MEMORIAL DAY 2022

I’ve been lucky as hell to have the very best job in the world: I got to meet the guys I grew up reading about and was in awe of, became their friend, and recorded their stories for history. Some of them were already in the history books, most weren’t. A friend of mine - a successful novelist - once told me that he envied non-fiction writers, because we have the power to bring the dead to life.

Today, all those guys I knew are gone, and the world is a lesser place with their absence.

Let me bring the ones I find most memorable to life here for you.

Dan Bowling was born in Bisbee, Arizona, the son of a socialist union organizer in the copper mines. After they moved to California, he became interested in airplanes because they lived near Mines Field (today’s LAX). He joined the USAAF in 1942 and excelled in training so much they sent him on for advanced training; when he got to Corsica to join the 321st Bomb Group of the 57th Bomb Wing, the squadron check pilot looked at his logbook, with the IFR “green card” and told him “You’ve got more time in the B-25 than I do.” Within the first month, he was made a flight leader. Bombing the Brenner Pass was hard - the Germans had their guns up in the Alps as high as 7,000 feet, and the bombers flew at 10,000 feet, and because of the terrain, they came from the same direction every time. Not good. Dan and his bombardier Jope Silnutz figured out a way to feed the information into the bomb sight so he could change the path of the formation, coming onto the bomb run only seconds before “bombs away,” rather than make a long straight run that gave the gunners several shots to get it right. His CO finally gave up fighting over this because the results were better than anyone else. “I never missed a target, and I never lost a guy,” was how he described his war. His friend Paul Jackson told me “He was the squadron leader; that’s different from the squadron commander.” He returned from the war five months before he turned 23, a Major in the Air Force. After the war, Dan returned to Los Angeles and married his girl and went into business with his father in law. Over the next 50 years, they built most of the homes in Torrance and the Palos Verdes Peninsula. As he put it, “I spent a year of my life knocking down people’s homes and the rest of my life building people homes.” When I met him to interview him for “The Bridgebusters,” Dan was deep in Alzheimers, but every time I was around him, “the squadron leader” was there. He died six months after I met him, and I spoke at his funeral, held in the church he built, filled with those who knew him. Six different people told me the same story six different ways of different times they had witnessed Dan literally give the coat off his back to a man who had none.

It’s not often you meet someone of whom it can be said they literally changed history, single-handed, but Dick Best did exactly that; just to prove it wasn’t a fluke, he did it a second time. A graduate of the Naval Academy, on June 4, 1942, he was a Lieutenant, and the commander of Bombing Squadron Six aboard the USS Enterprise at the Battle of Midway. The Enterprise bombers were first to find the Japanese carriers, arriving overhead at a bit after 10am. At that point, the United States was losing the battle; every airplane sent to attack had been shot down and no hits had been made. And then, as they prepared to attack, the Air Group Commander, a fighter pilot who had no experience of dive bombing, led the first squadron down on the wrong carrier! To make it worse, 15 of the 18 bombers in Bombing Six went with him, diving on what was for them the “right” carrier. There was Dick and his two wingmen - according to doctrine, they were worse than useless for an attack. Dick led them across the fleet and they dove on Akagi, the Japanese flagship. It was the single most successful, most accurate dive bombing by any pilot in any air force in the war. Dick’s bomb hit her right on the flight deck, penetrating into the hangars where the planes were fully fueled and armed, with other bombs lying around because the Japanese couldn’t decide if they were attacking Midway a second time or attacking the US carriers that had just been discovered. His two wingmen dropped their bombs immediately alongside the carrier, opening seams in the hull underwater as the hangars exploded. As Dick pulled out of his dive, he saw the carrier the rest had bombed, the Kaga, afire. And at that moment, the Yorktown bombers arrived and dived on Soryu. In eight minutes, the Japanese lost three of their four carriers and the United States became the world power we have been ever since. Flying home to the carrier, Dick started coughing up blood. He would later learn that a malfunction of the oxygen system had precipitated the emergence of incipient tuberculosis he had unknowingly contracted as a child. Once back on Enterprise, a second strike was organized to get the last carrier, the Hiryu. Dick flew that mission and they sank the carrier. It was the last time he would ever fly. It took 10 long years to deal with tuberculosis. In 1962, he became the Librarian at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. In 1971, just before he was going to retire, he “turned a blind eye” to the activities of his friends Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo, as they took the Pentagon Papers out of the library and copied them. “I believed the American people had a right to know what had been done in their name.” Publication of the Pentagon Papers was the spear in the heart of support for the war. Dick retired a year later, after the FBI interviewed him. “I was just waiting for them to decide to arrest me and put me on trial. I think that would have been something.” The FBI, realizing who he was, decided to let sleeping dogs lie. Dick was educated and cultured - he had the biggest personal library I ever saw, lining all four walls of the two story living room in his home in Bel Air. He also had the biggest collection of jazz records I ever saw.

John Bridgers is, to me, the stand-in for every naval aviator of World War II. He graduated from East North Carolina Teachers College in June 1940. At the time, a teacher in North Carolina got $99 a month. He saw an advertisement for the Navy’s AvCad (Aviation Cadet) program. As he later put it in his memoirs, “While a teacher was expected to pay room and board and taxes from that pay, a Navy aviator was paid $125 a month, with room, board and clothing provided, and an additional 50 percent of that pay for flight duty. At the end of four years of active duty, a bonus of $1,000 for each year of service would be paid, a sum that would go far in my plans to go to medical school. To a son of the depression, these seemed princely sums.” John graduated from Pensacola as an aviator, specialized as a dive bomber pilot, the Wednesday before Pearl Harbor. Originally, he had orders to the Atlantic Fleet, but those were changed and he was ordered to Hawaii. When he got there six weeks after the attack, “It was evident we had been struck far more grievously than reported.” Like nearly every other sailor who went through Pearl Harbor until the bay was finally cleared in 1944, he took a personal oath of vengeance against the enemy for what they had done. Assigned to Bombing Squadron Three, they went aboard the Enterprise in April for what turned out to be the Doolittle Raid against Tokyo, which he witnessed the takeoff. Returning to Pearl Harbor, they went aboard the Yorktown at the end of the month, and he survived her sinking at the Battle of Midway. Back aboard Enterprise in July, he took part in the invasion of Guadalcanal. At the Battle of the Eastern Solomons, the flight he was in was diverted to the island. Flight 300 was at Henderson Field throughout September and early October, the six weeks that were the worst of the campaign. At the end of the year he went aboard the Saratoga and participated in the Central Solomons Campaign. Returning to the US in the summer of 1943 a Lieutenant and the veteran who had survived the worst year of the war, he was assigned to Bombing Squadron 15 as Senior Division Leader. Air Group 15 went aboard the Essex in May 1944; their timing was perfect: they were the only fleet carrier air group to participate in both the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June and the Battles of Leyte Gulf in October, the two largest naval battles in history. At Leyte Gulf, having just turned 24 and just been promoted to Lieutenant Commander and made Executive Officer of Bombing 15, John led the entire 438-plane strike from Task Force 38 that struck the remains of the Japanese carrier fleet at the Battle of Cape Engano. The Essex bombers delivered the killing blow to the carrier Zuikaku, the last survivor of the six carriers that had struck Pearl Harbor on December 7. He later wrote that, as he flew back to the carrier, “I considered what I had done the last two years and decided the Navy had gotten a good return on their investment.” After the war, John Bridgers went to medical school. He became a hospital administrator and was a national expert in the provision of medical care to underserved communities.

Steve Pisanos once said to me, “My life IS the American Dream.” He was right. Born in Athens, Greece, the son of a streetcar motorman, Steve fell in love with flying when he saw Greek Air Force planes landing at a nearby airfield while he was tending a herd of sheep. He quickly learned that a boy like him would not become a pilot in Greece. He came home that night and told his family, “I am going to be a pilot. I will go to America, where all things are possible.” His father got him to stay home till he graduated from high school. He signed on a ship as cabin boy, and then discovered there was a North and a South America when the ship went to Rio de Janeiro. It took two more trips to get to Baltimore where he jumped ship and became what is called today “an illegal immigrant.” He got to New York City, where he got a job shelling oysters at Delmonicos and taught himself English using the New York Daily News and a Greek-English dictionary while traveling to and from work. Once he had enough English, he went to learn to fly. Flying cost $5 an hour and he was making $15 a week. After he passed his private pilot licence, he learned the RAF was looking for pilots. At the time, he had 70 flying hours; he “padded” the logbook with 150 non-existent hours, went to Canada, and joined the RCAF. He arrived in England in 1942, and was eventually sent to 133 Eagle Squadron, one of the three “Yanks in the RAF” squadrons, just before they were transferred to the USAAF. At this point, as he was about to become an American officer, his citizenship status was discovered. He became the first immigrant to take advantage of a new law granting immediate citizenship to any immigrant who joined the armed forces. Over the next 18 months, he became an ace in the Fourth Fighter Group, before being shot down over France on March 5, 1944. He ended up with the French Resistance and eventually took part in the Liberation of Paris. He stayed in the Air Force after the war, and rose to Colonel in 1969. In 1972, he was assigned as Air Attache to the US Embassy in Athens. He had an extra job: to make contacts in the Greek Air Force and discover those who wanted to see the overthrow of the military dictatorship then running the country, which happened in 1974. Just before he left to retire in America, Colonel Steve Pisanos, son of a poor streetcar conductor in Athens, who had to go to America to achieve his dreams, was awarded the George Cross, the highest Greek military order, for his service in restoring democracy to the land of its birth.

UPDATE: I just recalled one that has to be here:

Tom Hudner won the Medal of Honor in Korea for risking his life above and beyond the call of duty to try and rescue his friend Jesse Brown, the Navy’s first Black Naval Aviator, who had been shot down. Despite his efforts, his friend died. But that friendship did something extraordinary later. In 1969, race riots broke out at navy bases around the country over the treatment of Black sailors in the service that was still the most socially retrograde. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, the CNO who created the modern navy, called then-Captain Thomas Hudner to the Pentagon and gave him an assignment: to go to the bases, investigate the circumstances of the events, and to make such changes as were necessary to “restore justice.” Because his story was known, Hudner was the only white senior naval officer with the moral authority to undertake such an assignment. The “Hudner Reforms” were taken up by Admiral Zumwalt and made part of Naval Regulations. The operation of the Navy was transformed for the better. After the US adopted the all-volunteer force, the other services realized they had to make changes if they were to attract volunteers, and Hudner’s reforms were adopted across all. Today, the US military is the one place in America that comes closest to “opportunity for all, regardless.” That’s the result of an unlikely friendship between two very different people, that was thought ended on a lonely hill in the middle of a cold Korean winter. But the results of that friendship spread everywhere.

To me, there is a one word thread that runs through these stories - and all the other stories I could write here - “Service.” Not just service in war, but service throughout their lives to their communities. That was the attitude I always found all my life among the people I met who had been in World War II. In big ways and little ways, they served their communities and created the world we grew up in.

For those of you who are paid subscribers and support That’s Another Fine Mess, if you have a story to tell of someone you know or knew, I hope you’ll add it to this post. None of them should ever be forgotten.