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rachelmanija) wrote2017-08-05 11:44 am
rachelmanija) wrote2017-08-05 11:44 am
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A Higher Call, by Adam Makos
Nonfiction about a brief but fateful encounter between a German ace fighter pilot and an American bomber crew, in mid-air; forty years later, the two pilots met up again. The book started out as a magazine article, and I bet it was a terrific one. It’s a great story and unlike many WWII stories, this one is about people’s best behavior rather than their worst.
As you may guess from the summary, the actual incident, though amazing, lasted about twenty minutes and is recounted in about ten pages. So most of the book is the story of the German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, plus a much smaller amount about the American crew. (Stigler was not a Nazi and in fact came from an anti-Nazi family. I know that it would have been convenient for him to claim to have been secretly anti-Nazi after the fact, but given what he was witnessed to have done, I believe it.)
The book is is interesting if you have an interest in the subject matter, but doesn't really rise above that. The best parts, apart from the encounter itself, were the early sections on the culture and training of the German pilots. One detail that struck me (not just that it happened, but that Stigler actually told someone about it), which was that dogfighting was so terrifying that pilots regularly landed with wet pants. I'd heard that about the first time, but not that it wasn't just the first time. Just imagine doing that for months on end. And knowing that you're not likely to do it for years on end because the lifespan of a fighter pilot is probably not that long.
If you just want to know what happened in mid-air over Germany, in December, 1943, click on the cut.
The American bomber was hit over Germany, killing two and wounding several of its 12-man crew. As it began to flee, Franz Stigler was sent to dispatch it. But when he got close, he saw that its guns had been destroyed and enough of its structure had been ripped away that he could actually see the men inside, some tending to the wounded and others trying to bluff him by aiming the wrecked guns at him. He couldn't bring himself to kill defenseless men in cold blood, especially when he could see their faces, so he decided to let them go.
Here's where he goes way beyond the call. He tried to signal to the pilot, Charlie Brown, to fly to Sweden, but couldn't manage to communicate it. (Brown only figured out that was what he meant when they met 40 years later and Stigler told him!) But what Stigler knew, and the Americans didn't, was that if they kept their course, they would fly right over a German anti-aircraft battery that would shoot them out of the sky. So Stigler flew below them, knowing that the gunners below wouldn't shoot down one of their own planes. He escorted them for twenty minutes, until they were safe, then saluted them and flew back, knowing that if he didn't come up with a convincing story to explain what he was doing, he'd be taken out and shot.
Luckily for Stigler, things were so chaotic and desperate at the time that no one really looked into it. Luckily for the bomber crew, they managed to get safely home. After the war, Stigler moved to Canada. Forty years later, he read an article about that encounter in a magazine, and wrote to Charlie Brown with details that no one could have known unless they were there.
Does anyone have any recommendations for other books on pilots, fighters or otherwise, historical or otherwise? I've read Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and really enjoyed the combination of desperate survival narrative with odes to the joy of flight. I think I'd be more interested in memoirs by pilots than biographies about them.
A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II
As you may guess from the summary, the actual incident, though amazing, lasted about twenty minutes and is recounted in about ten pages. So most of the book is the story of the German fighter pilot, Franz Stigler, plus a much smaller amount about the American crew. (Stigler was not a Nazi and in fact came from an anti-Nazi family. I know that it would have been convenient for him to claim to have been secretly anti-Nazi after the fact, but given what he was witnessed to have done, I believe it.)
The book is is interesting if you have an interest in the subject matter, but doesn't really rise above that. The best parts, apart from the encounter itself, were the early sections on the culture and training of the German pilots. One detail that struck me (not just that it happened, but that Stigler actually told someone about it), which was that dogfighting was so terrifying that pilots regularly landed with wet pants. I'd heard that about the first time, but not that it wasn't just the first time. Just imagine doing that for months on end. And knowing that you're not likely to do it for years on end because the lifespan of a fighter pilot is probably not that long.
If you just want to know what happened in mid-air over Germany, in December, 1943, click on the cut.
The American bomber was hit over Germany, killing two and wounding several of its 12-man crew. As it began to flee, Franz Stigler was sent to dispatch it. But when he got close, he saw that its guns had been destroyed and enough of its structure had been ripped away that he could actually see the men inside, some tending to the wounded and others trying to bluff him by aiming the wrecked guns at him. He couldn't bring himself to kill defenseless men in cold blood, especially when he could see their faces, so he decided to let them go.
Here's where he goes way beyond the call. He tried to signal to the pilot, Charlie Brown, to fly to Sweden, but couldn't manage to communicate it. (Brown only figured out that was what he meant when they met 40 years later and Stigler told him!) But what Stigler knew, and the Americans didn't, was that if they kept their course, they would fly right over a German anti-aircraft battery that would shoot them out of the sky. So Stigler flew below them, knowing that the gunners below wouldn't shoot down one of their own planes. He escorted them for twenty minutes, until they were safe, then saluted them and flew back, knowing that if he didn't come up with a convincing story to explain what he was doing, he'd be taken out and shot.
Luckily for Stigler, things were so chaotic and desperate at the time that no one really looked into it. Luckily for the bomber crew, they managed to get safely home. After the war, Stigler moved to Canada. Forty years later, he read an article about that encounter in a magazine, and wrote to Charlie Brown with details that no one could have known unless they were there.
Does anyone have any recommendations for other books on pilots, fighters or otherwise, historical or otherwise? I've read Antoine de Saint-Exupery, and really enjoyed the combination of desperate survival narrative with odes to the joy of flight. I think I'd be more interested in memoirs by pilots than biographies about them.
A Higher Call: An Incredible True Story of Combat and Chivalry in the War-Torn Skies of World War II
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Richard Hillary's The Last Enemy is fascinating - the memoir of a Spitfire pilot, written during the war. I was actually reading it for details about Archibald McIndoe's work (pioneering plastic surgeon) as I have been fiddling with a relevant story idea for ages, so can't remember specific details about flying, but I would recommend it and it may be on project Gutenberg.
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Re: pioneering plastic surgeons in WWII: my grandfather (the one who nearly became a fighter pilot before he got booted for being a communist) had a best friend who was a surgeon in WWII. He started out as a generalist, but it turned out that he was very good at delicate work and specifically genital reconstruction. He very quickly got assigned to just do that, and ended up spending the entirety of the war and post-war reconstructing penises, and apparently pioneered some techniques for doing so. He said he got to the point where they looked perfect. I asked him how they functioned sexually, and he said in most cases they didn't, but at least men could go into locker rooms and not get stared at.
I always felt so bad for those men, who were usually really young. And there were enough of them to keep him busy, full-time, for years.
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Jan Morris' Last Letters from Hav, my favourite travel book to a nonexistent country :D
Your grandfather sounds fascinating! Did he do a memoir? I hadn't thought about the less visible injuries but yes, they must have been devastating.
I've read an interview somewhere (in one of Jan Wong's memoirs, I think) with a Chinese urologist who did a lot of penis reconstruction surgery - apparently the traditional Chinese toilet training method involves putting the kids in open crotch pants, which in small villages with feral pigs and dogs means the potential for horrific injuries.
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ETA: Method of injury: HOLY FUCK!
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Poor damn kids.
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Ah, the Guinea Pig Club!
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I am tinkering with an historical m/m in that setting.
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Observe my lack of guilt. *g* I think I first found out about them via an exhibition at the Hunterian Museum, covering plastic surgery in WWI and II.
NPR piece, in case you haven't already found it:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7556326
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Faces From the Fire seems to have the most overall info but is really expensive. Maybe I can interlibrary loan it.
Oh, wait, there's another one: The Reconstruction of Warriors. That one's much more reasonable.
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Since you buy a lot of physical books, and I've stopped buying anything but e-books, I bequeath to you my book bargain-hunting secret: bookfinder.com. It'll search Amazon, abebooks, and a few other sites, and put the prices up next to each other for easy comparison.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/21/story-maverick-ww2-guinea-pig-surgeon-told-big-screen-first/
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ETA: I have Byrd's Skyward but I'm pretty sure I haven't read it yet, but there it is: a narrative of the early days of aviation by the famed aviator and explorer. I have not read any single book about the doomed Umberto Nobile expedition (the airship Italia, which crashed), but I think there are some books out there.
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It hit me much harder as a father than when I'd first seen it.
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He was in a lot of war movies.
Twelve O'Clock High was available at our local library, though, and may be at yours.
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"Consider yourselves already dead. Then it won't be so rough."
SOLD.
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(It's also around the point where Our Hero learned to act, which is nice. Icon from previous film, where he didn't seem to have.)
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Another one I really liked was The Last Flight of Bomber 31, about the WWII bombing runs staged from the Aleutian Islands across Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula towards Japan. Obviously this one fascinated me in part because of the Alaskan historical connection, but it's also a really interesting account of trying to conduct an air war over large amounts of territory with extremely long supply lines and the logistical difficulties they faced. The Americans could just barely manage to reach Japan's northernmost acquisition, a rocky island of no interest to anyone except as a strategic point of attack on the main part of Japan, by stripping down their planes of all extraneous weight and adding an extra fuel tank, but even under good conditions they were flying on fumes by the time they made it back to the easternmost tip of the Aleutians, so anything from a headwind to minor damage to their planes tended to result in crash-landing in Kamchatka. This was awkward for the Russians, who were trying to maintain their neutrality with regards to Japan so as not to have to fight a war on two fronts, so they took the American pilots as POWs because they didn't really have a choice, but negotiated a sort of informal "escape route" across Siberia to release their (alleged) POWs in the Middle East and allow them to get back into the fighting.
The author also strikes a pretty good balance between the American and Japanese perspectives, and deals fairly with the ordinary Japanese soldiers who were stuck in the middle of nowhere with Americans dropping bombs on their heads all night long, some of whom had pretty interesting stories too -- like one guy who kind of broke my heart - born in the U.S. of Japanese origin, his family was visiting relatives in Japan when the war broke out, and he ended up drafted on the side he didn't want to be on, and stuck on this barren rock in the middle of nowhere, then imprisoned in a Siberian labor camp for several years post-war rather than being repatriated back to the U.S. like he was hoping.
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It's not that the brutality of war is something that most war memoirs shy away from, but the way it gently leads you into the battlefield with a lightly funny touch and then plunges you straight into utter brutality of war and just leaves you there, dangling on a narrative cliffhanger, is really well done. It's a brilliant way to use the book's structure, as well as reader expectations about him as an author, to convey the experience that he had, as an idealistic 18-year-old who had no idea what he was getting himself into.
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But yeah, I've also read a number of his books about animals and nature, and really enjoy them.
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I remember reading it, and about it, when it came out and running into several articles drawn from regimental histories "which cannot be reconciled with Mr. Mowat's account." (Which is not necessarily to say And No Birds Sang involves deliberate untruths; people don't often remember what actually happened during combat.) Mowat himself said he had waited until after his father died to publish it. There's some parental expectations involved as well as the presented naïveté.
We don't have (so far as I know) a really good critical biography of Farley Mowat, nor anyone who has gone through and done the monumental job of fact checking necessary to talk about the mythologizing Mowat certainly did a lot of even in ostensibly factual books. And there are very few primary sources.
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People who get consciously good at humour may not solely do so because of trauma, but it seems like a safe bet. It's clear Mowat started doing that prior to serving and sort of semi-clear that most of Mowat's writing is about a better world with better outcomes. (And then you get into "why is that the better outcome?")
"Why?" and "to what end?" is why I would like that critical biography and the kind of academic interest to generate it. Not going to tackle that one on my own.
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Re the spoiler, I saw it developing, and I've been so conditioned by every book ever that I was thinking, "The character doesn't realize what's going on, and the author's never going to go there, but the ambiguity's going to be great fodder for fanfic authors." Then she WENT THERE. And then I kept waiting for her to go back on it, decide it was a phase, etc. AND SHE DIDN'T.
I foresee glorious Yuletide treasures coming out of this!
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I heard this story on an episode of the podcast Futility Closet, which seems to have a lot of really fascinating WWII stories. (Like the Battle for Castle Itter and the most effective double agent of the war.
I feel like the more I learn about WWII, the more I realize how deeply bizarre circumstances can be.
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There was a fake memoir a while back about a Jewish girl who escaped the Holocaust and roamed with a pack of wolves. After it was debunked, people wondered why otherwise non gullible readers had accepted something so preposterous. I think the reason is that children who really did survive the Holocaust often benefited from multiple bizarre lucky chances. The odds were so against them, if they only had one weird narrow escape, they didn't survive the next encounter. Read enough of the true stories, and a pack of friendly wolves seems tame. So to speak.
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Have you read Sherri L. Smith's Flygirl? YA novel about a Black American girl who joins the Women Airforce Service Pilots in WW2, and has to pass as white to do so. That and Code Name Verity are what immediately came to my mind.
Also, I vaguely remember Roald Dahl's memoirs having a lot of piloting in them.
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Fraser describes one of many battles in which an officer shouted at his men, "Get that bugger, he's nobbut wounded!" and pointed at an enemy soldier who'd been shot and was trying to crawl away to cover. There is then a lengthy justification of how you can't just wound someone on the field of battle, you have to shoot him again and finish him off, or he'll be back in action a month from now, and shoot you. "If you think that sounds barbaric, well, think away," he says, and the subtext is: and who are YOU, reader, to question Fraser's morality? Have YOU been there? Huh?
Anyway, I tried to accept this from Fraser without either compromising my own sense of right and wrong, but it was hard to handle the cognitive dissonance. Likewise, his descriptions of his own bloodlust. He doesn't quite say, "Shooting that one Japanese guy on the field of battle was an adrenaline-packed thrill ride and I sometimes wish I could do it all over again," but I got that impression, and I felt filthy just reading it.
It was all very convincing at the time, but I don't think I have to buy into Fraser's worldview just because he was a combatant and I'm not. Nice to know not every combatant thinks it's automatically wrong to make a generous gesture in a battle or to refuse to finish killing people you wounded.
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The Pacific theatre was very different, though, and from what I've heard, for various reasons (racism obviously being one of them) the behavior of the Allied troops towards the opposition troops was more brutal.
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The thing about combatant world views is not just that you don't know what you'd do in the same situation, it's that they didn't know what they were doing to do, and a great many of them don't know why they did what they did afterwards. Fraser's very unusual in talking about it. (There are some really harrowing Eastern Front memoirs that talk frankly about events, but like ... six? seven? out of millions upon millions of people involved.) Fraser's also unusual in also writing the -- genuinely humorous -- McAuslan stories about serving with the Gordon Highlanders (well away from Burma in North Africa), The Steel Bonnets, a scholarly work on the Scots border reivers, the frankly morally ambiguous The Candlemass Road, and the -- most popular of all Fraser's writings -- Flashman stories, whose protagonist isn't morally defensible and clearly knows it. Fraser's views on conflict and combat and the utility of force aren't facile ones. I think they're interesting in large part because Fraser is willing to acknowledge that people really are like that and really do those things.
So I don't think Fraser's subtext there is "who are you to question"; I think Fraser's subtext there is "you don't think enough".
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Did you assume I was unfamiliar with everything else Fraser ever wrote, or are you giving this list of his works for the benefit of other folks in this thread?
Any fans of Fraser in the house should note that I wasn't playing fair with that quotation. It's not from QSOH, it's from the short story "Captain Errol," and the real quote should be "By today's standards, you may think that atrocious. Well, think away." The protagonist, totally-not-Fraser, is justifying the decision he's about to have to make, to order soldiers to fire into an unarmed crowd. Your call whether that's the same as saying, "Who are you to question my morality?" but I think it is.
Then there are other things in QSOH, like this one nighttime massacre of wounded Japanese POWs in a hospital, murdered by their guards, men who were never punished for it. Fraser still seems to feel guilt about it, after the lapse of decades, but he makes the point that... what were he and his guys supposed to do, turn in their comrades for murdering enemies? (To paraphrase a line from Fraser's own The Pyrates, the answer to that is "yes," but it's not the kind of thing I can say to him and still be a decent person myself.
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I had no idea whether or not you were familiar with Fraser's other works, but needed to reference them to make the argument I was trying to make, that Fraser had complicated (and maybe ultimately unresolved) views about force and violence and war and that QSOH is maybe more explicable in the context of those other works.
I am not a Fraser fan; I could not get very far into the first Flashman book, and my view that Harry Flashman the character isn't a defensible literary choice colours my views of everything else Fraser wrote. It's a bit like Mowat; I try to be sympathetic to Farley despite a career built on lying his ass off about real people and real things, and I try to be sympathetic to Fraser despite a career filled with never quite managing to move to the "axiomatic" part of "axiomatic necessity" no matter how much energy and research and struggle got expended on the "necessity" part.
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A good reason to be anti war is that it is inherently full of situations where all choices will have terrible outcomes.
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It occurs to me to realize that I think it's better, or more righteous, or something, to value "having mercy in the moment" over "being ruthless in the moment to prevent a potential future bad thing," since the future is uncertain but the fact that you can make decisions in the moment is powerful.
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Mucca's grandpa was a Canadian fighter pilot, but my own was US infantry, so no family tales to add there.
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in-depth news reportage, based on accounts by the survivors of the bombing campaign in question.
Of supplementary interest is Fighter, his more straightforwardly-historical account of the Battle of Britain.
From the "nothing to do with this at all" department comes The Man in the Hot Seat by Doddy Hay (long out of print, mostly published in the UK). Hay was an RAF tail-gunner during the latter part of the war, and a keen — Olympic level — free fall parachutist in the 1940s (back when that was considered extreme sports): most of the book is a memoir of his years as
guinea pigtest pilot for Martin-Baker ejector seats, in which he racked up a number of memorable firsts (first backward-facing ejection, first triple-zero (ground level, zero speed, zero altitude) ejection), and a considerable number of broken bones. A bit of an odd book, about an extremely odd fellow.no subject
Ejector seat test pilot sounds like a joke job.
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This is a novel from 1983 by Derek Robinson about a fictional (but historically accurate) RAF squadron in the first year of WWII.
It was adapted into a six-part miniseries in 1988.
Not my usual sort of thing, but I watched the adaptation with my then-boyfriend and later read the book. Then I had to read something fluffy and comforting afterward.