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New Story on my Website
THE PILOT WHO WOULDN'T FLY
I am only telling you this story because he passed away two years ago. I won't reveal his identity. Let's call him Captain Johnson. 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. But he still wouldn't fly. But everyone else in the 344th damn well had to fly. Feelings were running high. The talk around the group was, "If I have to fly, then he has to fly. No free lunch. Her had a bad bailout? Too frigging bad. We all have our troubles." My pilot Paul Shorts said, "he was weak". When his name was brought up, the universal response was disgust. Then one day he was gone. 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. Arthur Kramer 344th BG 494th BS England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany Visit my WW II B-26 website at: http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer |
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"ArtKramr" wrote in message ... THE PILOT WHO WOULDN'T FLY I am only telling you this story because he passed away two years ago. I won't reveal his identity. Let's call him Captain Johnson. What would you think of a man that was a hero and then came home and called you a murder, Art? |
#3
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Subject: New Story on my Website
From: "Tarver Engineering" Date: 2/3/04 1:38 PM Pacific Standard Time Message-id: "ArtKramr" wrote in message ... THE PILOT WHO WOULDN'T FLY I am only telling you this story because he passed away two years ago. I won't reveal his identity. Let's call him Captain Johnson. What would you think of a man that was a hero and then came home and called you a murder, Art? I'm just telling you what happened. Draw any conslusions you wish. Arthur Kramer 344th BG 494th BS England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany Visit my WW II B-26 website at: http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer |
#4
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"ArtKramr" wrote in message ... Subject: New Story on my Website From: "Tarver Engineering" Date: 2/3/04 1:38 PM Pacific Standard Time Message-id: "ArtKramr" wrote in message ... THE PILOT WHO WOULDN'T FLY I am only telling you this story because he passed away two years ago. I won't reveal his identity. Let's call him Captain Johnson. What would you think of a man that was a hero and then came home and called you a murder, Art? I'm just telling you what happened. Draw any conslusions you wish. http://www.vietnamveteransagainstjohnkerry.com/ |
#5
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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 |
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"Paul J. Adam" wrote in message ... 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. I believe this is an intelligent approach to this issue. I wasn't going to answer this because when it comes to assessing something like this; personal, and directly associated with combat, I usually defer to those more qualified to speak. The closest analogy to why is the feeling I get when someone who hasn't rolled an airplane inverted at 50 feet tries to tell me how I should feel about someone who has and been killed. I get an involuntary reaction when this happens. It's caused by a firm belief right or wrong, that unless you have paid your dues, there are certain things in life you're not really supposed to comment on. Something like this is closely related to what I'm discussing here; I call it the "association factor". I can't comment directly from a combat point of view on something like this as I haven't earned the right to have this opinion, but I am in the unusual situation of having known many people who have "been there and done that", and I can relate a sort of summation of what I believe they would say on such an issue as this one. I honestly believe that every man and woman who goes in harm's way in a war situation has a limit for being able to handle fear, and stark terror; and no two limits are the same. I believe the 8th called it a "maximum effort factor" during the war. No one could define it of course. You were just supposed to keep going! There are of course those who somehow manage to traverse the whole thing while maintaining some degree of control, but for most of those who go into combat, there is a limit to what the human mind can absorb and still function normally. The macho folks will no doubt tell you that no matter what these limits are, it's your solemn duty to swallow whatever it is and continue on regardless. There's just too much at stake if one person caves in. Besides, one can argue effectively.....why aren't the others affected? They have to continue on, so what gives one person the right to call it quits? I honestly don't have the answer to this. How do you tell a crew that they have to continue living through the same horror that one man can't take any more and understand the reasons why? How can you ask men who have to continue on to understand the plight of one of their fellows who no longer can take it? God! What a difficult thing to have to face. I honestly don't see how anyone can call a man who has flown 62 missions a coward. But where does this leave you if suddenly you can't take it any more and the rest of the crews have to continue? Is it reasonable to expect these men to understand that you have reached the absolute limit of your human tolerance to fear and can't take a single step further? Considering that the crews have to continue, it's asking a great deal of them to exhibit understanding in these cases. It is however also reasonable, that the powers that be in these cases, exhibit some higher degree of understanding with the issue. A man who has lived through a personal experience as absolutely terrifying as this pilot did has reached a personal limit of human endurance to fear. He's over his personal edge for what his mind has allowed him to accept as acceptable. He's a causality as sure as if he had taken a bullet. The man has already demonstrated 62 times that he came to do the job. He in fact, did the job...time and time again. So what do you do with a man like "Johnson"? Do you write him off as a coward simply because you have to go on and he says he can't? I can see in a heartbeat that for those who have to continue, this would be a quick call...and who's to blame these men? But does this address Johnson's problem at all, or is it simply an understandable reaction from the other crews? Hell, if I had to go, I'm sure I might have had the same reaction as these crews did. Of course this assumes that I as an individual, hadn't reached my personal limit for what I could take yet!!!! It might happen today....but it hasn't happened YET!!!! The guys I know would have reacted exactly as Art's associates did at the time, but strangely enough, many I know would have also understood the causality issue with Johnson, and would have agreed that treatment for him was what was needed instead of admonishment by the group. I believe they would have based this on the 62 missions Johnson had already flown. In situations like this one, in a combat group, you will always have those who see something like this only as a sign of cowardice. That's understandable, but not necessarily right. No matter how you cut this guy's record down, if he flew 62 missions, then had this unbelievable experience and couldn't go on after that, I would say there's a serious question that cowardice should be given a real hard long look as NOT being the prime factor in this instance. I believe that in many cases like this one, if some degree of care is given at the medical/psychological level instead of shunning, the person involved can be brought back. Of course, there's always a chance that once over this kind of an edge, there's no return from whatever mental sanctuary the affected person has entered into in order to escape. The easy road is to write him off. The hard way is to take him off the line; work with him; and try to bring him back. As I say, I wasn't there and don't know the exact circumstances involved with this case, but from what I've read in Art's post, I think I would have given this guy a chance. 65 missions takes a lot of guts....as I'm sure Art can relate to much better than I can!! Dudley Henriques International Fighter Pilots Fellowship Commercial Pilot/ CFI Retired For personal email, please replace the z's with e's. dhenriquesATzarthlinkDOTnzt |
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"Dudley Henriques" wrote in message nk.net... snip I wasn't going to answer this because when it comes to assessing something like this; personal, and directly associated with combat, I usually defer to those more qualified to speak. There you go. |
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"ArtKramr" wrote in message
... THE PILOT WHO WOULDN'T FLY The talk around the group was, "If I have to fly, then he has to fly. No free lunch. Her had a bad bailout? Too frigging bad. We all have our troubles." My pilot Paul Shorts said, "he was weak". When his name was brought up, the universal response was disgust. Everything in the 40's was in black and white, it seems, not just the movies. |
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"Dudley Henriques" wrote:
[thoughtful responses from both Dudley and Paul Adams snipped] I wasn't going to answer this because when it comes to assessing something like this; personal, and directly associated with combat, I usually defer to those more qualified to speak. That would kinda' defeat the whole purpose of posting the story on Usenet , no? If Art wasn't looking for feedback, obviously he should have posted his story on his website and simply left it at that. As numerous posters (even including some whom have "seen the elephant") have pointed out to Art time and time again, Art couldn't possibly get any more mileage out of his "you weren't there so you ain't ****" mantra. The theme of Art's story was "courage" (as is his theme 99.9-percent of the time). LOTS of people have demonstrated incredible courage -- courage that often goes unnoticed and garners no medals. And courage doesn't always involve combat. A parent caring for a dying child is an act of courage, as is speaking up against Art when he gratuitously ridicules his fellow RAM listmembers simply because they "weren't there." As for the story itself, I agree with everything you and Paul said. |
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Subject: New Story on my Website
From: "Paul J. Adam" Date: 2/3/04 3:21 PM Pacific elt 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. Remember that thousands of men were wounded, recovered and went back to combat duty. It was the norm. Same in the infantry. It was the norm there too.You do have some options in war, But not fighting isn't one of them. Arthur Kramer 344th BG 494th BS England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany Visit my WW II B-26 website at: http://www.coastcomp.com/artkramer |
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