Bomber Pilot: A Memoir of World War II

Foreword

Foreword A man who goes to war takes part in an event which the merger of national effort and individual experience makes more profound than any other he may ever know. His nation may rise or fall and, if he sees combat, his own life is at stake. The awesome spectacle, the horror, the pain, the heroism, and the cowardice are etched in his mind. For some, these leave more grievous wounds than those which scar the body. While many might suppress their memories or select,only the easier, lighter moments to recall, other survivors feel compelled to tell what they saw-to describe those moments of intensity so starkly WHerent from the ordinary course of events. In American history, the combination of a high level of literacy and an interest in the common man has resulted in a wealth of soldier accounts from the Civil War to the present. The fact that newly discovered Civil War diaries appear in print at a time when the first wave of Vietnam memoirs are coming out shows the continuing interest in what those who fought have to say. There are World War II memoirs which have set a high standard . Among them the reminiscences of two infantry officers (Charles MacDonald, Company Commander, and Harold Bond, Return to Cassino) and that of a B-17 Fortress co-pilot Bert x Foreword Stiles whose Serenade to the Big Bird was published after his death in the air war over Europe. Although not intended as a memoir, J. Glenn Gray's beautiful philosophic study The Warriors : Reflections on Men in Baffle includes letters, journal notes, and fragments of memory of his service with infantry divisions in Europe. His emphasis, however, is on the universal rather than the individual experience. Philip Ardery's account belongs in this group of first-rate books. Older and better educated than most who fought, he possesses a fortunate combination of sensitivity and maturity as well as a talent for writing. From the beginning of Hight training in 1940 through the several schools as student and instructor to the end of his combat tour in 1944, he describes not only the actions but also the sensations he experienced. As a B-24 squadron commander , then group and later wing operations officer in the Eighth Air Force, he was in the midst of the great bomber offensive . He went on the famous Ploesti raid and Hew over the great D-day armada. After the former he remembered: «The sky was a bedlam of bombers Hying in all directions, some actually on fire, manywith smoking engines, some with great gaping holes in them or huge chunks of wing or rudder gone." And he cannot forget: «The noise a bomber pilot hears.... The horrible screaming ... of the enemy radio jamming apparatus. It is like the death cry of the banshees of all the ages." He saw some friends die in Hames and others lose «the youthful facade which tears so easily in combat." He describes the effects of fear and how he mastered it for, as he put it, «no matter how fast things happened, I always had time to get scared." Off duty he moved in a select circle. He knew Edward R. Murrow and talked with T. S. Eliot and Harold Laski. There are brief characterizations of them and of his fellow pilots-Jimmy Stewart among them. This is a book which answers well the comprehensive question -what was it like? It is also a fascinating story. I have never met Philip Ardery but I feel as if I know him after reading these pages. And he is, to use an old fashioned term, a worthy. EDWARD M. COFFMAN, Professor of History University of Wisconsin at Madison ...