The Grapevine Art Salon

Presentations: Jonathan Knott

Jonathan Knott writes about a fighter pilot, seen this time from the outside, through eyes that are two generations younger and full of interest in the past. In this case, the past is World War II, and the pilot is an American in the Pacific theater living and then telling about events that his young interviewer had only read about. Jonathan is a history major and a curator of stories.

An Interview with a Veteran

Though I had never talked to him before, I had seen him once or twice, and he seemed like a gruff and intimidating man. I arrived at the appointed time with the intention of being as conciliatory as possible.

He is the owner of a machine shop and auto parts supply store known for having both the best parts and far and away the highest prices in town. The store was fairly busy, and he was short-handed (I got the impression that was usually the case). He seemed nervous, a reaction I was not expecting. I offered to come back the next day, and he politely replied, �Would that be okay?� Then, �Well, how long is this going to take?�

I shrugged and said, �However long you want it to,� which seemed to satisfy him. He invited me back to his office. He showed me to a chair opposite his desk and slipped away for a moment, allowing me to glance around and assess what I could from the way he decorated his walls. Though most everything else was automotive in nature, the main piece of d�cor was a large, framed, color photograph of a P-47 Thunderbolt escorting a B-17 bomber. The picture was mounted, I noticed, at an angle easy for him to view, not behind him, as if on display for others.

He slipped back in and apologized, and as he sat down I made an observation that I would continue to remark upon mentally throughout the interview: despite being over 80 years old, he had no pain or difficulty moving; on the contrary, he seemed almost to teleport himself from one place to another in well-controlled bursts of physical energy. He was never quite able to sit still but continuously shifted in his seat, leaning forwards and backwards and employing animated gestures that, while energetic, were not in any way frantic or annoying, merely interesting.

He leaned forward, looked at me objectively, and asked, �So what would you like to know?� I replied that I was a history major and, although I was there for an assignment, I had been particularly interested in military history since I was a boy, so that I would be happy to hear anything he wanted to tell me about his World War II experiences. This seemed to satisfy him, and he surprised me by launching into a comprehensive and highly detailed account of his life from high school graduation in l935 to the dropping of the atom bomb ten years later. How I wished I had brought a recorder. But I had not wanted to make him nervous and now I had to do the best I could without one.

He began by describing the Depression, a time when hardly anyone had a car and those who did had it up on blocks because they couldn�t afford parts or gasoline to keep it running. He said the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and related programs, including a youth organization, kept the country afloat. I�d noticed in the past that almost everyone I�d met who�d been through the Depression was scarred so deeply that worries about money, food and such still stayed with them long after it was necessary. He was no exception. Despite being one of the wealthiest men in the county, he still wore polyester bell-bottom suits from the 70�s because, according to him, �They aren�t worn out yet.� He said that after high school he was lucky enough to get a job on one end of town at a gas station and at the other end selling tires, both of which brought in about $40 a week total, enough to get married on, which he did.

He said the country was divided in opinion and generally skeptical about the war in Europe, but all that changed on December 7th (throughout the interview, he referred to the Pearl Harbor attack as December 7th, a tribute to the impact of that date at the time). He said that event pulled the country together in a serious way and sparked his own military career.

He wanted to serve in the Air Force, and in order to become a pilot he had to pass a particularly difficult written test. He described his nervousness at being a simple country boy in a room full of people who were much better educated and thus, he felt, more qualified. He was one of only four who were accepted. Another problem he faced was meeting the maximum height requirements, being taller than the accepted standard (�still am,� he noted). He was over six feet tall. They took him anyway.

He joined the Air Force in l941 and began training at a hastily assembled airfield in Mississippi. At the beginning of the war, according to him, the American military was weak and the Air Force was virtually nonexistent. Almost all of the training was accomplished by cavalry officers who, he said, possessed an ability to perform calmly and efficiently with minimal time and equipment. He excelled in gunnery, and they eventually made him a gunnery instructor.

He told me he was assigned to a double squadron of 100 planes. I knew from having memorized such things that a typical squadron had 48 planes, so I raised my eyebrows slightly. He noticed my questioning look and said that a double squadron on paper had 96 planes, but �they figured we�d probably tear up a few on the way.� I admitted to myself that he wasn�t going to slip up on anything. Indeed, one of the most impressive things about him was not only that he remembered all these details at his age, but during the interview he was also fielding phone calls and occasionally going out to look up auto parts in his catalogues and locate them in the warehouse for customers. He never lost his place when he got back to the story. I couldn�t have done that at my age.

His squadron was shipped to the Pacific Theater on a little escort carrier that was �so rough that even the sailors were sick most of the time.� A turning point had already been reached at Midway, he said, and America was on the offensive. He described the retaking of islands by winning naval battles and forcing the Japanese back toward their mainland, cutting off supplies to the islands, leaving them �withering on the vine.� Closer to the mainland, the islands became considerably tougher to take, however. He described Tarawa, Iwo Jima and other battles as being, despite superior force, serious tests due mainly to the Japanese habit of fighting to the last man and to Kamikaze attacks from the air.

During these tough battles, many pilots were shot down. American submarines and PBY reconnaissance planes conducted a series of bold rescues. He said the submarines in broad daylight would go right into the lagoon under Japanese destroyer screens to rescue survivors. The PBY�s would fly in, land on their pontoons, and load the downed pilots. Then the planes would be so heavy they couldn�t take off again, so they would ride back to base on the water. That particular area, he said, had glass-smooth water, calm even for the Pacific. The closest base off Iwo Jima was 100 miles. The trips back and forth by those lumbering planes proved a terrific morale booster. PBY crews were so loved by others for their exploits that, wherever they visited, they got steaks and ice cream by way of appreciation.

Listening to him recount these battles by memory was a strange and wonderful treat to me. As a boy I had spent countless hours reading about them in great detail. When other children my age were collecting baseball cards and torturing insects, I was off in a corner memorizing equipment statistics and soaking up every photograph and historical account of WW II that I could find in the library. Though I still am fascinated with the subject, it always has seemed like another world long ago, and to have before me a living, breathing participant (and who better than a fighter pilot?) to tell me stories could only have been better if I were still twelve (in a way, of course, I guess I still am).

One of my military history obsessions has been battleships, ranging from the earliest craft that could fit the definition all the way up to the glorious and majestic behemoths of WW II. The only flaw in battleship history for me is that there weren�t enough battles between the ships, the aircraft carrier having rendered them obsolete at the height of their technology. Despite their dwindling importance as mainline weapons, they were still important for the support of landing troops and as symbols of national pride and power. The two largest and most powerful were built by the Japanese in WW II: the Yamato and the Musashi.

The man before me was a quarter of the way into a tale about uncovering and destroying a �big goddam battleship� before I realized he was in on the bombing of the Musashi. I must have read that story fifty times as a boy, and I was quite excited to hear it from one who had been there. He was saying intelligence had word that there was �a big ass battleship� docked in the area they were flying reconnaissance over, but the ship�s camouflage was so good, nobody could see it. After several flights with no sighting, the order came in to �just put some bombs in the area anyway.� Lo and behold, he said, a battleship was there after all. He said they had gone so far as to cover the ship in soil and to plant full-size trees on it, which, during the explosions, flew straight up in the air.

His job during battle was to lend support to the Marines by pursuing �targets of opportunity� over the islands which, loosely translated, meant �shoot whatever you want, as long as it�s Japanese.� He continued in this role until everything but the mainland had been conquered, at which time he was instructed to escort bombers over the mainland itself. Soon after daily bombing began, the Air Force established such superiority in the sky that escorting bombers was no longer necessary. At this point, he was ordered back to seeking targets of opportunity, which he continued until the Japanese surrender.

I looked up at the painting and asked him what kind of fighter he flew. He replied that at one point or another he flew them all, though his favorite was always the P-47 Thunderbolt. I asked him why he liked it so much, since it was such a big, lumbering plane, and most stories about American fighter planes centered around the P-51 Mustang or P-38 Lightening, planes that were fast, maneuverable and beautiful to look at. He confided in me that he loved to fly those planes and they were more fun, but he always felt better in a Thunderbolt because �there was a little more metal in there protecting your ass from enemy bullets.� That comment reminded me that he still drove a 5000 pound Buick; I wondered if there was a correlation.

At a certain point while he was flying, all pilots were instructed not to go within a certain distance of Hiroshima. There was a great cloud over the city. He said the city sparkled like a diamond within the cloud for several days. Then he received an okay to fly lower where he looked at where the city had been, �and it was a pitiful sight.� I imagine it was.

As he came to the end of his narrative, he expressed his view that the Depression, and the programs like the CCC created in response to it, gave America a hardcore sense of grit and nationalism that enabled us to win the war. He said it was his opinion that if a comparable foe were to attack us today, we, being so soft and divided a people, might not make it. I did not mind telling him that I shared his opinion.

The shop had already closed around us. I thanked him for his cooperation and his time. As he drove away from me in his P-47 Buick, I observed to myself that with his passing and that of the few remaining others like him, so would pass the witnesses of this country in its glory, the ones who can speak with authority about why we have a Memorial Day and a Veteran�s Day and a Fourth of July and a national anthem. We can learn much more from them than the dusty pages of a history book, and we can only hope to show the same unity and fortitude they did, should history indeed repeat itself.