In message , ArtKramr
writes
THE PILOT WHO WOULDN'T FLY
Captain Johnson's plane was badly hit over the target. He and his crew bailed
out. But Johnson never liked to keep his chute harness buckled tight. It gave
him cramps. So he wore it loose. On this occasion, as he bailed out he slipped
out of the harness and it tangled around his foot. That meant that he dangled
head down in his chute as he came to earth. He was badly shook up on landing
and hospitalized with severe cuts and bruises and a good deal of shock. After
he recovered he was returned to duty. At that time we needed 65 missions to go
home. He had 62, Only three more to go. But he refused to ever fly again. This
was serious business with a war on. He was sent to London and a staff of
psychiatrists worked on him, but he wouldn't fly. Then they said if he flew as
an observer on the lead aircraft he could get 1½ missions credit for each
mission, He could fly two and get credit for three, and go home. He still
refused to fly. What was to be done? You can't really court marshal a man with
62 missions for cowardice in face of the enemy.

This is a tough one and no mistake.

First up, calling someone with 62 combat missions including being shot
down "a coward" risks a certain terminological inexactitude.

Secondly, techniques have improved. Men do fail under pressu but
we're better at fixing them. IIRC something like 40% of Israeli
battlefield casualties in the first days of the 1973 war were what could
be called "LMF" or similar in WW2: but almost all those troops were back
in combat within 48 hours. (Layman's understanding of a complex
technique: you don't stigmatise the guy as a coward, you treat him as a
casualty with the solid expectation that he's going to get better soon
and go back to help his friends who need his assistance ASAP. In other
words, get him back to his unit and have him finish his missions)


But he still wouldn't fly. But
everyone else in the 344th damn well had to fly.

Another reason this is a damn difficult question: does _anyone_ really
want to fly those last few missions before the end of the tour? No
personal experience, but I've read infantry memoirs from Vietnam of how
"short-timers" sometimes got very gunshy... nobody wanted to become a
KIA a week or two from their escape date. But I would get really angry
if I felt that a cadre of folk were getting the easy jobs while I took
the risks, simply because they'd been in-theatre longer than me.
Similarly I'm sure I'd get very jumpy in the last few days / last few
missions of a term-limited deployment.

Part of me says that this wolfpack reaction he recieved was very wrong.
But part of me understands it: when you're fighting fear yourself,
seeing others lose their battle and go apparently unpunished is almost
toxic. "If he can chicken out then why do _I_ have to go?" must be a
hellish hard argument for commanders to deal with when they're
continuing to send the rest of the squadron out.



Art, would it have been different if the guy had had these problems
after a dozen missions, been gone a couple of weeks, then come back to
fly the rest of his tour without notable heroism but in regulation
style? Was it that he refused to go, or that he refused to finish his
tour, that you and your comrades found so offensive?

What would it have taken for him to redeem an initial refusal to return?
Would his finishing his tour and flying three missions (or two as lead)
have been sufficient? If he dropped out at 62, would _anything_ else he
did have counted? (Wide open question... to give an extreme, if he'd
refused to fly in a Marauder ever again, but instead walked to
Berchtesgaden and personally cut Adolf Hitler's throat, would your unit
still have condemned him so fully?)

Fast forward 15 years
to a reunion of the 344th Bomb Group. Who should walk in but our old friend
Captain Johnson. No one spoke to him. Many just turned their backs on him. I
felt sorry for him. But while we were risking our necks over Germany and losing
good men, he was curled up and whining under a blanket. He flew with us, but
after that not a single man in the 344th considered him to be one of us.

From outside, I admit to finding this fascinating.

On the one hand, this is a man who has demonstrated a hell of a lot of
courage in the past.

On the other hand... when it ran out, he didn't have a reserve. (And I
have to admit, being shot down sounds uncomfortable enough, without
having to add a parachute descent by one ankle: never been shot down,
but I have done a jump with a properly-fitting 'chute and that was quite
enough excitement for peacetime at my own expense )

How could he have been kept as a useful asset? I'm not asking that he be
left feeling joyful about himself, but this is an experienced crewman
who at worst has a lot of hard-won lessons to teach trainees. (But then
how do you prevent '60 of 65 and my luck is running out - time to be a
Stateside instructor!' taking hold?)

It's an interesting collision of doctrine and reality... to me, anyway.
--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk