George McGovern as a B-24 pilot

I just finished reading Stephen Ambrose's The Wild Blue about the 741st Squadron in the 455th Bomb Group of the 15th Air Force (whew - AAF designations are a bitch) - particularly the crew of the Dakota Queen - George McGovern's crew. It's a helluva story guaranteed to leave the reader in awe of the young men that won the war, a great companion piece to Ambrose's Band of Brothers. The following passage wasn't the only one that stuck with me, but I thought it was worth sharing. After a bomb run over the railway marshaling yards at Wiener Neustadt, Austria. One of the bombs in the plane did not drop (if you plan on reading the book anytime soon you might want to avoid the two excerpts below):

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The crew left the bomb bay doors open and Sergeant McAfee and Lieutenant Cooper went to work, trying to trigger the little steel catches on each end of the bomb, hoping to pry them open so the bomb would drop. McGovern remembered: "It was scary as hell. If the plane suddenly made a lunge when the 500-pound bomb dropped..."

McAfee and Cooper were doing their work standing on the catwalk, less than a foot wide, hanging in the center of the bomb bay. McGovern looked behind him to see how they were doing, "but about all I could see was the top of their heads and their back."

...

As McAfee and Cooper labored, McGovern throttled back to slow down the Dakota Queen and they began to lose altitude. "I didn't want to drop a bomb in front of other airplanes," he explained. "Also, I wanted to give McAfee and Cooper undivided time. I didn't know how long it would take to get rid of the bomb..."

The Dakota Queen descended to 12,000 feet, several thousand feet below the formation, which was pulling ahead in any case. Then Cooper yelled something "and all of a sudden the plane jumped and I knew the bomb had been cut loose." They were approaching the Austrian-Italian border. McGovern watched the bomb descend, "a luxury you didn't have at 25,000 feet. It went down and hit right on a farm in that beautiful, green part of Austria. It was almost like a mushroom, a big, gigantic mushroom. It just withered the house, the barn, the chicken house, the water tank. Everything was just leveled. It couldn't have come in more perfectly. If we had been trying to hit it we couldn't have hit it as square. you could see stuff flying through the air and a cloud of black smoke."

Sergeant Higgins watched the bomb descend. He commented, "It just blew that farm to smithereens. We didn't mean to do that, we certainly didn't try to do that."

McGovern glanced at his watch. It was high noon. He came from South Dakota. He knew what time farmers eat. "I got a sickening feeling. Here was this peaceful area. They thought they were safely out of the war zone. Nothing there, no city, no rail yard, nothing. Just a peaceful farmyard. Had nothing to do with the war, just a family eating a noon meal. It made me sick to my stomach."

...

After the bomb fell, McGovern closed the bomb bay doors and headed home. On the intercom, he and Cooper talked. McGovern asked, "What's the highest elevation between here and where we are going?"

Cooper looked at his map, did his calculations, and replied, "Eight thousand feet, George. Eight thousand feet." In an interview he admitted, "Actually, it was only 7,000 feet, but I added another 1,000 feet because I was engaged to get married." Cooper grinned, then added, "As George was expecting his first child, he added another 1,000 feet on top of that."

Back at Cerignola, it was an easy landing. There had been no flak on the milk run over Wiener Neustadt. There was not even a scratch on the Dakota Queen. No one had been hurt. McGovern jumped into a truck and rode over to the debriefing area, where the Red Cross women gave him coffee and a doughnut. An intelligence officer came running up to him - the same officer who had handed him a cable back in December that told him his father had died. This time, however, the officer was grinning from ear to ear. As he handed a cable to McGovern, he said, "Congratulations, Daddy, you now have a baby daughter."

...

"I was just ecstatic," McGovern said. "Jubilant." But then he thought, Eleanor and I have brought a new child into the world today - at least I learned about it today - and I probably killed somebody else's kids right at lunchtime. Hell, why did that bomb have to hit there?

He went over to the officers club and had a drink - cheap red wine. He was toasted and cheered. But, he later said, "It really did make me feel different for the rest of the war. Now I was a father, I had not only a wife back home but a little girl, all the more reason why I wanted to get home and see that child." He returned to his tent and wrote Eleanor a long letter. He did not mention the farmhouse but he couldn't get it out of his mind. "That thing stayed with me for years and years. If I thought about the war almost invariably I would think about that farm."

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Pretty rough baggage to carry for years and years and a key passage in the book. However, (again: spoiler alert) the story finds a happy resolution at the very end of the Epilogue (pages 262-3):

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In 1985, McGovern was lecturing at the University of Innsbruck. A director of Austrian television's state-owned stationed contacted him to ask if he would do an interview for a documentary he was producing on Austria in World War II. He wanted McGovern to talk about what it was like bombing Austrian targets. McGovern was not inclined but finally let himself be talked into it. A woman reporter did the interview. She said that Senator McGovern was known around the world for his opposition to the war in Vietnam, and especially the bombing of South and North Vietnam. Yet he had been a bomber pilot in World War II. The reporter asked, "Senator, did you ever regret bombing beautiful cities like Vienna, Salzburg, Innsbruck, and others?"

McGovern answered, "Well, nobody thinks that war is a lovely affair. It is humanity at its worst, it's a breakdown of normal communication, and it is a very savage enterprise. But on the other hand there are issues that sometimes must be decided by warfare after all else fails...I thought Adolf Hitler was a madman who had to be stopped.

"So, my answer to your question is no. I don't regret bombing strategic targets in Austria. I do regret the damage that was done to innocent people. And there was one bomb I've regretted all these years."

The reporter snapped that up. "Tell us about it."

McGovern told her about the bomb that had stuck in the bomb bay door and had to be jettisoned, on March 14, 1945. "To my sorrow it hit a peaceful little Austrian farmyard at high noon and maybe led to the death of some people in that family. I regret that all the more because it was the day I learned my wife had given birth to our first child and the thought went through my mind then and on many, many days since then, that we brought a young baby into the world and probably killed someone else's baby or children."

When the documentary appeared on Austrian TV, the station received a call from an Austrian farmer. He said he had seen and heard McGovern. he knew it was his farm that was hit, because it was high noon on a clear day and exactly as McGovern described the incident.

"I want you to tell him," the man went on, "that no matter what other Austrians think, I despised Adolf Hitler. We did see the bomber coming. I got my wife and children out of the house and we hid in a ditch and no one was hurt. And because of our attitude about Hitler, I thought at the time that if bombing our farm reduced the length of that war by one hour or one minute, it was well worth it."

The television station called McGovern and told him what the farmer had said. For McGovern, it was "an enormous release and gratification. It seemed to just wipe clean a slate."

Thank you for our freedom

Why I left the German Evangelical Church (of which I was never a member)

by EscutcheonBlotLong ago, at the close of the last century, as a starry-eyed young Escutcheon arrived in Germany for his first engagement, he was taken by an obliging--if officious--young man from the theater employing them both, to complete the paperwork necessary for a temporary (8 week) work and residence permit. In Germany, at that time, this was done for each job, in each town, for each contractual period, and not one second longer.

Young Master Blot did not, at the time, understand a word of German, and was led through the beaurocratic vicissitudes(and Brother, can those Germans make some vicissitudes) by the helpful young German. He was quite astonished to be asked his religion. He replied, like any red-blooded American Boy "None of your damn business". He was told that German Law required him to declare. He said "Very well, then...Christian".

"Protestant or Catholic?"

"Episcopalian...the American branch of Anglicanism."

"Is that Protestant or Catholic?"

"Protestant".

"Thank you Herr Blot. Here is your visa".

And so I thought, "well, when in Rome, and so forth, what?"

Years later, as I began to understand German better, and began questioning the various tax categories on my pay slips, I was horrified to discover that I had been paying between 3 and 5% in tax to the German Evangelical Church (the Lutherans). For German Officialdom, the only Protestant church is the Lutheran. I informed several of the theaters where I was working that I was not then, nor had I ever been, a Lutheran...I was raised Episcopalian(which has its own drawbacks). I was informed that I was permanently a part of the those-be-taxed-for-the-benefit-of-the-Lutherans, and they could not extract me. The Lutheran and Catholic Churches are the two Established churches of Germany. All who belong must pay the church tax. (Anglicanism, which is not Established, is also not taxed...but no one informed me of this back in 1999. Other faiths are also not taxed.)

As I grew more confident I started to try to fight the church beaurocracy and get my damn(if not in fact damned) money back, which had been taken from me for 4 or 5 years running. Three percent doesn't sound like much, but it really adds up after a while. I was told by the church themselves that their beaurocracy couldn't handle the possibility that someone was mistakenly put into their flock. It (according to the church tax flunky with whom I spoke) happened too seldom for there to be a procedure to rectify it. My money was gone. My only choice was to go to the Ministry for Inhabitants for my Berlin urban division and officially declare that I wished to renounce my allegiance to the Evangelical Church...to which I had never belonged.

So I went to the Ministry for Inhabitants of the City Division of Schoeneberg, Berlin, where I officially left the German Evangelical Church...becoming apostate in the eyes of the German State.

I got a certificate.

This, gentle reader, is what the 1st Ammendment to the Constitution is talking about when it forbids the establishment of a church. The Anglican Church was similarly established in most, if not all of the 13 colonies, and the taxes to support it were particularly onerous. (Fun fact: the movement to keep the Anglicans Established in Ireland in the 19th century gave rise to one of the English language's longest and most fun words, antidisestablishmentarianism. Lovely).

Yours, poorer, wiser, and apostate,

Escutcheon Blot(the officially un-churched)


P.S. I found out later that a large portion of the taxes that both the Catholics and Lutherans take in are from foreigners like myself who are conned into declaring for one or the other. So few Germans are willing to belong to the taxable flock that the churches must fleece the incoming ignorant to stay afloat.
P.P.S. I don't wish for this to be seen as an Easter Morning denunciation of Faith. I have never lost faith; just as I have never been Lutheran.

Postcards from Berlin

I am an American living and working in Berlin. The corporate bigs here at Liverputty thought it might amuse and edify the teeming readers of this blog to hear occasionally from me. Full disclosure: I am an artist, not a writer, and the attempt over the last few years to become fluent in German has rendered my English a little weird.

A couple of visits back, I was sitting at the dinner table with a few friends, when one (who hates flying, and as a consequence has never been more than 500 miles from home) asked me rather abruptly, "So what's it like...over there...you know...in Europe?" And he wanted an answer before the linguine got cold. In a word, it's different - far more different than either Americans or Europeans want to admit. Far more different than it first appears. It has taken me several years being here to realize just how different we are from each other.

I live in the heart of West Berlin, in the old entertainment district. It is still entertaining: as I write there are six prostitutes plying their wares on the street below. The streets are full of honking cars, racing past, flying great big German flags (black, red, and gold), celebrating the win a few hours ago over Argentina in the World Cup. This is the closest Germans get to displaying overt patriotism.

I saw Der Untergang (nominated for best foreign language film Oscar in, I believe, 2005) a few years ago when it was first released. At the time, I was relatively new in Germany and had only recently become marginally fluent. It was when the film ended and lights came up that I finally started to understand the German passion for pacifism. The audience was dead silent for a very long moment before silently getting up to leave. There were no comments. The scars on the German psyche are still fresh and there are physical reminders everywhere.

Today, walking to the State Library in eastern Berlin, I crossed over the wall, or rather the remains of the wall. It is now denoted by a flat line of bricks imbedded in the middle of the street, following its old course. In front of me was the Holocaust memorial, a three or four acre plaza filled with granite plinths, ranging from a few inches to over ten feet high, all uniform gray. The memorial had to wait until reunification to be built, as it occupies the site of the mine-fields on the East German side of the wall. One block north was the Brandenburg Gate, the symbolic center of Berlin, and just behind that was the Reichstag, restored after the reunification with an enormous glass dome over the center.

And galavanting through the streets were the Germans, waving their flags in hopeful anticipation(later realized) of victory that evening. But what was unexpected (to me anyway) was the number of non-european young people wearing the German colors(often in the form of large, fuzzy Cat-in-the-Hat hats) and waving the flag. Arabs, Africans and Asians were all heavily represented. Germany is not, like the USA is (or was), a melting pot. The country has only been open to immigration since 1949, when the Federal Republic of (West)Germany (DFR) was founded. And although Germany has been allowing entry to foreigners for nearly 60 years, with one of the most liberal asylum policies in the world, Germany has never been welcoming to foreigners (mostly Turks; known for years as "guest workers"), especially non-white, non-europeans. And the foreigners here have responded in kind, keeping to themselves, keeping their languages and national allegiances - merely existing within the German state.

Yet with a birth rate far below replacement, Germans are starting to realize that they will have to start absorbing immigrants, rather than merely making room for them, if they want the German nation to survive. And for the first time, the guest workers seem to be acting like the citizens they mostly are, if only for the soccer team. Those cars, which are still honking like crazy, are as likely to be filled with Turkish teenagers as German ones.

It is neither a deep nor, probably, a meaningful patriotism. Turkey didn't make it to the World Cup finals this year. A deeper intellectual pride of country would be too much to expect from the Germans, themselves, for many more years. That will not likely happen not until the generation that fought the war, and suffered (and ran) the concentration camps is dead and buried. But this World Cup spirit may be a start.

Next up: Ausländer Raus! The Far-Right, Far-Left, and anti-immigrationism.

Or maybe not.

Yours, Escutcheon Blot