B-24 Story

I recently interviewed a great old fellow who piloted a B-24 during the war. We talked for about four hours, a cheerful, smart guy in his mid-80s, who is in great health, has been married happily since 1947, walks 4 miles a day, and served 12 years in the Peace Corps.

Because I am an artist and a natural egotist, we were eventually talking about the B-17 sculpture. I feel a little bad about this because the debate over the overall best bomber of WWII between the robust, beautiful B-17 and the specs-superior B-24 has never been settled, and here I am proposing a massive sculpture celebrating the B-17 to a man who piloted a B-24 through 25 full missions.

Ah well. We were talking about his experience of it all, and I asked him about what I might put on the ground below the formation. He thought a moment, and told me this story:

It is very late in the war, and they receive unusual orders for a very, very low level mission: 2000 feet. For the B-24, another big 4 engine high-altitude bomber, this is like sending the Space Shuttle on the commuter run to Cincinnati.

They were to destroy a railroad switching yard, where the locomotives are turned around. He was leading about a dozen B-24s to Germany to destroy this target. There was cloud cover; the flight, many thousands of pounds of explosives, hundreds of men, all headed for one initial point.

They came through some cloud cover, rail tracks, rolling farmland. Unlike every other mission, he could really make out individual houses.

One of which was a farmhouse, one near the rail feature, one that was the exact point upon which they were to release their weapons. He was sixty seconds away.

It was just a farmhouse. He could remember the haystacks. He could remember thinking that inside this house was a farmer, like many he had known back in Wyoming, that the buildings were a little different but the same in function, that in that house was a man who knew nothing of a major force of American bombers coming right for him.

He told me that it occurred to him that he could veer off, cancel the attack; this would have, in effect, spared a single house from total annihilation.

That he had sixty seconds to consider this, that he for a moment held this specific choice, and that he reflected in spite of a foregone conclusion, speaks I think to the best of a soldier's instinct. I reflect now that the truth was this: he had never had to really see an individual person he was assigned to destroy, and now he did, and it was in his power to avert this annihilation, and he, of course, chose the mission.

The mission was to destroy that place. The holy rage of the Allies against the Nazis manifested itself now in a hundred screaming engines, a rainfall of high explosives, rage, technology, speed and metal and death visited upon a man sitting in his farmhouse. Aluminum literally shocked from the good earth, reborn in incredible effort to a flying bomb, massed, directed against a single house, a single man. Dropped within the choice of a man.

He told me that this was the one moment when the scale of what they were doing, the distance between humanity- a real person on the ground- and the war and the mission, became clear.

I've heard this theme before. This is war fever both amplified and distanced by technology. It grew to absurdity in the U.S. Civil War, and ballooned in escalating war logic ever since. That life remains stronger than war amazes me.

Interestingly, Sen. George McGovern was also a B-24 pilot (note his comments on the failure to bomb Auschwitz.) He had a similar incident, but with the luxury of redemption.