Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy Page 22

  Six weeks later he was gone, and those of his mates who had survived the bombing of Donophan thought back to the blushing youngster from tobacco country, and wondered if he’d died still the virgin boy.

  Name: Second Lieutenant Dennis Francis O’Connell

  Born: September 23, 1920

  Place of Birth: Boston, Massachusetts

  Dennis O’Connell’s father was a stonecutter who had left Ireland during the Easter Rebellion for Boston, where he regularly gathered with other expatriates and descendants of expatriates in corner bars and argued adamantly for the cause they’d left. Of his father O’Connell had little to say, other than vague complaints of oppression and ignorance. Of his mother, another Irish émigré, he said even less; she might very well have disappeared for as much as he mentioned her. It was not a dismissal but rather, it seemed, a memory he savored privately and quietly, as one might worship one’s private saint.

  His father enrolled him in Boston College but O’Connell chafed under the Jesuits and, against his father’s wishes, enrolled in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; if his father wished to push him toward Catholic divinity, then O’Connell would strike back with heartless science. When his father came to accept the change, and even boast of his boy’s progress, O’Connell left school to pick up work as a day laborer here and there while roaming up and down the East Coast. His occasional visits home lasted only long enough to antagonize his father with his apparent shiftlessness.

  A year of roaming in those hard Depression days was enough for O’Connell, and in 1939 he turned to the same avenue as that of many other rootless young men of the time: the military. His smattering of university and the results of his battery tests landed him in flight training. He emerged an adequate pilot assigned to the Air Transport Command, where he was quite content to enjoy the myriad sights of the country as he shuttled men and materiel about the States. As the war in Europe grew more ravenous, threatening to draw in America, he betrayed no sign of anxiety in his visits home, but privately he began counting the days until the end of his enlistment.

  Like certain Irish constituencies, O’Connell’s father saw the war as an opportunity for Ireland to break the bonds of English fiefdom. So reflexively opposed to his father was O’Connell that he could not resist touting English resilience in the war, and boasted that America would soon be rallying to the Royal Family’s side to roll back Ireland’s potential liberators. It was then that Dennis O’Connell’s father finally and permanently closed his door on his son.

  The war did come and O’Connell, along with every other man in uniform, whether he had two years or two hours left on his term of service, was now in uniform for the duration. His enthusiasm for the war against the Hun in Europe (or any other for that matter), with which O’Connell had tweaked his father, waned abruptly.

  Although the American Air Corps was the first military arm extended overseas, with their bombers flying out of England by the summer of 1942, O’Connell continued to play the role of aerial lorry driver safely back in the States. However, the considerable pilot losses of those early days of the American bomber offensive sparked a search through the service’s ranks for qualified fliers with multi-engine aircraft experience. A number of ATC pilots fit the bill, including O’Connell, but he sidestepped reassignment by putting in for a transfer to fighter pilot training, a move misinterpreted by his seniors as evidence of an admirable ambition. Eventually, the bottomless manpower needs overseas expanded to include fighter pilots as well.

  He received transfer orders late in ’42 to a unit already operating in England. O’Connell claimed hardship, saying his family’s poverty and mother’s ill health required him stateside. Without his father’s knowledge, he obtained a corroborating letter from his mother, and the transfer was canceled. Early in ’43 he was ordered to San Antonio to replace a 351st Fighter Group pilot injured in a ground mishap. Again, O’Connell claimed hardship, but this time his father intercepted his son’s request to his mother for a second corroboration, and supplied his own document to the Air Corps in which he frankly claimed his son’s only hardship was an inability to find a family member to lie for him.

  At San Antonio, O’Connell was assigned to Al Markham’s squadron just as a transfer to combat operations in England was in the offing. O’Connell’s ambition to avoid combat remained unabated. He investigated conscientious objection; he pleaded to the base psychiatrist that he was mentally unfit; he put in for transfer back to his ATC unit.

  According to Leo Korczukowski, O’Connell’s frantic maneuvering to avoid combat duty hardly went unnoticed. One hot April afternoon, Al Markham took him under his arm and walked him off to a far corner of the field. What transpired between them neither Markham nor O’Connell ever shared with anyone else. Whatever it was, O’Connell’s attempts to leave the 351st ceased immediately. His conduct on the ground and in the air improved. He fulfilled his responsibilities unenthusiastically but reliably, and continued to do so through his first combat sortie. Thereafter, whatever equilibrium Markham had given the boy rapidly evaporated; this time no walk to a quiet corner of the field would put things right.

  Some thought they could see O’Connell deteriorate with every sortie. Though Markham had continued to try to turn the boy round, Adams, with his promotion to Wing in sight, declared that the O’Connell situation had to be resolved before his departure. Markham agreed. That discussion, to which Korczukowski, Markham, and Adams were party, took place at evening mess on August 8. The group had been alerted for a mission the following day, and Markham suggested that further discussion of the matter be put off to the following morning so they could dedicate their evening to the usual preoperation activities. Adams assented.

  Approximately six hours later, the Germans bombed Donophan and Colonel Adams was dead. Seven days later, so was Lieutenant Dennis O’Connell.

  Name: Captain Jon-Jacob Anderson

  Born: May 12, 1920

  Place of Birth: Matson, Kansas

  There were seven children on the Anderson farm — five boys, two girls — all with the same azure eyes and cornsilk hair. J.J., as they called him, was the runt, and as such was determined to prove himself the equal — or better — of his littermates. Meaning: If the other children were jumping from the barn loft into the straw, J.J. would leap from the rafters, flashing his consequent broken arm like a Medal of Honor; if his older, taller brothers made the school basketball team, then basketball became a sport for nancy boys, and J.J. threw his undersized body into the grinding gears of football.

  With a boy so adventurous and impulsive, it was unsurprising for him to be attracted to the air circus that drifted across Kansas during the summer season of county fairs. Once J.J. tasted the scent of seat leather and gasoline fumes, and felt the rush of air past an open cockpit, the farm lost him forever. His parents managed to hold on to his leash long enough for him to finish his schooling, but thereafter, he was with a troupe of barnstormers crisscrossing the farm country.

  But for someone like J.J., the derring-do of flying loops over county fairs could not compare with the tests of aerial combat. One summer morning in 1940, J.J.’s mates awoke to find one of their pilots missing, along with one of the show’s aeroplanes. The craft was located a week later, abandoned in a fallow field outside Toronto.

  Toronto was his gateway to the RAF’s Ferry Command, flying Hudson bombers to England. J.J.’s interest surpassed being a mere “airplane cabbie” (his disparaging self-description); it was simply a vehicle to get him across the Atlantic. That done, he soon after appeared in RAF uniform, where his story intertwines with that of Al Markham.

  Name: Major Albert Quincy Markham

  Born: November 11, 1915

  Place of Birth: Euclid, Ohio

  Al Markham was the middle child — bookended by sisters — of the owner of a small hardware shop. His father worked hard, his mother alongside him, and, as the children grew old enough and capable, each took a place behind the counter. The shop had alw
ays struggled, then struggled still more come the Crash of ’29.The Markhams did without, worked longer hours, and did not complain. Their mother died the following year. (This event Markham related stoically to acquaintances thusly: “She just worked herself out for us.”)

  Despite the demands of keeping house with his siblings, and shopkeeping with his father, Markham managed to maintain respectable marks in his schooling, and made a name as a running back on the school football team. His grades and athletic skills earned him a partial scholarship from Ohio State University. But Markham’s interests had already been waylaid by an odd bloke identified in Markham’s tales only by the colorful sobriquet “Skipjack Bailey.”

  Mr. Bailey, it seems, was a one-man aviation industry who encamped at a small aerodrome outside Euclid every spring. Throughout the season and into summer and fall, Mr. Bailey secured a living with his patched, creaking Curtis Jenny, performing aerial displays on festive occasions, aerial sightseeing tours, and crop-dusting. Markham never said what first attracted him to Bailey and his patch-work flying machine. What attracts a young man to any first love? It happens.

  When Markham could cadge time away from the shop and the schooling and the athletic field, he was with Bailey, learning to make aeroplanes run, to make broken aeroplanes run again, and eventually to fly them. However taken Markham was with Bailey and his shopworn Jenny, so Mr. Bailey was taken with his young disciple. By the time Markham was seventeen, he was Bailey’s partner during the flying season, sharing flying time and profits. To atone for his increasing absence from the family shop, Markham unhesitatingly turned over most of his earnings to his father, putting aside for himself only a small cache for upcoming university expenses.

  But the university could not compete with flying. Markham left OSU early in his second term, on the eve of the spring flying season, to join Bailey full-time. But just a few months after the lad returned to the aerodrome outside Euclid, Skipjack Bailey — with as much irony as one could want — was struck down by a bus.

  Bailey’s death took the pleasure out of the little business, and for a bit Markham was all at sixes and sevens as to what to do with himself. His father offered him a place at his shop, but Markham still felt drawn to the air. With his extensive experience it was not difficult for him to secure a position with one of the many birthing airlines that made most of their money flying the mails while experimenting with the concept of air passenger travel on the side.

  Markham’s particular route was among the cities of the Great Lakes region, and he quickly attained a reputation as a welcome crewman in the co-pilot seat where all newcomers served their apprenticeship. With many new pilots coming from the likes of barnstormers and crop dusters, pilot trainers always anticipated investing a certain measure of time disciplining the air-circus lone-wolf tendencies out of their pupils, but Markham, from the outset, showed a welcome ease at taking the subordinate seat. If Markham served with a pilot who considered his control of the aeroplane God-given and as such not to be shared with any other human being (including his second), Markham did not complain, and diligently applied himself to his logbook and control checks. And, when flying with a generous captain who would benevolently turn to him and say, “OK, kid, take ’er for a while,” he took the control yoke like a veteran.

  He had an admirable and remarkable cool about him. Bad weather left him unflustered; bad airfields with bad winds and bad runways he met with thought and calculation instead of anguish and worry; a peculiar vibration in an aeroplane was a puzzle to deduce, not a reason to fret. The airline was sorry to lose him to a competing offer.

  Hitler’s was a name that made little impression across the oceans in those days, and the events in China were tragic, yes, but it was only yellow men killing yellow men, and the bloodshed had been going on for so long that it had become as unexceptional a part of the news reports as sports scores. And as for the Italian excursion in Abyssinia, well, the cribbage chat ran along the lines that the idea of the fuzzies and Eye-ties chasing each other round the bush seemed downright comical. But in 1936, all that kindling finally birthed the first licks of flame as Spain fell into civil war.

  On the other side of the Pond, young men in the doldrums of the Depression became caught up in the classic American adventure tale: overbearing bad guys (the “Insurgents,” comprised of rather nasty Fascists) besieging outgunned good guys (the Loyalists) to whose rescue the stout-hearted cavalry could ride. Three thousand American idealists read Hemingway’s reports of blood, regarded Capa’s stunned Spanish foot soldier — an explosion of splayed arms and legs — dropping to the ground, but saw only the glamour of a grand cause and pretty nurses with lilting Spanish accents, soothing “a mere flesh wound” with soft, loving hands. Brave, foolhardy, and naive, they gave themselves over to the illegal recruitment that violated America’s neutrality policy, and were smuggled across the Franco/Spanish border. Twenty-one-year-old Al Markham was one of them.

  To any young flier, aerobatics, dusting fields, the routine of domestic air routes — all paled at the idea of combat in the air a la Rickenbacker and von Richthofen. Even the normally cool and responsible Al Markham could not resist that allure. But aerobatics are not the same as air combat tactics. Markham was new to the game and discovered — with the first thunk-thunk-thunk of German 7.9-mm machine-gun bullets into the fuselage of his I-16 fighter — that what went on in the Spanish skies was not a game or the chivalric jousting of von Richthofen’s day. Markham grappled with the same epiphany that finds every new warrior: Across from him, men he did not know, and would probably never see, were as blindly committed as a thunderstorm to depriving him of his life.

  A person’s world changes in that moment; the moral compass he has been raised and lived with goes madly spinning. Understanding that there are those who wish to kill one, one now needs to set oneself seriously to developing the skills to kill them first.

  The German Condor Legion providing air support for the Insurgents had the Loyalists out-trained and out-equipped. The plucky little I-16s fell regularly to the guns of the German Messerschmitts. Markham was game, and he had a raw ability, enough to gain a kill (“More luck than skill,” he often related humbly), but he had yet to perfect that ability. Consequently, in April of 1937, his I-16 plowed a long furrow in the dry Spanish earth, though he managed to turn what should have been a crash into a crash-landing. He hobbled away from his burning ship with a horrendous gash in his right leg, a wound that would still give him a twinge in bad weather. (Markham’s fellows would often remark of the invitingly casual air he exuded when one entered his office and saw him leaning back in his chair, one leg propped on an open desk drawer; but that devil-may-care pose had less to do with ease than easing the pain in his old wound.)

  A few weeks later, on April 26, Markham was still recovering in a small hospital in a Basque village thirty kilometers from the combat lines. It was Monday, a market day, and Markham first thought the church bells he heard late that afternoon had something to do with the festive air of the crowd milling among the costermongers in the square. A few minutes later he was tragically corrected by a flight of Condor He-111 bombers which, after they emptied their bomb bays, turned round to strafe. After the Heinkels were gone, Ju-52’s arrived with loads of incendiaries, and then it was their turn to strafe as well. When the Germans were done three hours later, nearly one-third of the seven thousand Basques who lived in Guernica were dead or wounded.

  The war had changed, and so had Al Markham. Still limping, he took up a rifle and returned to the battle line.

  He finished the Spanish Civil War in ’39 with a letter of commendation from the deposed Diaz government, a recurring pain in his leg, and the fervent belief that the Germans were far from finished. It had been too easy for them; they would come for more. He looked at the map, calculated the possibilities, and settled in France.

  He applied to and was accepted by the Armée de l’Air, who, while sharing the prevailing French thinking that the Boche would neve
r attempt to penetrate the impenetrable Maginot Line, were nonetheless happy to have Markham’s experience against the Germans on their rolls.

  The French were correct in one assumption: Jerry didn’t come through the Maginot. Instead, von Rundstedt’s forty-four divisions blazed through the Belgian Ardennes and, with Guderian’s panzers in the spearhead, punched through at Sedan, flanked the Maginot, and opened northern France like a tin of kippers. As the French collapsed less than four weeks after the German breakthrough, Markham, along with a number of his dispossessed French colleagues and a mixed bag of refugee combatants from Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, and the rest of the Reich’s shopping list, escaped through Cherbourg a step ahead of the Germans and made the short journey across the Channel with an aim toward — as the saying goes — fighting again another day.

  He joined the RAF and was assigned to the 501st Hurricane squadron at Gravesend, directly in the path of the Luftwaffe strikes on London. Not long after Markham started flying with the 501st he received a new wingman, also an expatriate American: Jon-Jacob Anderson.

  At first, one would have thought them as likely to shoot at each other as at the Germans. Anderson was a loud braggart, bridling at his junior status on someone’s wing. More than once, he went off chasing German aeroplanes instead of holding the confining but necessary confines of the wingman’s slot keeping his element leader’s tail clear. Quiet, well reasoned, Markham often seemed more concerned about his compatriots than his score. At first, the mix of the two was decidedly volatile.