Airmen Quotes

It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.

In the 1960s it was in Maniema that thirteen Italian airmen of the United Nations were killed and eaten, their body parts smoked and made available at local markets for weeks after the slaughter.

But if she'd come then, she would never have properly appreciated it. She'd have seen the happy crowds and the Union Jacks and the bonfires, but she'd have no idea of what it meant to see the lights on after years of navigating in the dark, what it meant to look up at an approaching plane without fear, to hear church bells after years of air-raid sirens. She'd have had no idea of the years of rationing and shabby clothes and fear which lay behind the smiles and the cheering, no idea of what it had cost to bring this day to pass--the lives of all those soldiers and sailors and airmen and civilians.

First gain the victory and then make the best use of it you can.

As Halloran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Halloran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many falling airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Halloran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends.

Live for something rather than die for nothing.

They’re like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were.

It is with some regret that I here besmirch the nobility of our airmen, but boys, you killed an appalling lot of women and children.

*2 As Halloran parachuted over Tokyo, the Zero that had shot him down sped toward him, and Halloran was certain that he was going to be strafed, as so many falling airmen were. But instead of firing, the pilot saluted him. After the war, Halloran and that pilot, Isamu Kashiide, became dear friends.

Above all, the sense of personal responsibility was reduced by the way agency was fragmented. Among the airmen who obeyed the order to drop the bomb, the many scientists who helped to make it, the President, the many political and military advisers involved in the decision, who killed the people of Hiroshima? No one seems to have felt that the responsibility was fully his.

Strength lies not in defence but in attack.

The airmen were considered the most important passengers on the carriers.

All of these things about America—the independent spirit; freedom and liberty to think, express, and act; the promise of the potential for prosperity—have all been delivered to American citizens by our Founders and Framers, and secured by American soldiers, sailors, and airmen.

And some go the other way, the most lethal way of all: when the pressure gets to be too much, it's not their nerve that breaks, it's their fear. They lose the capacity to be afraid, even when they should be. These can't ever go home again. They're like those First World War airmen, the finest ones, shining in their recklessness and invincible, who got home and found that home had no place for what they were. Some people are undercovers all the way to the bone; the job has taken them whole.

American airmen, when they got to the front, mostly flew in borrowed, patched-up planes provided by the Allies, leaving them in the position of being sent into the most dangerous form of combat in modern times with next to no training in generally second-rate surplus planes against vastly more experienced enemies.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

Victory is a thing of the will.

She thought of the Allied airmen dropping the bombs, wondered if they knew what they were doing, who their bombs were killing. Were they war criminals, as most of the people in the air-raid shelter would testify? Or were things like accountability for war crimes decided by the victors?

Owning a drone does not a pilot make.

She thought of the Allied airmen dropping the bombs, wondered if they knew what they were doing, who their bombs were killing. Were they war criminals, as most of the people in the air-raid shelter would testify? Or were things like accountability for war crimes decided by the victors? ...Those on the side that emerged victorious would likely be lauded as heroes, their crimes remembered as exemplary actions.

Its real deity, I saw, was no longer of a spiritual kind: it was Comfort. No doubt that there were still many individuals who felt and thought in religious terms and made the most desperate efforts to reconcile their moral beliefs with the spirit of their civilization, but they were only exceptions. The average European - whether democrat or communist, manual worker or intellectual - seemed to know only one positive faith: the worship of material progress, the belief that there could be no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression went, 'independent of nature'. The temples of faith were the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dance halls, hydroelectric works; and its priests were the bankers, engineers, politician, film starts, statisticians, captains of industry, record airmen, and commissars.

Keith Park was a popular and persuasive man. He had quelled a near mutiny in 1918 by assembling the airmen and talking to them on random subjects and in such a monotonous voice for so long that all rebelliousness was destroyed by fatigue.

British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

You could pretend that Guenever was a sort of man-eating lioncelle herself, or that she was one of those selfish women who insist on ruling everywhere. In fact, this is what she did seem to be to a superficial inspection. She was beautiful, sanguine, hot-tempered, demanding, impulsive, acquisitive, charming - she had all the proper qualities for a man-eater. But the rock on which these easy explanations founder, is that she was not promiscuous. There was never anybody in her life except Lancelot and Arthur. She never ate anybody except these. And even these she did not eat in the full sense of the word. People who have been digested by a man-eating lioncelle tend to become nonentities - to live no life except within the vitals of the devourer. Yet both Arthur and Lancelot, the people whom she apparently devoured, lived full lives, and accomplished things of their own. She lived in warlike times, when the lives of young people were as short as those of airmen in the twentieth century. In such times, the elderly moralists are content to relax their moral laws a little, in return for being defended. The condemned pilots, with their lust for life and love which is probably to be lost so soon, touch the hearts of young women, or possibly call up an answering bravado. Generosity, courage, honesty, pity, the faculty to look short life in the face - certainly comradeship and tenderness - these qualities may explain why Guenever took Lancelot as well as Arthur. It was courage more than anything else - the courage to take and give from the heart, while there was time. Poets are always urging women to have this kind of courage. She gathered her rose-buds while she might, and the striking thing was that she only gathered two of them, which she kept always, and that those two were the best.

Service members will only stay on active duty if they can provide for their families—and DOD schools provide a world-class education that has proven time and again to be an incentive for sailors, soldiers, airmen and marines to reenlist. Military dependents that attend DoDDS schools are highly regarded by prestigious universities the world over for a number of reasons, but there’s one that you’d have a hard time replicating in a stateside school system: they’ve lived overseas, traveled the world, seen and experienced other cultures, learned foreign languages through immersion, and they’ve gained an understanding of the world that you can’t get in a traditional classroom. Add a rigorous curriculum and a long track record of high test scores throughout DoDDS, and it’s pretty easy to see why military kids are in such high demand.

From this day forward, until victory or defeat, transfer, discharge, capture, or death took them from it, the vast Pacific would be beneath and around them. Its bottom was already littered with downed warplanes and the ghosts of lost airmen. Every day of this long and ferocious war, more would join them.

The Average Occidental- be he a democrat or a Fascist, a Capitalist or a Bolshevik, a manual worker or an intellectual- knows only one positive "religion", and that is the worship of material progress, the belief that there is no other goal in life than to make that very life continually easier or, as the current expression goes, "independent of nature". The temples of this "religion" are the gigantic factories, cinemas, chemical laboratories, dancing halls, hydro- electric works; and its priests are bankers, engineers,film stars, captains of industry, record-airmen. The unavoidable result of this craving after power and pleasure is the creation of hostile groups armed to the teeth and determined to destroy each other whenever their respective interests come to clash. And on the cultural side the result is the creation of a human type whose morality is confined to the question of practical utility alone, and whose highest criterion of good and evil is material progress.

The Midway battle was crucial. In exchange for 307 lives, the Yorktown and a destroyer, and 147 airplanes, the American fleet had destroyed four Japanese carriers, more than three hundred planes, a cruiser and a destroyer, and nearly five thousand Japanese sailors and airmen. It has been called, with justification, “the turning point” in the Pacific war.

I ask not for wealth, or fame or long life, only that I may have the strength and courage to get to my objective and hit it, and hit it, and hit it.

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

THE EXPERIENCE OF WAR was extraordinarily diverse. The Eastern Front, where 90 percent of all Germans killed in combat met their fate, overwhelmingly dominated the struggle against Hitler. Between 1941 and 1944, British and American sailors and airmen fought at sea and in the sky, but relatively small numbers of Western Allied ground troops engaged the Axis in North Africa, Italy, Asia and the Pacific.

The crews flew from dawn to dusk every day and at night returned to their airfield in Chernigov to decontaminate their machines, discard their uniforms, and scrub radioactive dust from their bodies in a sauna. But it proved almost impossible to entirely remove the radiation from the helicopters, and when they returned each morning to begin a new mission, the airmen found the grass beneath their parked aircraft had turned yellow overnight.

In the air corps, 35,946 personnel died in nonbattle situations, the vast majority of them in accidental crashes.*1 Even in combat, airmen appear to have been more likely to die from accidents than combat itself. A report issued by the AAF surgeon general suggests that in the Fifteenth Air Force, between November 1, 1943, and May 25, 1945, 70 percent of men listed as killed in action died in operational aircraft accidents, not as a result of enemy action.

That's not a very manly way of doing it!" Courage began. "No one gets punched, kicked, stabbed or bit?" Raphael folded his arms. "Nope!" Courage furrowed his brow. "Can't I at least call someone a bad name?" Raphael stared at him for a moment, then blinked. "No!

As with all new inventions, there are upsides and downsides. The commercial drone is no exception. But until robust safeguards have been introduced to protect personal privacy from prying eyes in the skies, the true benefits to society of unmanned aerial vehicles will remain unrealised.

Well, I heard the story, as one hears all the varied marvels and terrors of the air; as one heard some years ago of “air pockets,” strange gulfs or voids in the atmosphere into which airmen fell with great peril; or as one heard of the experience of the airman who flew over the Cumberland mountains in the burning summer of 1911, and as he swam far above the heights was suddenly and vehemently blown upwards, the hot air from the rocks striking his plane as if it had been a blast from a furnace chimney. We have just begun to navigate a strange region; we must expect to encounter strange adventures, strange perils.

in the spring of 1945 the Third Reich simply ceased to exist. There was no longer any German authority on any level. The millions of soldiers, airmen and sailors were prisoners of war in their own land. The millions of civilians were governed, down to the villages, by the conquering enemy troops, on whom they depended not only for law and order but throughout that summer and bitter winter of 1945 for food and fuel to keep them alive. Such was the state to which the follies of Adolf Hitler—and their own folly in following him so blindly and with so much enthusiasm—had brought them, though I found little bitterness toward him when I returned to Germany that fall.

Airmen would later speak of sharks arriving almost the moment that their planes struck the water. In 1943, navy lieutenant Art Reading, Louie’s USC track teammate, was knocked unconscious as he ditched his two-man plane. As the plane sank, Reading’s navigator, Everett Almond, pulled Reading out, inflated their Mae Wests, and lashed himself to Reading. As Reading woke, Almond began towing him toward the nearest island, twenty miles away. Sharks soon began circling. One swept in, bit down on Almond’s leg, and dove, dragging both men deep underwater. Then something gave way and the men rose to the surface in a pool of blood. Almond’s leg had apparently been torn off. He gave his Mae West to Reading, then sank away. For the next eighteen hours, Reading floated alone, kicking at the sharks and hacking at them with his binoculars. By the time a search boat found him, his legs were slashed and his jaw broken by the fin of a shark, but thanks to Almond, he was alive. Almond, who had died at twenty-one, was nominated for a posthumous medal for bravery.

While the picture houses were struggling to maintain their audiences, things were not going terribly well on the production side of the business either. The previous November unions representing the craft trades—painters, carpenters, electricians, and the like—had secured something called the Studio Basic Agreement, which granted them important and costly concessions. The studios were now terrified of being squeezed similarly by actors and writers. With this in mind, thirty-six people from the creative side of the industry met for dinner at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles in January 1927 and formed a kind of executive club to promote—but even more to protect—the studios. It was a reflection of their own sense of self-importance that they called it the International Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, elevating the movies from popular entertainment to something more grandly artistic, scientific, and literally academic. In the second week of May, while the world fretted over the missing airmen Nungesser and Coli, the academy was formally inaugurated at a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles. (The idea of having an awards ceremony was something of an afterthought, and wasn’t introduced until the academy’s second anniversary dinner in 1929.)

Filming was done outside San Antonio, Texas. The scale of the production was vast and complex. Whole battlefields were scrupulously re-created on the plains of Texas. Wellman deployed as many as five thousand extras and sixty airplanes in some scenes—an enormous logistical exercise. The army sent its best aviators from Selfridge Field in Michigan—the very men with whom Lindbergh had just flown to Ottawa—and stunt fliers were used for the more dangerous scenes. Wellman asked a lot of his airmen. One pilot was killed, another broke his neck, and several more sustained other serious injuries. Wellman did some of the more dangerous stunt flying himself. All this gave the movie’s aerial scenes a realism and immediacy that many found almost literally breathtaking. Wellman captured features of flight that had never been caught on film before—the shadows of planes moving across the earth, the sensation of flying through drifting smoke, the stately fall of bombs, and the destructive puffs of impact that follow. Even the land-bound scenes were filmed with a thoughtfulness and originality that set Wings apart. To bring the viewer into a Parisian nightclub, Wellman used a boom shot in which the camera traveled through the room just above table height, skimming over drinks and between revelers, before arriving at the table of Arlen and Rogers. It is an entrancing shot even now, but it was rivetingly novel in 1927. “Wings,” wrote Penelope Gilliatt simply in The New Yorker in 1971, “is truly beautiful.” Wings was selected as best picture at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. Wellman, however, wasn’t even invited to the ceremony.

Few grown humans can normally survive a fall of much more than twenty-five or thirty feet, though there have been some notable exceptions—none more memorable perhaps than that of a British airman in World War II named Nicholas Alkemade. In the late winter of 1944, while on a bombing run over Germany, Flight Sergeant Alkemade, the tail gunner on a British Lancaster bomber, found himself in a literally tight spot when his plane was hit by enemy flak and quickly filled with smoke and flames. Tail gunners on Lancasters couldn’t wear parachutes because the space in which they operated was too confined, and by the time Alkemade managed to haul himself out of his turret and reach for his parachute, he found it was on fire and beyond salvation. He decided to leap from the plane anyway rather than perish horribly in flames, so he hauled open a hatch and tumbled out into the night. He was three miles above the ground and falling at 120 miles per hour. “It was very quiet,” Alkemade recalled years later, “the only sound being the drumming of aircraft engines in the distance, and no sensation of falling at all. I felt suspended in space.” Rather to his surprise, he found himself to be strangely composed and at peace. He was sorry to die, of course, but accepted it philosophically, as something that happened to airmen sometimes. The experience was so surreal and dreamy that Alkemade was never certain afterward whether he lost consciousness, but he was certainly jerked back to reality when he crashed through the branches of some lofty pine trees and landed with a resounding thud in a snowbank, in a sitting position. He had somehow lost both his boots, and had a sore knee and some minor abrasions, but otherwise was quite unharmed. Alkemade’s survival adventures did not quite end there. After the war, he took a job in a chemical plant in Loughborough, in the English Midlands. While he was working with chlorine gas, his gas mask came loose, and he was instantly exposed to dangerously high levels of the gas. He lay unconscious for fifteen minutes before co-workers noticed his unconscious form and dragged him to safety. Miraculously, he survived. Some time after that, he was adjusting a pipe when it ruptured and sprayed him from head to foot with sulfuric acid. He suffered extensive burns but again survived. Shortly after he returned to work from that setback, a nine-foot-long metal pole fell on him from a height and very nearly killed him, but once again he recovered. This time, however, he decided to tempt fate no longer. He took a safer job as a furniture salesman and lived out the rest of his life without incident. He died peacefully, in bed, aged sixty-four in 1987. —

Everyone standing on the road as the body went past had been so utterly silent, so still. There was no sound or movement except for the slow steps of the Corpsmen and the steady progress of the corpse. It’d been an image of death from another world. But now I know where that corpse was headed, to the old gunny at PRP. And if there was a wedding ring, the gunny would have slowly worked it off the stiff, dead fingers. He would have gathered all the personal effects and prepared the body for transport. Then it would have gone by air to TQ. And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.

Last year the Pupfish were banned from Applebee’s for ripping apart the dining room while trading blows with a bunch of airmen who got to giggling about the team’s name.

be a British pilot in the Royal Air Force, press here. To be an American pilot fighting in the Pacific Ocean, press here. To be a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, press here.

It is all true. It is true that a German plane came down on the moor in the middle of a shooting party and the two airmen were captured. It is true that German planes came down to low level in Norfolk, and elsewhere, and used machine guns to kill pedestrians on the roads.

Rubenfeld spoke no Hebrew. His mind was racing to come up with something—anything—that these wild-eyed dirt farmers would understand. He threw his arms in the air and yelled the only Yiddish words he could think of. “Gefilte fish! Gefilte fish! Shabbes! Shabbes!

Les Américains, en 1945, décomptaient plus de 1 million de Noirs hommes et femmes mobilisés, dont plus de 200 000 furent envoyés pour la seule France. Comme ils évitaient d’armer leurs soldats noirs, la plupart servaient d’auxiliaires (chauffeurs, mécaniciens, etc.), particulièrement exposés parce que dans l’incapacité de se défendre. Seuls un peu plus de 30 000 d’entre eux participèrent directement au combat, dont une flottille aérienne dite Tuskeegee Airmen spécialisée dans des missions de bombardement en territoire ennemi (32 aviateurs noirs américains furent faits prisonniers)27.

From its earliest days, the Resistance also helped greatly with the escape of Allied airmen downed over continental Europe, or Allied prisoners of war who escaped from prison camps. This branch of the Resistance, known as the Comet Line, worked in cooperation with the special British intelligence group MI-9, created specifically to assist with the return of “evaders” to Britain, mostly through Spanish ports or via British-held Gibraltar but occasionally through French ports also.

The two airmen stared at the dead body. Both had seen a great deal of death, and seen it in horrific form, and they were not sickened by what they witnessed in the Abort. The sensation both men felt in that second was different, it was a shock of context. They had both seen men ripped asunder by bullets, explosions, and shrapnel; eviscerated, decapitated, and burned alive by the vagaries of battle. Both men had seen the viscera and other bloody remains of turret gunners actually hosed out of the Plexiglas cocoons where they'd died. But all those deaths came within the context of battle, where they both expected to see death at its most brutal. In the Abort it was different; here a man who should have been alive was dead. To die violently on the toilet was something altogether shocking and genuinely frightening. "Jesus is right," Hugh said.

what had once been men.” As in the Philippines and Malaya, the initial Japanese airstrikes had come quickly, over a shockingly long range, and were conducted much more skillfully than the Allied airmen had expected.

Our military is very powerful, very lethal,” says Captain Ryan La Rance, an officer who manages the airmen on a Doomsday Plane, “but it doesn’t happen without communication.

psychologists found that airmen reacted to the various types of aircraft “as they would to individuals they meet, forming loves, hatreds, and jealousies out of all proportion to the realities of the situation.

In the intervening thirty years since Sadat’s death at the hands of Jihadists, thousands of terror attacks have occurred in nations across the globe. Two years after Sadat’s death the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon was bombed, killing 63. Six were killed in the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City on February 26, 1993. The next month, 250 civilians died in the attacks on Bombay, India.  A year later, three members of the Armed Islamic Group hijacked Air France flight 8969 in Algiers, killing seven. In 1996 the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia were bombed, killing 19 U.S. Air Force airmen living in the towers.

Would I be right in thinking you’ve been attacked by a Zeppelin crewed by German airmen?” The entire group looked astonished. “How did you know?” said the mayor. “We’ve been on their tail for a while.” Khuwelsa put her hand over her face to hide her smile at Harry’s exaggerated account of the situation. The mayor looked at Harry, then Khuwelsa, then the Pegasus. “You’re chasing them?

Southeastern Training Command over possibly

When is there a boy, even in these materialistic times, to whom the call of the wild and the open road does not appeal? Maybe it is the primitive instinct, anyway it is there. With that key a great door may be unlocked, if it is only to admit fresh air and sunshine into lives that were otherwise grey. The heroes of the wild, the frontiersmen and explorers, the rovers of the seas, the airmen of the clouds, are pied pipers to the boys. Where they lead the boys will follow and these will dance to their tune when it sings the song of manliness and pluck, of adventure and high endeavors of efficiency and skill, of cheerful sacrifice of self for others. There's meat in this for the boy. There's soul in it.

Public opinion surveys conducted as part of this study strongly suggest that while the American public is not knowledgeable about military issues, its judgment is fundamentally sound, and its concern is unabated for the soldiers, sailors, airmen, coastguardsmen, and Marines who fight the nation’s wars.

In its first ten months of operation, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and some 1,900 crewmen; those numbers would skyrocket over the next year and a half. By the end of the conflict, the U.S. air operations in Europe would suffer more fatalities—26,000—than the entire Marine Corps in its protracted bloody campaigns in the Pacific. “To fly in the Eighth Air Force in those days,” recalled Harrison Salisbury, “was to hold a ticket to a funeral. Your own.” The savagery of the air war was not due solely to the ferocity of German defenses. Early in the war, when the Air Force brass in Washington were touting the advantages of high-altitude flying, they failed to realize that the extreme atmospheric conditions experienced by the crews could kill as effectively as a Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf. “There are apparently little things that one doesn’t think about prior to getting into operations,” commented Dr. Malcolm Grow, the Eighth’s chief medical officer. Little things like oxygen deprivation, which could cause unconsciousness and death in a matter of minutes, or extensive frostbite, caused by several hours of exposure to temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees below zero. Until early 1944, more airmen were hospitalized for frostbite than for combat injuries. As

And as it was unloaded off the bird, the Marines would have stood silent and still, just as we had in Fallujah. And they would have put it on a C-130 to Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Kuwait. And they would have stood silent and still in Germany, and silent and still at Dover Air Force Base. Everywhere it went, Marines and sailors and soldiers and airmen would have stood at attention as it traveled to the family of the fallen, where the silence, the stillness, would end.

Though every dead man is a reduction of their number, the thousand POWs who first left Changi as Evans’ J Force—an assortment of Tasmanians and West Australians surrendered in Java, South Australians surrendered at Singapore, survivors of the sinking of the destroyer, HMAS Newcastle, a few Vics and New South Welshmen from other military misadventures, and some RAAF airmen—remain Evans’ J Force. That’s what they were when they arrived and that’s what they will be when they leave, Evans’ J Force, one-thousand souls strong, no matter, if at the end, only one man remains to march out of this camp. They are survivors of grim, pinched decades who have been left with this irreducible minimum: a belief in each other, a belief that they cleave to only more strongly when death comes. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter. The fact of their own survival somehow demands that they are one, now and forever.

Where will that be?’ ‘Either Greenland or Iceland.’ ‘How shall we know which is which?’ ‘If it’s green, it’ll be Iceland. If it’s icy it’ll be Greenland.

Indian Tales of valour, courage and bravery in the face of insurmountable odds are not the exclusive preserve of the warrior princes of ancient and medieval India, or those of a colonial army in the dust and grime of WW I &II, but also of soldiers, sailors and airmen of a secular, democratic and modern India.

it is important to note one thing: there are a few major exceptions to today’s “softness indoctrination.” The biggest and by far most important is the U.S. military. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines are among the toughest, grittiest folks to ever walk the planet. Those who have fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror in general—as well as many of our first responders and law enforcement—are the exception to today’s soft America.

Today those who stand, almost alone, against the Jihadis are young American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, and Marines. We should thank God that they still volunteer to serve.

But you need…” Helen began. “Nothing,” he finished flatly. “I have uniforms, and airmen’s mess hall – I need nothing.

Caine, Philip D. Aircraft Down! Evading Capture in WWII Europe. Virginia: Potomac Books, 1997. Champlain, Héléne de. The Secret War of Helene De Champlain. Great Britain: Redwood Burn, Ltd., 1980. Chevrillon, Claire. Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance. Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Coleman, Fred. The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 from the Holocaust. Virginia: Potomac Books, 2013. Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line: The Brave Men and Women Who Rescued Allied Airmen from the Nazis During World War II. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Fitzsimons, Peter. Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Foot, M.R.D., and J.M. Langley. MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945. Boston: Little Brown, 1979. Humbert, Agnés. Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2004. Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Litoff, Judy Barrett. An American Heroine in the French Resistance. The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Long, Helen. Safe Houses Are Dangerous. London: William Kimber, 1985. Moorehead, Caroline. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Neave, Airey. Little Cyclone. London: Coronet Books, 1954.

Mildred Elizabeth Sisk later named Mildred Elizabeth Gillars was born in Portland, Maine on November 29, 1900. In 1929, Gillars left the United States for France, where she worked as an artist's model in Paris. During World War II she was employed as a radio announcer with RRG, Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaftm, the official German State Radio Station. In 1941, the US State Department advised American nationals to return to the United States however, she voluntarily stayed in Germany because her fiancé, Paul Karlson, said he would never marry her if she returned to the United States. Shortly afterwards, Karlson, was killed in action on the Eastern Front. She remained in Germany broadcasting propaganda to the US forces in Europe and became known as Axis Sally. From Christmas Eve in 1942, until the end of the war she broadcast the Home Sweet Home Hour from Berlin. During these broadcasts she talked about the infidelity of soldiers' wives and sweethearts, while they were fighting in Europe. Midge-at-the-Mike broadcast American songs and GI's Letter-box and Medical Reports was directed towards the United States in which Gillars used information on wounded and captured US airmen, with the intent of causing fear and anxiety for their families.

US airmen of the Eighth Air Force were required to fly twenty-five missions to complete their tours of service. And if you were part of that second Schweinfurt mission, in which a quarter of the crews didn’t come back—well, you do the math. Fly twenty-five missions like that, and what are your odds of making it through the war alive?

Like most of the special operations community, their physical training centered on useful strength, cardiovascular endurance, and durability, which, as both of them were pushing age forty, was increasingly important. Looking like a steroid-fueled bodybuilder was not part of the equation and was a liability in terms of both physical performance and blending into civilian populations. Their workouts pulled elements from various coaches and training programs, including CrossFit, Gym Jones, and StrongFirst. The idea wasn’t to be able to compete with endurance athletes, power lifters, or alpinists, but to achieve a broad-based level of fitness that would allow them to perform well in each of those areas. After a series of warm-up exercises that most would consider a serious workout, they completed the strength and endurance Hero WOD “Murph,” named in honor of Navy SEAL Lieutenant Mike Murphy. Wearing their body armor, they started with one hundred burpees followed by four one-hundred-yard buddy carries. Then it was right into a two-mile run, one hundred pull-ups, two hundred push-ups, three hundred air squats, followed by another two-mile run. Both men powered through, thinking of the scores of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who didn’t make it home.

You can’t go home again,” wrote Thomas Wolfe, and he might as well have been writing about the newly minted Imperial Japanese Navy aviator, resplendently clad in blue and brass, returning home to visit his family. Of course his parents and siblings were overjoyed to see him, and he them. He had done them a great honor, lifting the status of his entire clan in the eyes of neighbors, colleagues, and friends. He was bigger, stronger, tougher, older, wiser. But his homecoming was inevitably poignant, and more than a little strange. He might have dreamed of home every night he was away, clasping it in his imagination as a sanctuary from the brutality of his tormentors and the unremitting toil of his training. Once there, however, he was inevitably taken aback by the comfort, the ease, the disorder, the aimlessness. The reality of home had steadily diverged from the image he had carried in his mind. It contrasted too sharply with the harsh, purposeful life to which he had grown accustomed. He loved his family as much as he ever had, and they loved him as much as they ever had, but he was aghast at how much space had grown between them. They could never fully understand what he had done and endured, or what he had become. That was a secret known only to his classmates, his fellow survivors, who had shared in the long crucible of his training—the fatigue, the humiliations, the beatings, the deprivations, the chronic dread of expulsion, the ecstasy of flight, and the inconceivable joy he had felt upon receiving those blessed wings. He might never admit it, but his fellow airmen were closer to him now than his own kin. He belonged with them. He could not go home again because now the navy was his home.

So there was no alternative but to mobilize against this all-pervasive threat if we did not want to lose everything that our valiant soldiers, sailors and airmen had fought and died for in World War II.

incident plus such Japanese tactics as playing dead and then throwing a grenade—or playing wounded, calling for a corpsman, and then knifing the medic when he came—plus the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, caused Marines to hate the Japanese intensely and to be reluctant to take prisoners. The attitudes held toward the Japanese by noncombatants or even sailors or airmen often did not reflect the deep personal resentment felt by Marine infantrymen. Official histories and memoirs of Marine infantrymen written after the war rarely reflect that hatred. But at the time of battle, Marines felt it deeply, bitterly, and as certainly as danger itself. To deny this hatred or make light of it would be as much a lie as to deny or make light of the esprit de corps or the intense

last words to parents, friends, wives or fiancées and wanted these greetings to be taken home surrounded them. With a mixture of relief and disgrace for leaving all the other men to their fate, the airmen put the papers in their pockets and entered the aircraft. But the aircraft could not be launched. After a while, it was discovered that a splinter originating from a shell fired by the Prince of Wales had punctured the container with the compressed air that propelled the catapult. It could not be repaired

attack was launched in the evening, and at 23.04 the air-raid warning sounded on the Tirpitz. The Flak defenses opened fire as the British airmen strived hard to hit the target, but the results were indeed meagre. Only the remains of a flare actually hit the battleship

Dedication To my father, Charles Franklin Corley, the greatest campfire storyteller of his generation and one of the smartest men I have ever known. As a young boy, I loved staying up past my bedtime and curling up next to my dad on the couch to watch old war movies. I think he would have liked this novel; it has lots of explosions and soldiers doing brave things.

If Congress finds out,’ Roosevelt told the Navy airmen, ‘I will be impeached.

Winged Victory

Not only did the Berlin Airlift bring in food, fuel, clothing, and much more, it also brought hope and tremendous regard for the Allies, especially the Americans who flew the bulk of the flights. The Germans also knew that over one hundred British and American airmen had died trying to keep their city alive.

some of the airmen, home became a religion, a sacred place they would do anything to get back to, a thing worth fighting for, and a destination greater than heaven. Dean admired their faith.

one of the airmen was asked why he believed the German ships had left. He sarcastically answered: ‘Well, I didn’t crash into anything when flying at sea level in the fiord,

inside of three months had made his way from humble circumstances to the very front rank of American airmen.

The campaign to discredit Black troops, which stung the Tuskegee Airmen and 92nd Infantry, intensified as the Allies secured victory. United States senators disparaged the performance and character of Black soldiers, while photographic histories of the war overlooked Black American contributions almost entirely.

With the Allies on the advance nearly everywhere and invasion talk in the air, London was a welcoming place for young airmen who were taking the fight to Hitler’s doorstep. The first stop for American airmen was usually the nearest Red Cross Club, where helpful volunteers made bookings free of charge at commercial hotels or at one of the Red Cross’s own dormitory-like facilities. After checking in and dropping off their kits, most men headed straight for Rainbow Corner. Located on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly Circus, it was a place as close to home as a GI could find in all of England. Administered by the American Red Cross, Rainbow Corner had been designed “to create a strictly American atmosphere.” There was an exact replica of a small-town corner drugstore in the club’s basement, where ice-cold Cokes were sold for a nickel and grilled hamburgers for a dime. Upstairs, in the grand ballroom, servicemen danced with volunteer hostesses to the driving music of soldier bands—the Flying Forts, the Thunderbolts, the Sky Blazers. There was also a lounge with a jukebox and a small dance floor with tables and chairs around it. Lonely GIs dunking donuts in fresh coffee would loaf there, listening to the latest American hits. Rainbow Corner never closed its doors. The key had been symbolically thrown away the day of the grand opening in November 1942.

All she knew was that they were here in this faraway country, soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines and volunteers, risking their lives, and their government could no longer be trusted to tell them the truth about why.

Hutch MISSION ALERT Mission alert, we’re scheduled to fly another day of combat; perhaps to die. Early to bed for a restless night we’ll get the call before dawn’s light. Breakfast, briefing and out to our plane, we pray to survive combat again. Loaded bombers soar into the sky hundreds on both sides are going to die. Eighth Air Force aircrews in WW II faced flak-filled skies and fighters too. I’ll always remember the B-17 boys; the deadly missions and the terrible noise. Sixty- six years have come and passed since I heard “mission alert” last. Victory was won at a terrible cost. Today, I salute the boys we lost. World War II airmen share my tears as our ranks grow thin with the passing years. Many know nothing of those days of glory and so I write to tell our story. James Lee Hutchinson, 2011

I had told Parliament on June 4: “The great French Army was very largely, for the time being, cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousand armoured vehicles. May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen?

Then came the bear hugs as the tough airmen acknowledged the unity of their emotions and the incredible symbolism of what they’d done that day. Food instead of bombs. Life instead of destruction. Hope instead of despair. Not a bad day’s work.

fifteen thousand airmen—as many men as made up an infantry division—would die in training before they left the continental United States.

In some ways, the Saudi response to Iran has followed its long-established security policies; spend billions of dollars on advanced weapons and turn to traditional partners for support. In 2019, Riyadh made the first payments on an estimated $15 billion contract for Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defense system. That summer, Saudi Arabia reopened the Prince Sultan Air Base for the deployment of US aircraft, air defense missile batteries, and several thousand soldiers and airmen. Yet in other ways the Saudi response under King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman has been unconventional and may become even more so. Launching an independent air campaign in Yemen or investing seriously in a domestic defense industry were new approaches. Most worryingly, as the former head of Israel’s National Security Council Yaakov Amidor warned—a nuclear armed Iran would not only surround Israel with a “ring of fire,” it would very likely drive Turkey and Saudi Arabia to seek their own nuclear weapons.

There is very little that is not wasteful and dismal about war. The only clear, deep, good is the special kind of bond welded between people who, having mutually shared a crisis, whether it be a shelling or a machine-gun attack, emerge knowing that those involved behaved well. There is much pretence in our everyday life, and, with a skilful manner, much can be concealed. But with a shell whistling at you there is not much time to pretend and a person’s qualities are starkly revealed. You believe that you can trust what you have seen. It is a feeling that makes old soldiers, old sailors, old airmen, and even old war correspondents, humanly close in a way shut off to people who have not shared the same thing. I think that correspondents, because they are rarely in a spot where their personal strength or cowardice can affect the life of another, probably feel only an approximation of this bond. So far as I am concerned, even this approximation is one of the few emotions about which I would say: It’s as close to being absolutely good as anything I know.

There are few families in this country who were not touched by the war through the service of sons, daughters or near relatives, and there are still fewer servicemen and women who are not indebted to our submariners in some way or other. I have in mind particularly the 504 airmen of all the services who were rescued from almost certain death of drowning, or worse, by the timely presence of life-guard submarines.

The gratitude of every home in our island, in our empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion,

Caine, Philip D. Aircraft Down! Evading Capture in WWII Europe. Virginia: Potomac Books, 1997. Champlain, Héléne de. The Secret War of Helene De Champlain. Great Britain: Redwood Burn, Ltd., 1980. Chevrillon, Claire. Code Name Christiane Clouet: A Woman in the French Resistance. Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1995. Coleman, Fred. The Marcel Network: How One French Couple Saved 527 from the Holocaust. Virginia: Potomac Books, 2013. Eisner, Peter. The Freedom Line: The Brave Men and Women Who Rescued Allied Airmen from the Nazis During World War II. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Fitzsimons, Peter. Nancy Wake: A Biography of Our Greatest War Heroine. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Foot, M.R.D., and J.M. Langley. MI9: Escape and Evasion, 1939–1945. Boston: Little Brown, 1979. Humbert, Agnés. Résistance: A Woman’s Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2004. Jackson, Julian. France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Litoff, Judy Barrett. An American Heroine in the French Resistance. The Diary and Memoir of Virginia d’Albert-Lake. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Long, Helen. Safe Houses Are Dangerous. London: William Kimber, 1985. Moorehead, Caroline. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship, and Resistance in Occupied France. New York: HarperCollins, 2011. Neave, Airey. Little Cyclone. London: Coronet Books, 1954. Ideas for Book Groups Dear Readers, I truly believe in book groups.

The US military had this huge generator they needed to get to an airfield site they were planning in the south. This was a remote area, and aside from a few pockets of US troops, it was completely under bandit control. There was no fuel available for miles around the landing spot, and none of the outfits we approached would touch it with a bargepole. They all kept saying, “We’ll never get out again, how can we take off from an unprepared airfield with no fuel?” ‘The job was priced at between sixty thousand and seventy thousand dollars, but one day there’s a phone call from these Russian guys. They said, “We’ll do it, but it’ll cost you two million dollars, in advance.” The Americans didn’t really have a choice by this stage, so they paid. And sure enough, right on time, this ex-Soviet air force crew flew in, with the generator, in this battered old Il-76, unloaded the generator, then sat down for a leisurely smoke. ‘Just as all the Americans were wondering how on earth they were going to fly out again, there’s a cloud of dust and up clatters this old minibus driven by some Afghan bloke – and these airmen just get in and drive off. The Yanks were all going, “Hey, how will you get the plane back?” And the crew just said, “We won’t. It’s an old one – we only bought it for this job, and we’re ditching it here.” Half a million dollars it cost them, and they held it together with string just long enough to land, then cleared off one and a half million dollars in profit and left it to rust. It’s still there.

This discussion of war then lays the foundation for an understanding of change as a process and as an essential component of military affairs. Militaries must change to cope with the changing environment in which they function. The U.S. Army has a robust process to guide change in its combat developments community. Change is also present in the business world, as industry seeks a competitive advantage in order to survive and prosper. The present transformation initiatives in the U.S. Department of Defense seek to maintain the U.S. dominance in military capability in the world and to exploit the opportunities afforded by new technologies and concepts of organization and warfare that use those technologies. The future of military requirements remain a challenge to define. The transformation process tries to define that future and the capabilities needed in order to maintain the security of the United States. Yet enemies of the United States and its allies also seek to predict and mold this future to their advantage. The rise of Islamic fundamentalists or radicalism has changed the global security environment. Western nations must prepare to defeat this threat that is not really new but has risen to new levels of ferocity and lethality. Regardless of the changes in technology, organizational and operational concepts, and external or internal threats, people remain a constant as the crucial element in war. People make decisions to use military and other elements of national power to impose the will of a nation on another group or nations. People also comprise the military services and man the component systems within the services. Any study of war and warfare must address the impact that people make on the conduct of war and the effects of war on people. The political process always includes people. To paraphrase Carl von Clausewitz, war is a continuation of that political process. Leaders who make a decision to fight and those who lead those soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines into battle must not forget that people implement those decisions and are the object of any offense or defense. Protecting the citizens of the United States is why the nation maintains military forces.

He lived in her imagination as part of a protected, untouchable unit of valiant soldiers like the Panthers General Patton led in the Pacific or the Tuskegee Airmen who showed those Nazis that the Aryan race was indeed not superior and that Negro men could fly, they could soar. They were majestic.