomber crews in 1942 and 1943 was in excess of 50 percent. Only one man out of five was able to complete the original combat tour of twenty-five missions.

The author agrees with Donald Miller that the deep-penetration raids into Germany in the fall of 1943 should not have been launched until the bomber forces were large enough to accomplish the task and could be protected by long-range fighters.

Combat losses in the bomber crews dropped dramatically after these goals were achieved. It is a tribute to the courage of the Fortress crews in the first year of the air war that they kept on going in the face of tremendous odds, and with little hope of ultimate survival.

For those readers interested in what happened to the group of individuals whose stories were chronicled in this book, a brief account of their subsequent lives after the Stuttgart mission follows.

Martin “Andy” Andrews

After delivering his trove of top secret military intelligence to the admiral at OSS headquarters in Virginia, Andy enjoyed a brief family leave before being assigned to the U.S. Army Air Forces’ Transport Command. He spent the rest of the war piloting new military aircraft from the factories where they were manufactured to the active war fronts across the globe.

In the course of his travels, Andy spent his free time writing a stage play that he was sure would find glory on Broadway. Discharged from the army at the end of the war, he headed straight for New York and the Great White Way. Although his play failed, it led to a job as a writer for Paramount News, which then made the newsreels that ran at all the movie houses in the years before television. Aside from the radio networks, the newsreels were the only electronic medium for millions of Americans to learn the news.

In 1948, the Republican Party produced an expensive ten-minute propaganda film in support of its candidate for president, Governor Thomas Dewey, who was running against President Harry Truman. In every national poll, it appeared that Dewey was going to whip the unpopular Truman in a landslide, and Paramount News, among other companies, ran the film as if it was their own independent newsreel in movie houses all over the country.

The outraged White House press staff demanded “equal time” for Truman, and Andy was assigned to write and narrate a newsreel about him. It had a production budget of $1,200. Most of the footage came from Paramount’s film library, but Andy was granted an opportunity to interview Truman at a campaign event at Madison Square Garden.

Knowing that the president was ill at ease in front of a movie camera, Andy urged him to speak off the cuff on anything he wanted. Truman then gave his famous denunciation of the “do-nothing Congress” in Washington. In the week that the newsreel was shown in theaters across the country, 60 million theatergoers saw the newsreel. Truman narrowly won reelection a few weeks later in the greatest political comeback in history. Andy likes to think his newsreel might have helped.

A few years later, he was selected to become head of the documentary division of Hearst Metrotone News, eventually writing, producing, and directing nearly two hundred films. In 1956, shortly after Dwight Eisenhower was elected president of the United States, Andy was at home one evening mucking out his barn when he received a telephone call from his boss, who told him that five thousand feet of film had just arrived in New York. It was raw footage of the first bloody days of the Hungarian Revolution. He needed Andy to come into the city to cut it down to nine hundred feet and write an accompanying script for a newsreel that was to be shown to President Eisenhower the next morning. Two film editors were waiting for him at the Hearst studio in New York City, and a courier was on hand to take the finished film to Washington that night.

Andy had less than three hours to do the job.

Reaching the studio an hour later in his overalls, Andy had time to screen the raw footage once, and then told the editors what to open with, what to keep in the body of the ten-minute film, and what footage to close with at the end. There was no chance to write a script. After ad-libbing a ten-minute narrative to go with the footage, he gave it the title “A Nation in Torment.” The courier put it in his pouch and was on his way.

Convinced it was a disaster, he went to a local bar with the two editors and they proceeded to finish a bottle of whiskey together. The following morning, President Eisenhower invited the leaders of the House and Senate to watch it with him. After the screening, Senator James Mead of New York was quoted in the
New York Times
as saying, “This film should be shown around the world.”

It was. “A Nation in Torment” was screened in eighty-two languages and dialects, becoming the most successful propaganda film ever released by the United States Information Agency.

After winning numerous awards for his work, Andy established his own film company, going on to produce and direct numerous documentaries on the New York State park system and many environmental subjects.

Along the way, Andy’s first marriage ended in divorce, but he and his second wife, Jean, have been together since 1977. They share five children, along with five grandchildren.

After his friend Preston Bassett, the former president of the Sperry Gyroscope Company, reached the age of ninety, he told Andy, “You know, when you get to be ninety years old, you slow down. There are some things you can’t do anymore.”

Still high on life, the ninety-two-year-old Andy Andrews is now wheelchair bound, and lives in a veterans’ nursing home. The move there was a jarring experience for him. He felt a great sense of isolation living apart from his wife and family. To cope with his loneliness, he has embarked on a rigorous program of physical exercise, and dedicated himself to rereading the classic books of Western civilization.

James E. “Jimmy” Armstrong

After completing an account of his five months behind enemy lines to intelligence officers in England, Jimmy was granted home leave, and arrived to a joyful celebration with his parents and grandparents in Bradenton, Florida. It seemed like the whole town turned out to greet him when he got there.

“Jimmy, you are so pale after living underground for so long,” his grandmother told the twenty-one-year-old.

He quickly regained both his tan and his strength after three weeks of sun and swimming at the public beach. When his leave ended, Jimmy was assigned to the gunnery school at Buckingham Army Base in Florida. There, he was awarded his Purple Heart by the base commander.

Upon receiving his discharge from the army in 1945, he entered the University of Florida under the GI Bill and studied agriculture. In his sophomore year, he attended a dance, where he met a lovely young woman named Nita DesChamps. For Jimmy, it was love at first sight, and they were married two years later after his graduation.

In 1945, Annie Price, the Englishwoman who had sheltered him in Triel, France, and put him on his way to eventual freedom, wrote to him in Florida. He had sent her a letter saying he hoped to return to France to thank her in person.

“Dear Jim,” she wrote. “Are you serious about coming back? Are you thinking of trying to make Paris gay once more? You’ll have a job, for Paris is like myself—we have had all the stuffing knocked out and the beauty knocked off. . . . We’re a couple of ruins the Germans left behind.... Annie Price.”

As the years passed, the happy-go-lucky Jimmy slowly transformed himself into a more serious Jim. After an unfulfilling business career, he decided to enroll as a student at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia, where he earned a master of divinity degree. In the years after his ordination, he served as the pastor of three churches, drawing the admiration and respect of all the congregants he served. His last church family before his retirement was in Thomasville, Georgia, where he still lives.

In 1981, Jim made the first of four trips back to France to thank the people who had sheltered and protected him for the five months he evaded capture by the Germans. He met with Madame Laurent, who was still living in the same house where she had served him breakfast before turning him over to Annie Price. Annie had died in 1951. The medical intern with whom he had stayed initially in Paris was now Dr. Alec Prochiantz, and was serving on the medical staff at the American Hospital in Paris.

He had no luck finding the underground reprobates Maurice and George, with whom he had stayed above their Paris café, or Theodorine “Madame Q” Quenot, who had sheltered Jim and three other Allied escapees, or the brave Gilbert Virmoux, who had tried to help him escape over the Pyrenees.

In Quimper, he learned that his hosts Jacques and Madeleine Mourlet had continued to help Allied escapees to leave France until Jacques was arrested and imprisoned in 1944. They had both died after the war.

“Fanfan,” the French underground agent who had arranged Jim’s escape aboard the
Breiz-Izel
, and was a leader of the “Dahlia” resistance network, had been arrested by the Gestapo a few months after Jim’s escape. After weeks of torture, he died in a railroad car on his way to Dachau. The Catholic priest who had housed the escapees in his upstairs bedroom disappeared in a German concentration camp.

After his first visit, Jim continued to make trips to France to pay homage to the members of the underground networks who had assisted Allied airmen, and to provide support to those who were in need.

In 2008, Jim and Nita Armstrong celebrated their seventieth wedding anniversary. They have three children, Alice, Jim, and Jean, seven grandchildren, and a vast circle of friends.

Jim still plays golf and loves spending hours each week in his garden. He has made one concession to his age as he closes in on ninety. Jim no longer climbs an extension ladder to pick the oranges at the top of the fruit-laden trees in his backyard. A recent fall reminded him all too painfully of his parachute landing in France in 1943.

Henry H. “Hap” Arnold

In August 1945, his B-29 bombers delivered the nuclear payloads to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. Six months after the Japanese surrender, Hap Arnold resigned as the commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces. He had survived four heart attacks during the war while overseeing the disposition of two and a half million airmen and seventy-two thousand military aircraft.

One of his first priorities after leaving the army was to rebuild his shattered marriage. During the war, Bee Arnold had developed an acute nervous condition and had lost a good deal of weight. At one point, she accused Hap of being unfaithful. He had become increasingly bewildered by her shifting moods.

In February 1946, the Arnolds moved out of Quarters Number 8 on General’s Row at Fort Myer and headed for California. A few years earlier, while Arnold was at a military conference in Cairo, Egypt, Bee had found a small, unimproved ranch property in the Valley of the Moon near Sonoma, California, and decided to buy it for their future home. Although the price was only $7,500, Hap did not have enough money to pay for it. After overseeing billions of dollars in procurement contracts, he had to borrow most of the down payment. It would be the only land he would ever own.

After the war, Arnold had commissioned the construction of a modest house on the property. With a tiny kitchen, living room, and three small bedrooms, Arnold looked at it as a future guesthouse after he had the money to build his real home.

That was never to be. He was still suffering the lingering effects of his fourth heart attack, and his legendary stamina began to ebb. Hap’s doctor recommended increasing his alcohol consumption, and Arnold doubled his daily ration of two old-fashioneds.

Isolated from his old friends, he and Bee settled into a quiet retired life. He bought some woodworking tools and made the redwood furniture for their patio. The couple usually spent their evenings sitting on the patio gazing out at the surrounding hills.

In early 1948, he had his fifth heart attack and was forced to remain largely bedridden for months. Worried about Bee having sufficient means to support herself in the event of his death, Hap began working on a war memoir called
Global Mission
. Based on the success of similar books written by his contemporaries, he hoped it would sell at least one hundred thousand copies. The book came out to excellent reviews, but sales were less than ten thousand.