Part 6 (2/2)

Ken Higgins summed it up: ”I always said George brought me home. He did that day.”6 The following day, Cooper wrote his fiancee. He had retrieved one of the parachutes, and told her, ”Your worries about a wedding dress are over - that is, if you want one made of white silk.” He described the mission, then said, ”Actually I was too busy to be scared so it was all o.k.”7 Another mission to Linz was scheduled for April 26. McGovern would not be going on it, as he had completed his thirty-five missions, but others would. They woke, went to the briefing, got into their Liberators, and hoped for a red flare from the tower signifying that the mission was canceled. Pilots started their engines. Then shouts of joy could be heard all over Cerignola - the red flare had been fired. As it turned out, the war was over for the combat crews. It was over for every member of the Eighth and Fifteenth and Twelfth and Ninth Air Forces. No more missions. Less than two weeks later, on May 7, 1945, Germany surrendered unconditionally. It was a hot, sunny day in Cerignola. Very little celebrating was done. Most of the men just took it easy, getting a suntan and listening to all the notables on their radios. Somehow, the accolades sounded hollow, as praise often does. It was a poor replacement for the thoughts of those who had made the supreme sacrifice with their lives.8 The group had started 1945 with sixty Liberators. In the next four months it had flown 1,434 sorties. In that period it lost eight B-24s to flak and another thirty-four received flak damage. A total of seventy-four crewmen were missing in action, plus twenty wounded and sixteen killed. In its fifteen months in action, the group had flown enough miles on combat missions to circle the earth over ten times with a thirty-airplane formation. It had flown altogether a total of 252 combat missions, lost 118 Liberators. It had suffered nearly 1,000 casualties - men killed in action, wounded, missing, or taken prisoner. The best news was, of course, that the Allies had won the war. A close second for the airmen was the release of the POWs. That was a joyous occasion. Lt. Col. Thomas Ramey of the 743rd Squadron, himself a POW, related: ”We had 179 airmen lost from burning planes, ditching in icy cold water, crash-landing on rugged mountain terrain, often times wounded, only to 103 become captured American POWs. [What they endured included] starvation diets, deprivation, abuse, humiliation, vermin-infested quarters, forced marches in sub-zero weather, considerable weight loss, inadequate or no medical attention, infamous German box car rides, and in many cases, torture.” But then ”the sounds of war came closer and closer until one day when armored tank columns overran the camps and the American flag flew once again.” That was a joyous occasion.9 Fifty-four years after the end of the war in Europe, Ken Higgins - who was nineteen years old in 1945 - spoke for many of his fellow airmen, and for many other veterans of all the armed services, when he said, ”The war time was kind of unreal when I look back on it. It's hard to imagine that we went through all that.”10 McGovern and his fellow men of the 741st Squadron had played a small role in one of mankind's greatest triumphs, the defeat of n.a.z.i Germany. They had been a part of one of history's greatest undertakings, the Army Air Forces of World War II. After the war, there were disputes and arguments over which American service had done the most to bring about the victory. The ground forces, the Navy, and the AAF each a.s.serted that ”without us, it couldn't have been done. We were indispensable.” The Army Air Forces claimed that they could have won the war alone. But then, so did the Navy. The Army ground forces replied that the AAF's power to destroy was not the power to control. To control, it is necessary to put a man on the spot with a gun in his hand.

General Eisenhower, who commanded all three services in the campaign in northwest Europe, knew that it took all three to win. His ground forces could not have gotten to the battle without the Navy. Nor could they have driven through France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany without the Army Air Forces. As the supreme commander of the Army, Navy, and AAF in the campaign, he became so concerned with the service rivalries that at one time - this was before the establishment of the Air Force Academy in Colorado - he wanted mids.h.i.+pmen and cadets to attend the other service's schools during their second cla.s.s years. He talked about having them wear the same uniforms. He even proposed a single service academy. What he proposed never came to be, but it illuminates the answer to the question of which service was indispensable. They all were. Critics of the AAF, while praising the tactical airplanes for their role in supporting the ground offensive, argued that the strategic bombing campaign was an unnecessary waste. All the production devoted to building the bombers, the enormous effort to train men to fly and maintain them, could have been better spent on fighters, ground troops, and the Navy. And it would have avoided the worst accusation of all, that in World War II the United States used a method of making war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and destroyed uncountable historic buildings, factories, and residences, without doing much of anything to win the war while creating the worst legacy of the war, made much more frightful with the development of the atomic bomb and the beginning of the Cold War - making civilians into targets. Perhaps 305,000 Germans were killed in the bombings, another 780,000 seriously injured. About 25 million Germans had been subjected to the terror of the bombings.

The bombs. .h.i.t residences as well as factories, deliberately on the part of the RAF Bomber Command's night bombing, but also from the American precision bombing. The accuracy of free-falling bombs was far below the accuracy of artillery fire, not to mention rifle or machine gun fire. Most bombs fell considerably outside the target. After the war, a Polish officer who had been captured in 1939 by the Germans and spent the war in a POW camp near Munich, then immigrated to the United States, was talking to B-24 tail gunner Sgt. Art Applin. The Polish officer said, ”You know, when you guys would come over we would all run out of the barracks and start waving, screaming, and cheering and the German guards were trying to shut us up and get us back in the barracks.” He then asked Applin, ”Did you guys ever hit anything?” Applin's reply was, ”Yeah, we always. .h.i.t the ground.”11 They did a lot better than that. In the last chapter, ”Mission Accomplished,” in the official history of the Army Air Forces in Europe, editors W. F. Craven and J. L. Cate give their a.s.sessment. Like all their work, it is judicious and authoritative. Much of the chapter is based on interviews conducted with German personnel after the unconditional surrender. The AAF wanted to know what they had done right, what was done wrong. The Germans were eager to talk, most of them. They knew there was little to be gained from withholding information. They were professionals in the art of war and wanted to discuss what had 104 happened, and why. Some of them, no doubt, hoped to win better treatment for themselves by being cooperative. But whatever their motivations, they provided a unique glimpse of the other side of the hill.

TheLuftwaffe commander, Hermann Gring, was voluble. His overall conclusion was that the Allied selection of targets had been excellent. He insisted that precision bombing was more effective than night raids. Still, he concluded that Germany could never have been defeated by airpower alone. But n.a.z.i Germany's second and last fuhrer, Grand Admiral Karl Dnitz, said that airpower was the decisive element. Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt believed that air-power was the first of several ingredients in the triumph of the Allies. Colonel General Alfred Jdl of Hitler's staff said the winning of air superiority altogether decided the war and that strategic bombing was the most decisive factor. Albert Speer, the minister of production, emphatically stated his opinion that the strategic bombing could have won the war without a land invasion. The German leaders said that the Allies had underestimated Germany's industrial capacity. It was so huge that Germany had been able to mobilize at a leisurely pace. Her war production continued to increase until it reached its peak in mid-1944. But it was then that the strategic bombing campaign intensified. Of all the bombs that struck the Reich during the war, 72 percent fell after July 1, 1944. In the following nine months the bombing campaign wrecked the enlarged German economy until it could not support military operations or supply the basic needs of the population. By January 1945, Germany had been almost paralyzed economically, and by April she was ruined. In Craven and Cate's view, ”Of all the accomplishments of the air forces, the attainment of air supremacy was the most significant, for it made possible the invasions of the continent and gave the heavy bombers their opportunity to wreck the industries of the Reich.” And of all the mult.i.tudes of payoffs from winning air supremacy, the most significant was the strategic bombing campaign against oil refineries. This ”deprived the German Air Force of aviation gasoline so that operations were possible only on rare occasions.

German bombers practically disappeared from the air, and whenever fighters tried to interfere with Allied air fleets they invariably got the worst of the battle.”12 In April 1944, Germany had adequate supplies of oil. Over the next year, the Eighth Air Force dropped 70,000 tons of bombs on the refineries, the Fifteenth Air Force some 60,000 tons. By April 1945, Germany's oil production was 5 percent that of the previous year. Toward the end, even the most senior n.a.z.is in the hierarchy were unable to find gasoline for their limousines. German industries were badly crippled or gone. This despite an enormous amount of effort put into defending and rebuilding oil installations. The second major effect of the strategic bombing campaign, in this case aided by the tactical air force, was transportation. The Allied planes attacked bridges, highways, trucks, tanks, or anything that moved, but most of all the bombers went after railroad marshaling yards. By the spring of 1945 the German transport system was so badly wrecked that only the highest-priority military movements could be started with any prospect of getting to their destination. In Craven and Cate's words, ”The bombings of rail centers leading to the Russian front, attacks on marshalling yards in all parts of Germany, the Fifteenth Air Force missions against southern European railways piled up calamity for the Germans. If they produced they could not haul. Their dispersal programs strangled, and the country became helpless.”13 The price of the transportation victory had been huge. The Eighth Air Force had dropped one third of its bombs, 235,312 tons, on marshaling yards. The Fifteenth Air Force put almost one half its total bombs, 149,476 tons, on them.

Along with their acknowledgment of the effectiveness of the strategic bombing campaign, the German leaders being interrogated had criticisms. For example, they thought the Army Air Forces' conviction was wrong that there had to be one critical German industry that, if destroyed, would bring the country to ruin. The great raids on Schweinfurt, for example, designed to deprive German vehicles of ball bearings and thus bring their army to a standstill, caused some destruction and problems, but they were carried out at great risk and high cost and still hardly slowed Germany down. The Germans were able to use ball bearings already in the plants, or on their way there. They dispersed the industry. In the end, the German leaders declared, German armaments production suffered no serious effects from a shortage of ball bearings. Goring and Speer believed that going after electric power stations, which were highly vulnerable to air attack, would have benefited the Allies more. Or the Allies could have weakened Germany, perhaps brought her to surrender, by going after powder and explosive plants - in fact, the Germans said 105 they would have rated such plants second only to oil. Another possibility, generally ignored, was the chemical plants that produced nitrogen and methanol. But whatever their criticisms, and there were many more, the German leaders knew that the tremendous requirements of air raid defense had absorbed much German manpower, scientific energies, and guns and ammunition - an effort that, if applied to the ground forces, might have been decisive for them. We will never know because it was not done that way. We do know that what the Allies did won the war. What McGovern did, what the 741st Squadron did, along with the rest of the 455th Bomb Group and all the Fifteenth Air Force, and the Eighth Air Force, most especially in their attacks against oil refineries and marshaling yards, was critical to the victory.

McGovern, his crew, and all the airmen had spent the war years not in vain but in doing good work.

Along with all the peoples of the Allied nations, they saved Western civilization. Bernard Baruch quoted Clemenceau, who wrote, ”They were kittens in play but tigers in battle.”

EPILOGUE.

IN JANUARY 2000,my son Hugh and I spent two weeks in Rome, with a two-day trip to Cerignola, interviewing George McGovern, who was then the U.S. amba.s.sador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Six hours a day, sometimes seven, occasionally eight, and on the drive to Cerignola and back to Rome, constantly. Hugh and I have worked together on many books. We have done many interviews, alone or together. Earlier in my life I spent hours, days, weeks interviewing Dwight Eisenhower about the war and his presidency. That was different from interviewing McGovern, and obviously hearing Eisenhower's accounts of his activities was memorable, a highlight of my life. So too my interviews with thousands of veterans of World War II. But for me and Hugh, listening to McGovern's account of his youth, his training, and his missions in Italy was especially noteworthy.

What follows is my account of our last interview, filled in with other interview information. The subject was: What happened after your last mission and the end of the war?

Promotions were frozen, which McGovern thought cost him a certain captain's promotion. Everyone was just waiting for orders to return to the States. For those who had completed their required thirty-five missions, like McGovern, that would mean discharge. For those who had thirty missions, like the men of McGovern's crew, the victory in Europe meant they would be going off to the Pacific to engage in the war against j.a.pan.

Except Tex Ashlock, who was in the hospital. McGovern had promised him that he would pay a visit, and one day he ”borrowed” an Army truck and drove into Cerignola to visit him. When McGovern came into the ward, Ashlock began to cry. Soon he was sobbing. ”Here he was, this great big guy, just sobbing like a child,” McGovern recalled. McGovern said, ”Well, Tex, you're going to be okay. They've got good doctors here and we will see you back in the States.”

”If I get back,” Ashlock replied.

”You're going to get back,” McGovern said. ”I wouldn't leave here if I thought there was any doubt at all about you coming home. You'll be back there soon.” The other crew members also visited Ashlock, 106 who did get back. Almost immediately when the war ended, the AAF started to close down the air base in Cerignola and those across southern Italy. What to do with the food supplies was a problem. The mess sergeant in Cerignola had hundreds of boxes of powdered eggs, powdered milk, potatoes that could be reconst.i.tuted, thousands of cans of Spam and cheese, orange marmalade, raisins, peanut b.u.t.ter, flour, cornmeal. Tons of food, and that was true of every airfield. The AAF wasn't going to let the men they had spent so much time, money, and effort training go hungry.

The high command decided, in McGovern's words, that ”there are hungry people all over Europe and we don't need this stuff back in the States. There's no market for powdered eggs in Brooklyn. So we'll give it away, to the Europeans.” McGovern was asked if he would partic.i.p.ate. He said yes. ”So that's what we did. We started flying a few days after the end of the war, taking this food up there.” They flew from Cerignola to a field about forty miles north of Trieste. McGovern's crew loaded theDakota Queen with wooden and cardboard boxes of rations and on landing would hand the food out of the bomb bay to GIs, who would put it into trucks and drive it to villages, towns, cities. Soon the AAF began trucking unneeded rations from other bases to Cerignola for the airlift. ”We gave away everything we had,”

McGovern said. To the people of Europe, including the surrendered troops: ”It didn't make any difference whether they were German troops.”

”This was the first Berlin airlift,” I said. ”In a way the beginning of the Marshall Plan.””On a small scale, yes,” McGovern replied. He was glad to be doing it and took satisfaction in showing that the B-24s ”could so something other than bomb people. All those people that we were feeding, we'd hit with bombs. Now we're giving them food. There was real pride on the part of the crew.” Besides, he added, it gave the men something to do while waiting for orders.1 After the wartime missions, flying was a bit dull. McGovern lightened it up a bit. C. W. Cooper related one incident. ”We were over Yugoslavia when we saw a B-17 below. McGovern says, 'Hey, let's have some fun.' He put the plane in a steep dive and, just before we went sailing past the '17, he cut the number four engine (the one closest to the '17) as if to say, 'We're that much faster on three engines than you in that flying glider are on four.'”2 On the second or third flight to Trieste, McGovern had an unexpected encounter. After completing his landing, he did a U-turn and came back to the unloading area, where he pulled up, parked, and cut his engine. As theDakota Queen was unloading, another B-24 came in. ”He went to pull around me. I thought he was doing it kind of fast, a little too much of a hot rod technique. And I'll be d.a.m.ned if he didn't hit the leading edge of my wing with his wing. He just turned too sharp.”

The pilot leaned out his window. He looked at McGovern, sitting in the pilot's seat, and said, ”G.o.d, I'm awfully sorry about that. I hope I haven't damaged your wing.”

”No, I don't think so,” McGovern replied. Then he looked at the pilot again and exclaimed, ”Jim Peterson, from Mitch.e.l.l, South Dakota!” McGovern had gone to high school in Mitch.e.l.l with him, but did not know that Peterson was in the AAF. They chatted, reminisced, renewed their acquaintances.h.i.+p.

Peterson went on to become an architect and lived in Mitch.e.l.l. On every trip back to South Dakota, McGovern would get together with him.3 When he was not flying, McGovern thought about the future.

On May 30 he wrote his friend Bob Pennington (who had gotten engaged via the mails to Eleanor's twin sister, Ila; they later married), who had told McGovern that he was intent on getting his Ph.D. when he returned to the States. McGovern said he too would go after a Ph.D. ”As soon as possible if finances will permit it. I'm quite sure I can swing it. For a while I was pretty shaky about my interest in teaching. The lack of material reward just about had me in the dark for quite a while last winter. That coupled with my seeming intellectual decline had me guessing.” Bill Rounds's father had offered him ”a very attractive job with his company,” and that was tempting. ”Now though I've discovered that old driving interest to learn rather than make money is still there. I'm afraid I'm 'doomed' to the life of a student and teacher. But as you say it has a mult.i.tude of advantages to offset its more tangible disadvantages.”4 From May until mid-June, McGovern continued to fly to Trieste to deliver food, or, sometimes, he would fly over 107 Vienna, Munich, and other former targets, with the ground crew members as pa.s.sengers. The AAF wanted the mechanics to see what the planes they had worked on had done to the Germans. Ken Higgins went along, to operate the radio, but he never liked it. ”I just didn't want to be in that darned old airplane,” he explained, fearing an accident might happen.5 Cooper wanted no more, either. Like everyone else, he wanted to go home. On May 12, he wrote his fiancee that ”Mac left for Naples yesterday. He'll be sweating out a boat there for several weeks probably.” He thought he would be stuck in Italy for some time. ”There's nothing but rumors yet but when they decide to move us it will be sudden and homeward bound.” Two weeks later, he wrote again: ”Who should be here to greet me when I got back yesterday but Mac, our pilot! I thought he caught a fast liner in Naples and was in the States but they sent him back so I guess his 35 missions don't mean any more than my 32.”6 Pilot Ed Soderstrom related what happened. Four pilots of the 741st, Charles Painter, McGovern, Howard Surbeck, and Soderstrom, had finished their tours and headed for Naples to catch a boat home. But when they tried to board the troops.h.i.+p, their names were not on the orders.

Instead they had orders to return to the squadron, where they were told they were to fly their airplanes back to the States, and meanwhile they would continue to fly food to Trieste.7 On June 16, Cooper wrote, ”As Mac and I were starting home from the club last night, we had a surprise. We met a man in black slacks and a black s.h.i.+rt. He was half Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma and was just wandering around seeing the world. How he ever got here we don't know.” He was, possibly, one of the ”code-talkers,” Indians who served as radiomen with the ground troops - the Army figured, rightly, that there was no need to use coded messages when the Indians could speak to each other in their own language and the Germans would never understand them.

The following day, Cooper wrote his fiancee that while McGovern and Rounds were going to fly a B-24 back to the States the next day, he didn't expect to be on the plane. ”It makes me sad to see my old skipper, Mac, leaving and me not going with him. I hate to trust him with any other navigator and he doesn't particularly relish a long hop without me along, so it's mutual.”8 Bill Rounds had flown several of the supply missions to Trieste. In his diary on May 20, he wrote, ”I flew cargo in a B-24. I buzzed Venice. It was beautiful.” He did other things, such as collecting a h.o.a.rd of German Luger pistols. Once he talked a friend, who was a fighter pilot, into taking him to Florence in his P-47. Somehow he squeezed into the c.o.c.kpit, riding piggy-back. In Florence, the two men got drunk, went to the opera, got seats in a box, and found the music to be dull. So they began to blow up condoms, tie them at the end, and throw them down on the audience. They laughed uproariously at the sight of those ”balloons” coming down.9 McGovern, Surbeck, Soderstrom, and Painter were first on the list of pilots to fly home. On June 17, they decided that before doing so they would fly one last ”mission.” They took off in their planes, formed up, and buzzed the squadron area. Painter flew the lead s.h.i.+p, McGovern was in the number two spot, Surbeck was number three, and Soderstrom number four. They came in so close to the ground that they just missed a power line running along the road, then buzzed the headquarters of the 456th Bomb Group. They were so low their prop wash ripped the flag off the headquarters building. The 456th commanding officer was furious. He decided that Painter, McGovern, Surbeck, and Soderstrom would be the last, not the first, to leave Italy, but by the time the orders were cut it was too late.10 On June 18, McGovern took off for North Africa. Cooper, it turned out, was the navigator. Indeed all the crew, except Ashlock, were on the plane, along with a half-dozen sergeants, AAF meteorologists going to the States from Europe, then on to the Pacific. These men tossed in their duffel bags, arranging them as well as they could, and sat or lay down. They had some sandwiches and soft drinks aboard. The crew and pa.s.sengers began laughing. They were leaving Italy. The war in Europe war over.

McGovern took off. They would be flying alone. First stop, Marrakesh, North Africa. ”I hadn't had any flying like that during the war,” McGovern said. ”I was always used to having formations around, and scores of airplanes dotting the sky, and somebody shooting at us.” This time no one was shooting, it was quiet, the plane was all alone, all the engines were working without any problems. Coming into 108 Marrakesh, McGovern said to Rounds that perhaps they could pick up some food as well as gasoline.

”George,” Rounds replied,”those people haven't got any food. They're eating each other.” It was a brief stop, fortunately, as in late July it was fearfully hot.

Next stop, the Azores. But about a hundred miles from the islands, Cooper called McGovern on the intercom to say that he was lost. ”I think it's just temporary,” he remarked, ”and I'll get a fix.” But when they got to where the islands were presumed to be, there was nothing except blue water. McGovern was ”just furious.” He thought, G.o.d, we've gone through thirty-five missions and my navigator can't find the air base? How can we possibly be this unlucky. We're going into the drink out here in the Atlantic because Cooper can't find the Azores. He turned on his radio and, thankfully, raised the tower at the field. He asked what heading he should fly on, based on his present position, to get to the base.

The tower told him to turn to such-and-such a heading. He did and brought the islands into view.

”Here's this eleven-thousand-foot runway. We hadn't seen a runway like that since we left the States.”

He brought the plane down, got his tanks refilled, and took off for the next stop, Gander, Newfoundland.

McGovern got her aloft, climbed to a few thousand feet, and people began falling asleep. All the meteorologists. Indeed everyone but McGovern, the navigator, and Higgins. ”Bill Rounds conked off, just sound asleep. You could hear this heavy breathing all over the plane.”

It was a beautiful night, the air clear, a huge round moon making it almost as light as daylight. McGovern put the plane on autopilot, something he never did even once during the war, and he too fell sound asleep. Higgins put his head down on his table and fell asleep. So did Cooper. After some time, McGovern shook himself awake. The moon was beautiful, the stars s.h.i.+ning, he was the only one awake.

”I was almost overwhelmed with a sense of peace. Sheer joy. We were going home. I finally realized the war was over, and I'm going to see Eleanor, and my mother, and my little girl, then four or five months old. Everything now is going to be all right.” At Gander, as the plane was refueling, McGovern called Eleanor on the telephone. ”It was wonderful, to hear that voice again.” He didn't want to exceed three minutes on the long-distance call - too expensive - so he merely said he would be back in Mitch.e.l.l in two or three days.

”Well, I want to meet you,” Eleanor replied. ”I want us just to be the two of us when you first come in.”

He said he expected to be discharged at Fort Snelling, near Minneapolis. She said she would meet him there.

Off again, this time to Camp Miles Standish outside Boston. ”I regret to say that was the last landing of the war for me and one of the worst landings I ever made. I couldn't believe it. I leveled off and that B-24 dropped about six feet. Justbang, we hit the ground. I got on the intercom and I said, 'Well fellas, we've justhit the United States.'” No one minded the b.u.mp. There were cheers, laughter, tears.

Within two days, McGovern was at Fort Snelling. Eleanor met him. They spent the first night in a hotel in Minneapolis. Then off by train to Mitch.e.l.l, where he immediately enrolled for the fall semester.

We asked if he had brought any souvenirs home from his year in Italy. He replied that he had with him that piece of flak that had been only inches away from taking his head off, but has since misplaced or lost it. He had his uniform - which he had paid for out of his own pocket - but he gave his flight jacket to the Air Force museum in Pueblo, Colorado. He did keep his wings, dog tags, and the bracelet with his name and serial number.

As were nearly all the veterans of the war, McGovern was a good, hardworking student, eager to make up for lost time, earn his under-graduate degree and get off to graduate school to pursue his Ph.D. in 109 history. But one night, needing a break from his studies, he took Eleanor to a movie at the Paramount Theater in Mitch.e.l.l. On the newsreel, the announcer was saying, ”American bombers that were flying a few short weeks or months ago in England and Italy and the Pacific are now being collected in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, and other Western states to be salvaged.”

The newsreel showed bulldozers coming along and shoving hundreds of B-24s into a heap. One of them had a name on it,Yo-Yo. The cameraman zoomed in on it so people could see the name.

”G.o.d, I just couldn't believe it.” He had flown that plane, although he and his crew called it theDakota Queen. But it wasYo-Yo he had flown. ”I felt like just getting right up out of my seat. We nursed those bombers back as carefully as we could, and conserved the gas, and protected the oil, and watched the oil pressure and the other gauges, and tried to land them as well as we could, and we brought back the precious airplane. Now it was being turned into junk. I couldn't believe it. I reacted almost violently. I wanted to get up and tell the audience what we had just seen was sheer waste and extravagance. Made no sense at all. It really stirred my Scotch-Irish soul to see it taking place.” Within less than a year after the war, virtually all the B-24s had been salvaged. Fifty-five years after the war, there are three B-24s in museums, only one still flying. And except for those who flew them, or serviced them, they are today virtually forgotten.

At the end of our last interview, McGovern said that for more than half a century he had not thought much about his war experiences. As a politician, especially in 1972, running for president, he had done interviews with reporters on the subject, but usually for five minutes or so and never for more than a half-hour or in any depth. He said our two-week-long interview ”has forced me to dig deeply into my memory and my psyche.” And what he especially recalled was Eleanor's life with him, what traveling to all those airfields during his training had meant to her and to him, ”and what it was like having that baby when I'm 3,000 miles away and not even knowing whether Eleanor would ever see me again.”

He paused, then said, ”It's made me realize how much I love that woman. I have known for years I was in love with her, but being asked to probe into my life during the war has really brought that home to me in a different way. Shared history is a big part of being in love.”

We asked McGovern to sum up his war experience. With his answer, he spoke for every airman, every GI, every sail

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