The Daily Brief

Thirty years ago this weekend, Mom and I were in the supermarket, and in the aisle with the flour and sugar and baking supplies and spices, I took a bottle off the shelf of Schilling brand spices, a cylindrical glass bottle with the light green plastic cap and green and gold label.
“I wonder how much longer we are going to see this?” I showed it to Mom. The label said ‘Cinnamon’ and in smaller letters “Saigon.”Mom looked at it thoughtfully, and said,
“Get three. We’d better stock up.”
Cinnamon was the only consumer good that we knew of that came out of South Vietnam, and as of the cruel month of April, 1975, there would probably be no more of it.

The North Vietnamese had overrun and taken all of the South. The last helicopter had taken off from the room of the American Embassy, and the newspaper was full of pictures, pictures of frantic people mobbing the gates, crammed into boats, thousands, hundreds of thousands of desperate people, pleading for rescue, for shelter, for succor. Their city was gone, their country was gone. There would be no more jars of “Cinnamon-Saigon” on the grocery store shelves. The war was over, but not the responsibility that seemed to hang- for some people – like an albatross around our necks.

We owed them, and for two years, I got used to taking off my shoes upon entering a home and the arrhythmical sound of English as spoken by Vietnamese, with no ‘f’ or ‘th’ sound and a ‘p’ roughly inserted instead, and a dash of pungent fish sauce on rice and into practically everything else, and small children forgetting that I did not understand Vietnamese and jabbering away at me anyway, and the crackly-crisp texture of spring rolls – a crust like deep-fried tissue paper, but not a drop of oil in the inside, vegetables and bean threads and little bits of pork sausage, and Grandmothers’ vegetable pickles – oh, yes, I may not know Vietnam, but I know the Vietnamese Diaspora. That Diaspora that somehow barely merits a mention on NPR on the occasion of this anniversary; some news reports have mentioned the fact that 2 million Vietnamese decamped in 1975 and the years following, but in all the stories on this solemn occasion I do not hear any of the stories I heard thirty years ago, or any hint of the terror that impelled people like my parent’s foster-son, or my friends Xuan-an and Hai Tran to leave everything – and run.

I am not hearing retellings of the account of the last commercial flight out of Danang, a flight which was mobbed by Vietnamese so desperate that they clawed and trampled each other for a chance to climb onto the rear air-stair of an airliner that didn’t even dare stop, but taxied up and down the ramp with a mob stampeding after it… I am not hearing any accounts of the USS Hancock, where helicopters were landing so thick and fast it was all they could do to empty out refugees and shove the helicopter overboard because there were two – three – four more helicopters hovering and desperate to land, each crammed full of desperate people. What of the USS Pioneer Contender, where Hai and Xuan-An, and her brother and all their families, and the families of the crew of a coastal patrol launch found brief refuge, at the edge of international waters? What of Hau, the Vietnamese AF mechanic- on a cargo plane which took refuge in Thailand, crammed with Viet Air Force personnel, or Bien, the youngest son of a well-to-do family, who somehow wrangled a visa and way out for him and him alone, so at least one of their blood could be safe, somewhere in the world?

Why are there no stories on NPR about how there was hardly a Vietnamese-American community before 1975, only a scattering of Vietnamese women who had married American men? At a community resettlement committee picnic, to which all the local committees had brought together all the refugees they had taken on responsibility for – and any other resident Vietnamese, as advertised in the local paper – the wife of an American contractor confessed to Xuan-an that she had been reticent to get in touch with any of the refugees until then. She was afraid she would be stigmatized as a former b-girl, or a whore; in fact, she had been a perfectly respectable secretary of a contracting firm in Saigon, and had married her husband with the blessings of her family. Xuan-an teared up and hugged her and said that there was no more any of that, they were now all the same; hopeful refugees in a new land.

I think it was this woman’s husband, who was legendary in the refugee community, who had gone back to Saigon in that cruel April, to bring out her mother and father. If they had a sponsor, they could get a visa, they could leave, so he went personally to fetch them away. He did get the parents out, but he also pledged to sponsor all of her sisters and brothers – and their families – and the families of his in-laws – immediate neighbors – and six or seven strangers whom he took on in passing, to the tune of eighty-plus individuals, brands spared from the expected holocaust. The only individual to equal that was the Baptist Vietnamese minister, proprietor of the only Vietnamese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, and possibly the whole Los Angeles area at that time. It was in a bare-bones and otherwise undistinguishable strip-mall, but it was a restaurant six days of the week, and on the seventh, a church – the cash register perched awkwardly on top of the piano, but Xuan-An’s mother, Grandmother respected him enormously, because he was truly a good and devout man— he was sponsoring other refugees right and left, giving them jobs in the restaurant and setting up dorms in the rooms above. Grandmother was herself a devout Buddhist, and a highly respected arbiter of such matters; as an elder whose immediate family had all managed to escape, she was rather envied by the other elders� most of whom had been carried away because their adult children insisted on it.

Yes, the Vietnamese community in Los Angeles — and a good few other places — sprung into existence almost instantly as these things go, after 1975. This is the story I am not hearing on NPR or in other mainstream news venues, a story I know happened because I was there. I wonder why? The thought occurs to me that it may be that the exodus of all those thousands might be seen as a reproach. All those people on crowded boats and helicopters, all those people mobbing the Embassy, passing their children over the bars, or getting them onto the orphan flights. It is a reproach, a criticism – even a condemnation of all of those who urged the abandonment of a bad war in a bad place. Every Chablis-and-Brie anti-war intellectual, every campus protestor, every Chomsky-fellow-traveler, every fading movie star or rising politician glomming on to the trendy political position, every bureaucrat with second thoughts about actions they had themselves urged on – they had a hand in pulling the plug on South Vietnam. They have no interest in the stories of people like Xuan-an, and Hai, and Kiet and Bien, and Grandmother, the guy who went to get his in-laws and returned with eighty other people, and those thousands of other Vietnamese in the great Diaspora? Oh, no, taking account of the stories would mean accepting the responsibility for putting them into the boats, and sending them into exile. We can’t have that, can we?

To: NPR
From: Sgt Mom
Re: Flogging a Dead Horse

1. I have been listening to the broadcast series, visiting Vietnam on the occasion of the 30-year anniversary of the fall of Saigon to the North, which has been airing this week on Morning Edition: a very interesting and evocative series, touching on many aspects and lives and experiences.

2. However… and this is the big however, it looks like tomorrow you plan to take a break from vigorously flogging the dead horse of Abu Graib, to take a couple of manly thwacks at the even more defunct equine corpse of My Lai. Well, fair enough, it did happen, it’s a part of the very sad history of the wars in South-East Asia, but I was rather grimly amused at how your reporter, in visiting the old Imperial City of Hue expended only a sentence or two on the massacre of civilians committed by the Viet Cong during their brief occupation of the city in 1968.

3. In other words, a systematic, purposeful selection, execution and secret burial of at least 2,300 civilians is just one of those embarrassing little things that it would be best not to mention very much, not if you want to keep your news access, old boy. How nice to know that NPR is following where Eason Jordan led editorially and selectively, in keeping a CNN bureau in Baghdad. Must not say anything rude about executions, enemies’ lists, and mass graves, old chap… it’s just their way of doing things.

4. Well, at this point, it’s all very much ancient history, but it is quite charming how NPR is managing to avoid much reminiscence about the tidal-wave of South Vietnamese refugees, fleeing their country on anything that would fly, roll or float, or even giving an audience born after 1975 any idea of the fear that those refugees had of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. They were fairly sure that they would be treated like those civilians in Hue, served out with a bullet and a muddy mass grave, and so preferred to take their chances. I am sure you will mention something about mobs surrounding the American Embassy, and the baby lifts, and how desperate South Vietnamese citizens were to escape the long knives of the North, sometime before the week 1s out.

5. Funny how many Vietnamese ended up in America, isn’t it… you’d think after My Lai, they’d have figured out who their friends really were.

Sincerely,
Sgt Mom

(More Vietnam materiel, from the archives, here and here)

Some time later, this picture was smuggled out of Occupied France, and circulated among the families, the picture that hung for years in Granny Jessie’s house: four graves piled lavishly with expensive chrysanthemums, the names of Menaul and Dodge clear, if mis-spelled, Butterfield partially visible on the far left, and ‘un-known American’ — Buonarobo, whose body was not identified for certain until after the war. According to Army records, the German authorities brought the bodies to Toul after the crash, for burial in the military quarter of the cemetery. It was a bitter comfort to the families: one mother wrote to Granny Jessie, “At least it is good to know that our boys had a decent burial. I had often wondered. I have had three close friends lately hit by this wicked war— two killed and one missing. I think that our boys and maybe ourselves are better off than a lot of people, as we know that nothing can hurt our boys again, and we can have what peace we can and not worry any more, but I would give my soul to have my boy come walking in.”

The notations in the Army Mortuary records gave me a clue to the riddle of who had taken the picture of the grave: Granny Jessie had vaguely alluded to the Red Cross, but James Festa had told me it had been smuggled out of France through the Resistance, and that it had been shown to the internees, that it was the first they had heard of what happened to Lt. Dodge. The four crewmen buried in Toul were the only Americans recovered from there by mortuary affairs personnel after the war. Two of the survivors were hidden there. I thought it very likely that somewhere in a medium to small-sized town which had been a node on an escape line, there was someone who whom the crash of an American bomber nearby was a significant and memorable event. Since the picture was smuggled out through a Resistance escape line, and I knew such a line operated in Toul, it seemed a logical assumption that someone involved in the Resistance in Toul must therefore have taken the picture. In the spirit of someone throwing a bottle with a note in it into the sea, I wrote to the Mayor of Toul, enclosing a copy of the picture, and asking if the Mayor’s office knew anything about the burials in 1943.

Astonishingly enough, they sent me the address of a Pierre Mathy, the same Pierre Mathy who had hidden McClendon and Chandler fifty years before! “My name is Pierre Mathy,” he wrote to me, “and I’m the one who took the picture in Toul Cemetery to show that (we) took care of the American graves, against the will of the Germans. I did not assist in the burial – German soldiers kept people apart while they gathered corpses. I was there at that moment and I started to look for survivors . . . I had established channel to Switzerland with Ms. Suzanne Kriek (called Regina, her Resistance name). She was murdered by the Germans the day before Liberation – she was a Resistance lieutenant; she owned false papers for the Red Cross so she was able to go everywhere. She went to Switzerland about three times a month. An acquaintance of mine was in the Resistance, so I decided to join it . . . I rescued 19 aviators, amongst them 9 Americans, 4 Australians, 4 English and 2 Canadians. . .”

So there it was, out of a pile of old records and letters, a couple of amazing coincidences, the answer to some niggling little questions, and a window into the past, and some reassurance about the qualities of ordinary people in extraordinary times and circumstances. It is gratifying to know that against the odds, in war and occupation, someone would see to the graves of four young strangers, piled with flowers, and take a snapshot to reassure four unknown families, far away. It is reassuring also to discover the courage and fortitude of ordinary people— no headline heroes, no Hollywood spectacle, just people who did what they felt was right and their duty, unflinchingly in the face of odds: Jimmy-Junior and Louis Buonarobo refusing to leave their gun stations, Sherman Dodge and John Chandler staying to the last, conscientious Frank Francis scrounging another set of charts and seeing to the destruction of the classified “G” box, Pierre Mathy and his friends, feeding, hiding and guiding the survivors to safety, and those families at home, whose concern for each other helped them endure separation and grief. Ordinary people all, best remembered by the ordinary rest of us.

I did all this tracking down of survivors and witnesses nearly twelve years ago, and wrote the original account shortly afterwards. I worked together sources as various as the collection of letters written by my uncle in 1943, the letters written to my grandmother by relatives of the other crewmen and friends, various official Army Air Corps reports on the loss of the aircraft, the set of questionnaires completed by Lt. Chandler on the circumstances under which he last saw each of the dead or missing crewmen, another set of files from Army Mortuary Affairs, a collection of rips from the Escape and Evasion Society, interviews with James Festa and James Becker, and picking the brains of such varied experts as Colonel (Ret.) Frank Halm of the 94th BG Memorial Association, and a USAF crash investigator who thoroughly briefed me on exactly how a damaged and abandoned B-17 would impact the ground. Each set of facts, names, and actions fitted together like a jigsaw puzzle, and quite often, a tentative supposition that I had made, would be later confirmed by a witness, or by the record. I was never able to contact any other relatives of the Lonesome Polecat crew; there were, for example, no telephone listings for Butterfield in the entire state of Idaho by 1993. Sgt. Thomas, SSgt. McClendon and Lt. Chandler all survived the war, but their Veterans’ Administration files went into inactive status by the late 1970ies. Chandler and his family made a return trip to Toul, and a reunion with Pierre Mathy sometime in the 1960ies. His return was noted by the local newspaper, and Pierre Mathy’s grandson sent me copies of clippings after Mathy himself died in 1995. I transferred to Korea in 1993, loosing touch with James Festa and James Becker at about that time. Neither of them were in good health, and have since dropped from the rolls of the 94th BG association.
My uncle, Lt. Dodge, Sgt. Buonarobo and Sgt. Butterfield are buried in the American cemetery at St. Avold. Lt. Francis’ family had him brought back after the war, and interred in the VA cemetery at Ft. Bliss, since the military wouldn’t let his remains stay in Flirey. Even the original letters and pictures are gone;Jimmy-junior’s woolen uniform jacket and the Purple Heart all burned in the fire two years ago, although I had meticulously transcribed all the letters and rephotographed the pictures.

“..And all that remains is the faces and the names
Of the wives and the sons and the daughters.” (Gordon Lightfoot, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald)

(Sgt. James Menaul, taken while on leave before going overseas)

My first letter to the 94th Bomb Group memorial association included a telephone number and address for James Becker. Later I located James Festa simply by calling the information operator for Brooklyn and asking of there were a listing for that name. From those gentlemen, the only then-living survivors of Crew #30, and a stack several inches thick of reports from various government archives, contemporary letters, and interviews with an assortment of special experts , I was able to trace what had happened to the Lonesome Polecat II.

In the second wave of bombers over the ball-bearing factories, they made the target, dropping incendiaries onto the wreckage, when they were hit by anti-aircraft fire. With an engine on fire, they dropped out of the protective formation heading west, and were attacked by German fighters. They were last seen by those who returned to Bury St. Edmunds about sixty miles southwest of Schweinfurt, still heading west under power, still fighting. But in a very short space— about fifteen or twenty minutes, they ran out of luck, ammunition and time.

Sgt. Buonarobo ran out of ammunition first, but refused an order to leave the now-useless ball turret, swinging empty guns to bear on attacking fighters. Lt. Dodge took the “Lonesome Polecat” down to the minimum altitude for a safe parachute dump, trying to discourage fighter attacks from below. Sgt Butterfield was killed at his position at the waist gun, and Jimmy-Junior disabled by a stomach wound, crawled back into the tail compartment and returned fire until struck again, probably mortally. Sgt McLendon and Lt. Dodge were also wounded, to a lesser degree. Flight engineer James Festa, in the top turret with an excellent view all the way around, would only tell me that the aircraft was terribly damaged: the tail section was in shreds and a wing well on fire. Sgt. Thomas, the surviving waist gunner, and SSgt. Mclendon then reported taking Sgt. Buonarobo out of the ball turret, also dead.

The intercom knocked out as well, James Festa never heard an order to jump until Lt. Chandler came back and told him directly to bale out of the crippled aircraft. Lt. Francis went to destroy the “G” box, a receiver which allowed a target to be identified when two beams intersected over it. James Festa, going towards the bomb bay to jump out, was blown out through it by an explosion on or near the craft. To the day I spoke to him he still didn’t know why he wasn’t killed by it. The other survivors jumped, the two pilots Dodge and Chandler together at the last, Dodge saying tersely “So long,” leaving the aircraft to crash two kilometers south of the village of Essey-et-Maiserais, near a country road at about four o’clock in the afternoon. Part of it caught fire. The Germans came at once and kept the curious away, while they gathered up the remaining ammunition and guns, and the bodies of the three gunners.

Lt. Dodge’s body was found later, probably a short distance away. His parachute had not opened. Lt. Chandler himself hit the ground hard, and broke three toes. Lt. Francis’ parachute also failed; he fell into woodlands near Flirey, and his body was not found until six months later. The villagers of Flirey, led by their mayor, defiantly held a funeral mass and buried him in their little cemetery. (After the war, the family wished that he could remain there, where people had been so kind and brave, but the War Department insisted on removal to a military cemetery.)

The survivors were scattered far across Alsace-Lorraine. Sgt. Thomas was captured immediately by the German authorities, but the others were luckier, thanks to Pierre Mathy, the restaurateur and innkeeper of Toul. A week after the crash of the “Lonesome Polecat”, Pierre Mathy received a cryptic message from a local farmer, who had a ‘bag of carrots’ for him. In actuality, Mathy was a Resistant, running an escape line into Switzerland, the farmer was one of his contacts, and the ‘bag of carrots’ was actually SSgt. McClendon, complete with two bullets in his leg. Two doctors in Toul secretly operated to remove them and McClendon was sent down the line to safety. Lt. Chandler crawled westward for three days, finally sheltering in a haystack near a farmhouse. He watched the farmhouse for three days more, waiting to see of Germans or French lived there. Desperation drove him to approach it: again, lucky— the farmer was another of Pierre Mathy’s contacts. Given clothes and false papers, he later wrote his wife that the hardest thing he had to do was cram his broken toes into civilian shoes and not limp as he walked by German soldiers in a small town. James Festa was picked up in the little village of Void, near Nancy, by the local policeman, who gave him clothes and food, and passed him from friend to trustworthy friend, hiding him in the house of a wealthy soap-manufacturer in Verdun, and a houseboat on the river before being smuggled over the border and reunited with the others in Swiss internment.

For months afterwards, stunned and grieving families wrote back and forth, first with dignified condolences, then sharing grief and what information they were able to find out. Mrs. Butterfield wrote stoically, “We can be thankful that they didn’t have to suffer long . . . we have our oldest boy in New Guinea and another boy in England with the 341st Engineers. So you can see we must carry on and be brave as we know not when we will have to face this sorrow again.” Mrs. Chandler, who had given birth to a daughter, two weeks before the “Lonesome Polecats'” first mission, and Mildred Dodge, Lt. Dodge’s mother, coordinated the letter-writing. First, all the ‘boys’ were reported missing. Weeks later, Lt. Dodge, Sgt. Butterfield and Jimmy-junior were reported killed, and Sgt. Thomas a POW. Lt. Francis and Sgt. Buonarobo remained missing until almost the end of the war, a matter of distress among the letter-writers. The four in Switzerland wrote to their families, who promptly wrote to Mrs. Chandler or Mrs. Dodge, who copied extracts and sent them to other families. A picture of the four internees, showing them safe and well, was circulated. Mrs. Dodge, whose grief in fifty-year-old letters was raw and lacerating, sent Granny Jessie a snapshot of her son and herself, taken on his last leave, and Granny Jessie sent one of Jimmy-Junior. They corresponded for years afterwards.

(Sgt. James Menaul, taken while on leave before going overseas)

(Standing:Butterfield, Festa, Thomas, Menaul, Buonarobo, McClendon.
Kneeling: Francis, Dodge, Chandler, Becker)

The ten men in this picture assembled in May of 1943 at Ephrata Army Air Base, Washington, a place of which Jimmy-Junior wrote in disgust, “They have me living in a tent, out in somebody’s cow pasture. When we get into a crew, we move into hutments that are bigger than a doghouse, but smaller than a garage. I am the official ‘sound-the-alarm-er’ in case of rain. There is a rip in the canvas over my head, so I will be the first to know – it’s getting dark now and somebody forgot to put electric lights in this tent so I guess this is all I can write.” Two weeks later, he wrote, “As of this morning I am head armorer-gunner of crew #30. Crew #30 isn’t much to get excited about though, as all we have besides myself are the second armorer-gunner and the bombardier. I’m going to insist on a pilot before I do much.” A week later: “Our crew is changed around considerable. We lost everyone we had, but now we have a pilot, copilot and myself, which is much more practical than before . . . We fly today for the first time. Didn’t do much of anything but land and take off. After the third time I lost interest and slept most of the time.”

An observant young man with an unexpectedly sardonic sense of humor, born and raised in Pasadena, he had gone to trade school and left a job in the lithography department of the Los Angeles Times. Firmly convinced of all the then-forty-eight states there was only one good one, he was pleased that two other Californians were assigned to Crew #30: Lt. John Chandler, the co-pilot, was from Vallejo, and waist-gunner Sgt. Robert Thomas from Burbank. Both were married, and Mrs. Chandler was expecting a baby. True to the movie cliche, though, the rest of the crew was from all over: pilot and A/C commander, Lt. Sherman Dodge— also newly married— from Boston; bombardier Lt. James Becker from Kennet Square, Pennsylvania; flight engineer SSgt. James Festa, from Brooklyn; Sgt Louis Buonarobo, the ball-turret gunner (notably shorter than the other crewmembers) from the Bronx; navigator Lt. Frank Francis of El Paso, Texas; radioman SSgt Douglas McLendon from Greenville Mississippi, and waist-gunner Sgt. Warren Butterfield from Salmon, Idaho.

By mid-June they had accumulated fifteen flying hours. “Yesterday we made what they call ‘dry runs’—that is, going thru the motions of bombing something and don’t: that way, we bombed the city of Wenatchee, blew up the school in Quincy, a couple of dams, bridges and just about everything else in sight . . . got a letter from George— he had his first airplane ride and wished now he was flying. He could have had my place the other day when we went up to 30,000 feet, It got down to 40 below and I had to forget my flying boots! We just got up there and then an oil line broke so we had to come down, which couldn’t have happened at a better time. My nose was running under my oxygen mask and freezing on my lip. Very annoying. We had a gunnery mission today; I had the tail guns. I think they are mine permanently. At least I hope so, as I like it . . . we shot at targets on the ground. . .”

In July they moved to Geiger Field, near Spokane, for continuing training and a series of long flights all over the northwest; “We are supposed to be very observing of everything we see in the way of military objectives, especially trains and railway yards. Then we get questioned all about it, just as if we were over Germany or some place. I guess I will have to give up sleeping on future flights . . the navigator is getting me a set of maps so I can be able to tell where we are at. He claims in the tail I have the best view— not that anyone is depending on me, but he wants two of us . . “
In late fall, they were assigned a new B-17F, promptly christened the “Lonesome Polecat” by Lt. Dodge. Following another month of training flights, they ferried it to England, where the aircraft went to the replacement depot, and the crew to Rougham airfield, near Bury St. Edmunds, where they were assigned to an aircraft there. They promptly re-christened it “Lonesome Polecat II” but James Festa lamented during one of our conversations, they didn’t have it long enough to paint an emblem on the nose. Jimmy-Junior sent a telegram on arrival to let the family know they had arrived safely. Four V-mail letters followed, the last dated the day before his first combat mission: He couldn’t make sense of the coinage, there wasn’t much to buy that wasn’t rationed, he was making money faster than he could spend it. He hoped to visit London, and he had bought a bicycle to get around the field.

(Next: Part 3— Schweinfurt)

The first picture hung in a black frame, in the back bedroom of Granny Jessie’s house in Pasadena for many years, a black and white photo of four graves piled high with flowers. Only recently did my mother realize, upon looking closely at it, that the flowers were carefully tended hot-house chrysanthemums, and even more fabulously expensive in 1943 as they are now. The grave markers are plain wooden crosses, painted white and the names just barely visible, for the picture was taken in haste and surreptitiously, smuggled out of Occupied France.

“James Menaud” is one of two names which can be clearly read; a misspelling of James Menaul who was my mother’s older brother, Jimmy Junior who was a tail gunner on a B-17 and died in the war. There was a badly-tinted portrait-photo in Granny Jessie’s living room, a young man awkward in a hastily fitted set of woolen class-As, smirking uncomfortably at the camera, frozen forever at 19. Our curiosity about him was never rewarded. Mom had been only thirteen at the time. Ten years ago, when my father found a picture of Jimmy Juniors’ crew— ten young men on the tarmac in front of a B-17, awkwardly solemn or cocky and smiling— everything had faded from memory except for the name of the aircraft commander, Lt. Sherman Dodge. We knew that only because his grave was next to Jimmy-Juniors’ in an unknown cemetery somewhere in France. The rest of what we knew fitted into one sentence: Sgt. James Menaul, Jr. was killed in action in the fall of 1943 on one of the raids on the Schweinfurt ball-bearing factories, and some of the other crewmen had survived and escaped into Switzerland. Dad finally asked me, as a persistent and inventive snoop, if I could find out their names and whereabouts, and what had happened to them.

I started with my uncle’s service number and unit of assignment, the 331st Squadron, 94th Bomb Group, Bury St. Edmunds. It was one of the units that had formed an association (since dissolved due to the age and infirmity of many of the members), and they replied promptly to my first letter of inquiry, confirming that Jimmy-Junior’s B-17, the Lonesome Polecat II was one of those lost on Black Thursday, October 14th, 1943.

60 8th Air Force B-17s, each with a crew of ten were lost in a single day, attacking the ball-bearing factories in two waves at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, running a gauntlet of German air defenses to and from the target. A report on the status of various missing crewman, sent from the Army Mortuary Affairs Office contained some riveting extracts: Flights of enemy aircraft stood of at 1,500 yards on both sides and tail of the formation to ‘lob’ rockets or heavy cannon projectiles into the formation, while others attacked from the nose and top and bottom . . . Several enemy aircraft would dive through the formation from all angles, at times coming within four to six hundred yards . . . many that went down were hit by rockets or heavy cannon . . . whenever a Fortress was hit – it either exploded or fell apart. . . This aircraft was last heard on the ‘command channel’ and there were no eyewitnesses . . . This report showed no further information; the plane was simply missing from the formation . . .A total of 80 parachutes were seen in the vicinity of the target . . .the survivors were so busy avoiding enemy aircraft they were unable to observe what happened . . . Of the eighteen planes from this particular group which went on this mission, three aborted, thirteen failed to return and two completed the mission . . .Last seen at 1400 hours, just before it reached the target . . .Lost as a result of enemy aircraft.

(Next: Part 2: Crew Pictures and Old Letters)

(A version of this article was published in “Friends’ Journal”, the quarterly publication of the US Air Force Museum Foundation, Wright Patterson AFB, and accepted by a historical publication which shall remain nameless since they never actually scheduled it for publication or paid me a dime for it… and didn’t look likely to within the lifetime of anyone involved. William tells me that that particular magazine usually fobs off writers with a couple of subscriptions in lieu of cash anyway. I blow a large raspberry in their direction and publish it here anyway!)

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, they take on Jeffrey Rosen’s article The Unregulated Offensive in this week’s NYTimes Magazine, as they previously did with Cass Sunstein. Start here, and work up. It’s good reading for any student of Constitutional history.

There was one redeeming factor to James Cameron’s “Titanic” movie, to my eyes; and that lay in how rich, realistic and convincing the set of the “unsinkable” liner looked. How very solid, luxurious and sheltering it all appeared, such perfectly recreated spaces… and I could see how people would have been reluctant to leave it, at first. Who wanted to bounce around in a tiny open boat on the cold, on the open water? Surely, a ship as big as the Titanic, with every possible comfort, and modern advantage couldn’t be mortally wounded. Surely rescue was on the way, the situation couldn’t possibly be as bad as all that… Well, it was, and after seeing the movie, I could understand why the first couple of boats went away half-empty.

But there is a tenuous family connection to the loss of the Titanic, through the person of Granny Dodie’s older brother, Great Uncle Fred.
Great-Uncle Fred had a lady in a frilly skirt tattooed on each forearm, who did a kind of shimmy when he flexed his muscles, and he had been a sailor. He had been, in fact, a real sailor, on a real sailing ship, and had been around the Horn no less than four times, and thrilled us children with the tale of how he had fallen out of the topmost bit of rigging, once… but had managed to catch hold of a lower bit of canvas and rope before his Captain had been able to do much more than recollect the page number of the burial service in his Book of Common Prayer. (Well, we thought it was thrilling, everybody else had been listening to the same old story for forty years and were bored rigid.)

By 1912, the allure of a seafaring life had lost its charms for Great Uncle Fred and he was working on land, in Wanamakers’ Department Store in New York. (I have no idea in what capacity!) Wanamaker’s had a powerful Marconi wireless station on it’s roof. David Sarnoff, who would eventually be the president of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, was the station manager and one of the operators. This Marconi station was one of the most powerful on the east coast, and was one of the first to receive news that the Titanic had struck an iceberg and might be sinking. It seemed barely credible, perhaps exaggerated, at first. According to Great Uncle Fred, one of the managers who knew he had been a sailor asked him if it were possible that a great ship like that might actually be so damaged that it would in fact, sink.

His moment of faint glory, being asked for his professional expertise in such weighty and tragic matters; his answer was a masterpiece of noncommittal caution;
“Could very well be,” Great Uncle Fred said.
I wish, now, that we had been able to make him tell us some other stories, but those are the only two I remember.

“Then long folk to go on pilgrimages, And palmers for to seek strange strands,
To far-off hallows, couth in sundry lands; And specially from every shires end
Of England to Canterbury they wend.” Chaucer, Prologue to Canterbury Tales

And make pilgrimage they did, in payment of vows, to seek healing, to acquire merit, to give thanks— and offerings. The great shrines of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, and the tomb of Thomas Becket at Canterbury grew rich on offerings and benefices from the devout, as did any number of lesser shrines. Even more virtue attached to having made the much more difficult journey to St. Peter’s in Rome, the seat of Christ’s Vicar on earth, or the dangerous journey to far distant shrines in Jerusalem. To possess a relic, even one of dubious provenance, was a money-making proposition on the part of the ecclesiastical establishment which held proprietorship, especially if it appeared to have worked a miracle or two.

Many church treasuries in Spain and Italy still contain elaborate jeweled reliquaries, great things of silver and gold wrought to display little grimy brownish bits of bone and teeth, or a shred of crumbling fabric. I never felt myself so sternly a Protestant myself, as when I looked at these objects— those, and the rich vestments in silk, embroidered with jewels and gold, the Episcopal rings with stones the size of walnuts, crosiers and crucifixes in ivory and gold, and more gems. The upwelling urge to begin gibbering incoherently about simony, idolatry and indulgences usually didn’t subside until I went to look at the stained glass or the stone carvings, or something. These present treasuries, although reduced by schism and war, give an idea of how very, very rich the Catholic Church was by the fifteenth century, of how profitable it was to control the means of grace.

Of course, there had been other reformers — some of them later anointed with sainthood — who were troubled by how the church seemed to have been corrupted by power and riches, fallen away from it’s original mission, become distanced from the humble and devout. Early critics and reformers were co-opted, for a time seeing some success in establishing a more rigorous order, or having a particular reform adopted, but as the clamor of criticism became louder and more insistent, the Church tended to squelch it with a charge of heresy, a quick conviction and a public burning-at-stake. Martin Luther, priest and monk, a Doctor of Theology who had been intended by his father to be a lawyer, could not be co-opted, and would not be silenced. Besides his own formidable intellect, he also had the benefit of powerful and highly-placed friends, and the newly popular printing press, which did to theological disputes what the internet is doing to the mainstream news media. The flash of Luther’s insight, that man is justified by faith, rather than works, that grace and forgiveness were freely given – and could not be earned by pilgrimage, by generous donation, by turning over a few pennies or ducats for specific services rendered, had the effect of a bombshell on the carefully structured finances and schedule of benefits offered by the official Church.

It was, I thought, the most amusing of ironies that the Cranach portraits of Luther and his wife, Catarina von Bora hung in the Uffizi gallery in Florence, the city of the di Medici, those merchant-princes of the Italian Renaissance. While Luther was studying and preaching in Germany, a Medici was advancing steadily up the ranks, eventually to be enthroned as Pope Leo X. Born Giovanni de Medici, he proved to be as cultured and as worldly a patron of the arts as any of his ancestors, but without a shred of their financial acumen. Having emptied the Papal treasury, and with an extravagant lifestyle to uphold, and the Basilica of St. Peters’ to finish in style, the Pope authorized the sale of indulgences— automatic forgiveness of sins upon payment to the Churches’ representative. Luther, as outraged as a devout and thoughtful person could be in the face of a flagrant abuse and perversion of doctrine, wrote up a list of debating points and posted them as a challenge for discussion on a public notice-board, the door of the church at Wittenburg.

With a couple of taps of a hammer on nail, the established Catholic Church shattered like a bit of crockery with a flaw in it; it had to much invested in the system to entertain the notion of the sort of reforms that Luther and others wanted to see; and by the time that reforms were forced upon by necessity, the tipping point had been reached. Scholars and kings and cardinals had taken positions, and there was no going back – although occasionally someone like Mary of England would try. The monastery cloisters were empty, the bell towers silent, the brothers and sisters gone away, treasuries defaulted to the crown.

And one last little story, a Noel Cowardish, 1930ies screwball comedy sort of story, of the clever woman who met the romantically clueless academician, and made up her mind that he was the one for her. She had been a nun, Caterina von Bora, of a good family but an impoverished one. She and some of the other nuns wished to leave their convent; their escape was facilitated by a merchant who smuggled them out in some empty barrels. Doctor Luther and his friends pledged to help them: some of them returned to their families, and the others all found good marriages or a household position, all but Caterina von Bora. They respectfully asked her what she wanted — did she wish to be married, was there a particular man she would like to be married to? They would do everything they could to arrange that, if it were the case. And she said, yes, there was; Dr. Luther himself would suit her very nicely, thank you. He was nearly twice her age, had lived with the expectation of being executed as a heretic, in all the untidiness and disorganization that a single man tends to accept. It would amuse me to think he was flabbergasted at first, while all their happily married friends were gently and fondly amused – but it worked in the best sort of way. They had six children and were as happy as they could be and a great deal happier than most. It may not have happened quite like that… but that’s the way I like to tell it.

The most striking thing about the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome is that it is immensely, overwhelmingly huge, but so humanly proportioned that the size of it doesn’t hit you right away. It sneaks up on you, as the grand vista unfolds, marble and gold, bronze and Michelangelo’s glorious dome soaring overhead… and then you realize that the chubby marble cherubs holding the shell-shaped holy water font are actually six feet tall, that what looks like ordinary wainscoting at the bottom of the wall opposite is itself six feet wide, and those are not ants crawling slowly along the polished marble floor, they are other people.

All the artistic genius of the Renaissance was poured out lavishly to build and adorn this, the center of Christendom, the palace, church and administrative center of Christ’s vicar on earth, the latest in a line unbroken (although it did distinctly thin, in some places) from Apostolic times. All this, built over a necropolis in what had been outside the ancient walls, across the Tiber River from the city on seven fabled hills, in which tradition held that the bones of St. Peter—apostle and martyr, fisherman, missionary and Bishop of Rome— were laid. Over a hundred years in the building, it absorbed the energies of architects and the papal treasury, even the bronze roofing from the ancient Pantheon were taken to make the baldacchino, the elaborate canopy over the high altar. “Not the barbarians, but Bernini” was the wry comment by ordinary Romans on this particular bit of sack and pillage. But, oh, it is a splendid place, built for the greater glory of God on the Vatican Hill, and it is worth seeing many times, even if one is not Catholic, just for the treasure store of painting and sculpture. When St. Peters’ was a-building, the Church was a spiritual authority to a degree hardly comprehensible to us now, and— even more incomprehensible— a mighty secular power as well. Said the wise man, “Fear not he who has the power of life and death, but he that has the power to cast thee into hell”.

For a thousand years, the church was the intercessor between sinful human beings, and the divine, the keeper of the gates of heaven and the doors to hell, intercessor, arbiter, final authority, before whom even kings and emperors quailed and obeyed. Lesser men and saints trod very carefully, in the majestic presence of he who held all-power in this world and the keys of the next. The Basilica of St. Peter was meant to be a fit frame and show-place, but ironically it’s completion sparked the fracture of that one holy, catholic and apostolic church.

In one of the small rooms on the upper floor of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence are gathered many of the small treasures and rarities, portraits and curiosities mostly. Visitors are admitted one by one by a guard, and the line circles the room slowly. The couple ahead of my daughter and I on the Sunday afternoon that we “did” the Uffizi were older Italians with a look of country people about them, but country people dressed in their best, and uncomfortable in it. The man’s black suit was old, and pulled across his shoulders and gut, his white shirt collar and knotted tie looked like they were about to strangle him and he had the faint grimy lines on his knuckles and under his fingernails of someone who works with machines or automobile engines. But he and his wife were extracting the most out of their afternoon of culture, reading very carefully all the little cards underneath the pictures.

At a pair of Cranach portraits of a husband and wife, though, he leaned down to read the little cards, then straightened up and practically spat with contempt when he hissed
“Protestante!, and moved on to the next item in the treasury. My daughter and I looked at the two portraits. I didn’t need to read the little card, these were faces I was already familiar with. The husband, a bulky man with the thick shoulders and broad features of a working man; shrewd, tough, confident, clad in plain, unornamented clothes. The wife, whose round features sparkled with intelligence, and the assurance of a woman who is entirely pleased with the life she has made for herself, having had the wit to have picked out her man and made her own match and their mutual married happiness… which had been very much to his incredulous surprise.

Dying in bed of old age, was not how Martin Luther had expected his tumultuous life to end. He himself, brilliant, driven and outraged by the corruption of the Church he served with devotion, fully expected to burnt at stake as a heretic, from the moment he defied Emperor and the Pope’s representative at the Diet of Worms with the ringing words: “Unless I am convicted by [testimonies of the] Scripture and plain reason…I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe…Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. God help me. Amen.”

(To be continued)

The Vatican says Pope John Paul has died. Word came in an e-mail from the Vatican. It said “The Holy Father died this evening at 9:37 p.m. in his private apartment.”

(I’m at my Saturday job at the radio station. We have just announced it, and scheduled special programming. I am most unexpectedly moved by this, especially since I was in the news game 25 years ago, and my voice was breaking up in a most unprofessional manner….)

We drove across the border on a Sunday, my daughter and I, on a mild autumn day that began by being veiled in fog when I gassed up the VEV at the PX gas station at Bitburg, and headed southwest assisted by the invaluable Hallwag drivers’ atlas, open on the passenger seat beside me. Blondie shared the back seat with a basket of books, a pillow, some soft luggage stuffed into the space between the seats, and half a dozen Asterix and Obelix comic books. Fortunate child, she could read in the back seat of a moving car for hours. Not like me— child or adult, I could not even look at the printed word while underway without becoming nauseated.

“We’ll cross right over Luxemburg, and then we’ll be in France,” I said. “You know, Gaul.”
“Will there be indomitable Gauls?” my daughter asked, seriously. She was just coming up to five years old. Her favorite comic books followed the adventures of the bold Gaulish warrior Asterix, and his friend, the menhir-deliveryman Oblelix, whose tiny village was the last to hold out against the imperial might of Roman conquest, thanks to a magic potion worked up by the druid Getafix, which gave superhuman strength to all the village warriors. The drawings in the books were artistically literate, and there were all sorts of puns and word-plays in the stories – and they had been translated and distributed all over.
“There could be,” I said, noncommittally. Three or four weeks ago, we had left the apartment in the suburb of Athens where we had lived for most of what she could remember of life and taken the car ferry from Patras to Brindisi, on our way to my new assignment in Spain.

In easy stages I had driven the length of Italy, over the Brenner Pass, through the tiny neck of Austria, and across Southern Germany. We had so far stayed in a castle on the Rhine, a couple of guesthouses, a hotel outside Siena which could have been nearly anywhere, as it overlooked a junkyard on one side, and acres of grapevines on the other three, and another which covered two floors on the top of an office block in Florence and offered a view of the Duomo from the terrace. We had been to see ruins in Pompeii, the Sistine chapel, the wondrous Byzantine mosaics in Ravenna, a Nazi concentration camp, and a mineral bath in Baden-Baden.

“Where are we going to do first?”
“Buy some jam,” I said.
“What kind of jam?” my daughter asked.
“It’s very superior jam, made with currents. They pick out the seeds by hand with a goose-quill, so it’s very expensive and only made in this one little town in France, but it is supposed to be the tastiest on earth. It’s on the way between here and Paris.”
Well, it wasn’t any odder than anything else I had taken her to see in the time that we had lived in Europe. She curled up with Asterix, while the VEV’s tires hummed tirelessly down the road.

I could tell, without having to see a border sign, when we had left Germany. Germany was as clean as if Granny Dodie had dusted it all, and scoured it twice with Lysol, and then groomed all the grass and trees with a pair of manicure scissors. Houses and cottages were all trim and immaculate, not a sagging roof or a broken shutter to be seen – and then, we were in another place, where slacker standards prevailed. Not absolute rural blight, just everything a little grimier, a little more overgrown, not so aggressively, compulsively tidy. And the highway became a toll road, and a rather expensive one at that. I made a snap decision to take the rural, surface roads at that point, and the toll-taker indulgently wrote out a list for me of the towns along the way of the road I wanted, hop-scotching from town to town, along a two-lane road among rolling hills and dark green scrub-forest, and little collections of houses around a square, or a traffic circle labeled ‘centre’ around which I would spin until I saw a signpost with the name of the next town, and the VEV ricocheted out of the roundabout, and plunged headlong down this new road. (Good heavens, a signpost that way for Malmedy! Well, they did say snottily in Europe that wars were a means to teach Americans about geography, but I was interested this day in the earlier war, and my route led south.)

Always two lanes, little traveled on a Sunday it seemed. I had no shred of confidence in my ability to pronounce French without mangling every syllable, but at least I could read signs in Latinate alphabets. And this was Alsace-Lorraine, I was sunnily confident of being able to make myself clear in German, if required. The VEV’s tank was still better than half full, and it was only midday. Here we were climbing a long steady slope, a wooded table-land, and a break in the trees, where a great stone finger pointed accusingly at an overcast sky. A signpost with several arrows pointed the various ways farther on – Ossuaire …Ft. Douaumont … Fleury. A parking lot with a scattering of cars, the same oppressive sense of silence I had felt in places like Pompeii, and Dachau, as if even the birds and insects were muffled.
“What’s this place?” My daughter emerged from the back seat, yawning.
“There was a horrendous battle here, sixty years ago. The Germans tried to take it, but the French held on.”
“Indomitable Gauls,” My daughter said wisely, and I pointed up at the Ossuary,
“That place is full of their bones. We’ll go see the museum, first.”

This was the place of which the stalwart Joffe had commanded, “They shall not pass,” the place in which it could be claimed— over any other World War I battlefield— that France bled out as a significant military power. For ten months in 1916 Germany and France battered each other into immobility, pouring men and materiel into the Verdun Salient with prodigal hands, churning every inch of soil with shellfire and poison gas, splintering the woods and little towns, gutting a whole generation of the men who would have been it�s solid middle-class, the politicians and patriots, leaders who might have forestalled the next war, or stood fast in 1940. It was the historian Barbara Tuchman who noted that the entire 1914 graduating class of St. Cyr, the French approximation of West Point had been killed within the first month of war. For this was a wasteful war, as if the great generals all stood around saying “Well, that didn’t work very well, did it?— so let’s do it again, and again and again, until it does indeed work.” And afterwards, no one could very well say what it had all been for, and certainly not that it had been worth it, only that the place was a mass grave for a million men.

There was the usual little sign at the admittance desk to the museum— so many francs, but students and small children were admitted free, and so were war veterans and members of the military. I got out my military ID, and politely showed it to the concierge, a gentleman who looked nearly old enough to have been a veteran of Verdun saying
“Ici militaire…”
He looked at me, at the card, at my tits, and at my daughter, and then at the card again, and laughed, jovially waving me on to the exhibits; models and bits of battered gear, mostly, and a bit in the cellar made up to look like a corner of the battlefield, hell in a very small place, all the ground stirred up again and again. Supposedly, they had despaired of ever planting a straight row of trees; there was so much stuff in the ground.
When we came out again, the clouds were lifting a bit … down and across the river there was a golden haze over the town.

“Are we going to buy jam now?” my daughter asked.
“When we get to Bar le Duc. I think we’ll get something to eat, and stay the night there,” I said, and in that golden afternoon, I followed the two-lane road, the Voie Sacree, the only road into Verdun from the railhead at Bar le Duc, where traffic never stopped during the battle, two hundred trucks an hour, and 8,000 men shoveling gravel under their wheels day and night. The only visible mark left along the road were square white-washed mile markers, topped with a metal replica of a poilu’s helmet, like grave markers for a France gone sixty years ago.

I bought six jars of the confiture, six tiny jars of preserve as bright as blood, filled with tiny globes of clear red fruit. It was exquisite; saved for special occasions; I made them last for nearly a decade.

A couple of years ago, I wrote (here) about my adventures in the periodical stacks and the microfilmed archives of various newspapers, while in pursuit of a degree in English at California State University, Northridge. I spent hours in the Oviatt Library, reading periodicals and newspapers from the Thirties and Forties, leafing over the pages of magazines, sepia with age, and bound into heavy volumes, or spooling miles of film though the microfilm readers, my entrée into the world of my parents and their parents, and a disconcerting view of how things appeared the very day or week that they happened, before the historians set to and put it all to rights, smoothing out the wrinkles and making all the below-the-surface connections apparent.

There was an essay I read, whose premise has always stuck in my mind, although I cannot remember the author, or where it was published. I have the vague idea it was in the Reader’s Digest, reprinted from somewhere else— the Atlantic? New Yorker? Harpers’, maybe? Something meditative and literary anyway, penned by a woman sometime after the defeat of France, when England looked like being the next to fall, maybe even after Stalinist Russia had changed sides yet again, but well before Pearl Harbor, when the US was uneasily and technically at peace. But the war was on the authors’ mind, war and occupation, the loathsome-ness of the Nazis, and the tension between resistance and collaboration; France would have been occupied for at least a year, when the essay was published, and America was still a neutral, with businessmen, diplomats and journalists moving somewhat freely around the Continent.

The unremembered author wrote as someone familiar with Europe, and current events, and imagined herself at a literary cocktail party in her elegant New York apartment, looking around at the other guests and thinking “What would you do, under Occupation? How would you conduct yourselves? Would you resist? Collaborate? To what degree, and why?” She sketched out the character and background of her guests— old money, new money, artist, writer, actor, academic, non-conformist, businessman, man-about-town, and poseur—-and ventured suppositions on who would go along to get along, and who would quietly resist. I don’t quite know what struck me about the essay, other than her calm and even slightly chilly acknowledgement of the fact that, yes, given a military defeat and occupation of ones’ own country, the reactions of a personal circle of friends would be all over the ethical map.

There would be no united front, given ordinary day to day realities, and the necessity of making a living and keeping safe those you loved. Of course there would be individuals who wholeheartedly embraced their new overlords, and some who would feel obliged to strongly resist, and those in the middle who would have to work out some kind of accommodation, some way of enduring the situation without feeling ethically soiled. The writer did get that part quite right, but the trouble with that kind of speculation is when it got to specifics about people. Speculation is a more or less educated guess, and people can be more complicated than even the most imaginative writer can fathom.

A very few people are absolutely straight forward, and possess the heart and courage to carry on with the principles that they are renown for, like this man. But this man— for most of his life a soldier, patriot and hero— still fell resoundingly short of what anyone would have expected of him in the crunch. Yet this man, a bon-vivant, adulterous husband and dodgy businessman from whom nothing principled and high-minded could have been expected calmly risked everything to save lives, hundreds of lives. And this unremarkable young student nurse organized an escape line which funneled Allied evaders across three borders and a mountain range. If people sadly have the capacity to disappoint, they also have capability to take your breath away with their courage and dedication…. And most times it is just not something that you can see in advance. But what you do see it, the least you can do is recognize and honor those qualities.
In four days, the Iraqi people vote, in defiance of murder, bombs and terror, and it is in my mind that we may see the same hopeful, reckless courage, for out of that is a free nation born.

… You have more money than Midas. You are looking for a new car – a sporting cabriolet. What would you buy?

This is an interesting question. Despite the worldwide depression, there was a wealth of spectacular (for their day) high-end automobiles available. Just consider: the Blower Bentley, the Mercedes 540K Special Roadster, the Hispano-Suiza J-12, the Type 57 Bugatti, the Cadillac 36-60/90, the Talbot-Lago T150C SS, the Isotta-Fraschini Tipo 8B, the Maybach SW38, and, of course, the Duesenburg SSJ.

Well, the Cadillac and the Bentley can really be considered “second tier” automobiles. [It’s sad to say, my Limey friends, but in-between the Silver Ghost and the VW/BMW takeover, Rolls-Royce produced some relatively crude automobiles (great aircraft engines though)] Further, the Cadillac, the Isotta-Fraschinis, the Maybach, and the Hispano-Suiza were really more touring than sports cars (there were some exceptions, witness the ’37 Dubonnet Hispano.).

The Talbot, and particularly the Bugatti, are both spectacular examples of industrial craftsmanship – every facet finished to perfection. However, while the Talbots were by-and-large particularly beautiful, the 57s, with exception of the stunning Atlantic coupes (only 3 made), were some of the most ungainly Bugattis ever produced. For myself, iconoclast that I am, these cars would have a strong pull for me. But my practical side would not be unaware that these were really “small” and “delicate” cars for their age – not really the ticket for America’s [non] roads.

This brings us to the Mercedes and the Duesy. This is a tough choice. To me, there are few pre-war cars more beautiful than Jack Warner’s 540K Special Roadster (only 6 “hidden spare” models were built, IIRC). But Gary Cooper’s SSJ comes close (also IIRC, only 2 SSJs were ever built). On paper, you had that marvelous Duesenburg engine vs. that futuristic Mercedes chassis. But, in reality, while there are very few who have driven a 540K, ask anybody who’s driven a 300SL coupe, a Porsche 356 or early 911/912, or for that matter, a VW Bug or a MUTT – those swing-axle rear ends aren’t what they are cracked up to be.

In the end, it comes down to this: The Benz was a 105mph car, the Duesy would do 140+. I know what I’d choose.

Update: Well this is the last time I waste my time on an extendeded classic car post on you people. Not one comment? Not even to mention my omission of the spectacular Delahaye? Jeeze. (j/k – As I don’t make a dime on this, if I did it to please the unwashed masses, I wouldn’t do it.).