All Shall Be Well

I

 

How long does it take the fountain of blood from a decapitated human body to slow and then stop at an altitude of 28,000 feet, where the temperature is 40 degrees below zero? My father, who thought of becoming a physician but never did, learned the answer to this question. It was collateral learning. He completed 21 missions during World War II as a voice intercept operator, flying on U.S. Army Eighth Air Force bombers out of the county of Norfolk in England. My son, who is an emergency room physician, told me that he had never seen such a thing, although he suspected that the normal principles of coagulation would simply not apply under such circumstances. My son routinely sees a variety of trauma. Even so, I found it difficult to ask him to imagine a scenario so extreme.

In the year 1373, a woman we have come to know as Julian (or Juliana) of Norwich, also in the county of Norfolk, recorded an account of a religious vision she experienced. Referring to the third-century Roman martyr Saint Cecilia, she writes at one point, “I understood that she received three sword wounds in the neck from which she slowly and painfully died. Moved by this I conceived a great longing, praying our Lord God that he would grant me three wounds in my lifetime.” Julian’s three wounds are those of contrition for her own sins, compassion for others, and “an earnest longing for God.” The copilot on my father’s B-24 Liberator was beheaded by a 20mm cannon shell fired by a German fighter in a direct attack, a more efficient decapitation than that of Saint Cecilia, though lacking the metaphorical possibilities discovered by Julian.

In her bedridden vision of the crucified Christ, Dame Julian, as she was also known, “saw the red blood trickling down from under the crown of thorns, all hot, freshly, plentifully and vividly.” And: “I saw the blood coming from weals from the scourging, and in my vision it ran so abundantly that … if … it had been natural blood, the whole bed would have been blood-soaked and even the floor around.” Julian explains that blood, rather than water, is the medium with which to wash away sin, “for there is no liquid created which [God] likes to give us so much, for it is so plentiful and it shares our nature.” But I can only imagine the horror with which my father watched the human fountain in the cockpit. Julian was certain that she was going to die when she received her vision, and my father must have been sure that he would, too. I think he was an agnostic, though he was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church at the age of 47, which suggests a belated and deliberate longing for God. I’m not sure he had ever heard of Julian of Norwich.

Dame Julian was granted her vision, and my father was granted his. I do not question her account, which exists in Middle and modern English (the lines above are quoted from Elizabeth Spearing’s translation). But what of my father’s vision? I do not remember that he ever spoke of it directly, and he never wrote it down. Yet apparently, he woke up screaming from nightmares for some years after the war, and my mother, who took a subversive delight in making fun of my father’s stiff upper lip, told me about those incidents. The thing is that my father was not an inventor of narratives. He did not have that aspect of imagination, though he enjoyed the stories of others. In the crowded split-level seating arrangement on a B-24, the pilot and copilot sat side by side on the cockpit flight deck. Behind them, sitting sideways, were the flight engineer and the radio operator. Below them, in the nose of the plane, were the navigator and the bombardier. If the copilot was killed in this way, how did my father and the other crew members survive to not tell the tale? The family narrative has always been very specific about the casualty of the copilot, though it is possible that a different crew member was beheaded. Presumably the pilot survived and somehow nursed the shattered plane back to the base. Such miracles did happen.

 

II

 

I am riding the Greater Anglia Rail from London’s Liverpool Street Station to Norwich. It occurs to me that the speed of the train, as it hurtles between hedgerows, may be approximately that of a B-24 at takeoff. By late 1944, more than 4,000 flights a day were taking off and landing at Norfolk airfields, and with this density of aircraft, collisions occurred: 1,458 B-24s were lost in action. By comparison, 1,079 German fighters were reportedly downed by American gunners in the Second Air Division in Norfolk. From the point of view of aircraft lost or flyers killed (the bombers had a crew of 10, the fighters often of one), this tradeoff does not seem worthwhile. Seven thousand Americans died.

But what does all this information matter? I arrive in Norwich, and the broken flint nodules mortared into the buildings and churches 800 years ago turn their sharp cloudy lenses toward me, like an electronic device that has not yet been awakened to gather information. The flints, thousands of them, must have watched Dame Julian 650 years ago, and they would have also looked at my father 80 years ago when, on leave from the bomber base at Old Buckenham, he walked the streets of Norwich in his trim Ike jacket with its new staff sergeant’s stripes, headed to the cinema with a friend.

The visionary lived in a hermit’s cell attached to the Church of Saint Julian, from which she took her name. It is said that Norwich had a church for every Sunday of the year and a pub for every day of the year, but Hitler’s so-called Baedeker raids of 1942 took care of that. Named after the celebrated guidebooks of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, these retaliatory attacks targeted cities listed in the books for their cultural or historical significance: Norwich, Bath, Canterbury, Exeter, and York. One of those attacks destroyed the church of Saint Julian, the hermit’s cell having been lost to the English Reformation long before. The Germans called these Terrorangriffe, or terror attacks, a phrase with which we are now quite familiar.

I am staying with friends in Norwich, and their apartment balcony looks out on the flint wall of an ancient and deconsecrated church now being used as a skateboarding center. From the shelf in my room, I pull down Vera Brittain’s book England’s Hour, chronicling the German Blitz on London in 1940. Brittain identified a crucial difference between the First World War and the Second:

The battle is less a struggle between men, than a conflict between methods of technical production, and a clash of machines directed by a small number of controlling minds. … The Front is everywhere, owing to the moral inability, shared by every Great Power, to refrain from the manufacture and use of the bombing aeroplane. … All the towns, villages and hamlets of every combatant country are potential battlefields.

The phrase “technical production” has a depersonalized, Walter Benjamin feel to it; but in articulating the concept of civilian war—of total war—Brittain is providing an early description of the terror attacks. And the idea of direction by “a small number of controlling minds” suggests both the bureaucratization of that total war and an abandonment of humankind, by the mind of God, to the ruthless cruelty of the human mind.

 

III

 

From a gabion beside the River Wensum in Norwich, I pry loose a flint that fits my hand perfectly. One end has cracked off, revealing a mottled face; the buff sides of the nodule make the object look like an Italian salami with one end cut off, the marbled meat and fat visible. (Later, it will sit on my desk and watch me while I write.) What do I see in its small face? As usual, I am looking for the image of my enigmatic father, a gentle man who experienced violence in wartime and who loved me. He would be 104 if he were alive today, but he has been dead for 36 years. With this visit to Norfolk, I am trying to go the whole nine yards in understanding his experience of the war. Do you know where that expression comes from? No one is sure, but one theory is that it refers to the length of a belt of machine gun ammunition on military planes during World War II.

I am not here, particularly, to gather more information. I already have too much information. For a long time, I have been accumulating information, like piling flints into the steel cage of a gabion to shape the course of an unpredictable river. But like history, like narrative itself, the river is not easy to control. I have tended to think that information answers questions definitively and validates writing itself, but neither of these things is necessarily true. The darkened face of my broken flint will give me no more information. I must work with the information I have. It has no virtue in itself—other than how it makes possible an understanding of myself and those around me.

Surely what my father saw that day at 25,000 feet was sin and suffering. Or would Julian say that all the slowing blood was not suffering but sacrament, a unique solvent against sin, as it soaked her bed and her floor? Julian laughs at a revelation about the Devil because “everything that God allows him to do turns into joy for us and into pain and shame for him … for God holds fast all the Devil’s power in his own hand.” The Devil’s power sits in God’s hand just as the broken flint sits in my hand. And Julian laughs. “But,” she adds, “I did not see Christ laughing.” For Julian, everything may fit into the human palm, including “a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut,” very round, which Julian realizes is “all that is made.” But the created world is not the point: That is why it fits into the palm. We should be thinking about the Creator, not the created. I have always thought that my proper quarry was something that could not be held in the palm of my hand, though it might be intuited by the things of this world. But what is my proper quarry?

I said my father was a gentle man. I would like to pause at that. He would have agreed with the Second Air Division officer who wrote that, during World War II,

much of life was communal, yet each man, by some sort of trial and error … found for himself a manner of life that was distinct. Each had a pattern of work and recreation. English friends, places he went on leave and furlough … all the ways of living that made it a fuller existence.

The population on a bomber station was between 2,000 and 3,000 men. My father lived in a Nissen hut with 13 other men whom he praised as “friendly, generous and genial,” with “a great spirit of working together,” but only after he had separated himself from “some of the more unbearable (and, as it happens, Jewish) fellows in our original crew.” His need to include that parenthesis in a letter to his mother, dated October 3, 1944, reveals that the camaraderie of the Army did not abolish his prejudices, but rather confirmed them.

My father fitted out his corner of the hut with bookshelves and accumulated a library of 30 volumes, including some he found in used bookshops in the villages around the base and some that he requested be sent to him from the States. He did not play poker; he was a reader instead. He had subscriptions to Art News, The New Canaan Advertiser, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Reader’s Digest, Time, and U.S. News. He lent the others in the hut a novel called The Cross and the Arrow by Albert Maltz, about German fascism. He lent them Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge and volumes of Sad Sack cartoons by George Baker. By occupying the corner of the hut farthest from the warmth of the stove, he earned a bit of space for his library and for his own thoughts. Winter mornings he awoke to find the curved steel walls starred with frost from his breath. A florist from New Haven, Indiana, named Ladenburger was one of his friends. And so was Rudy Beyer, who may have been a jeweler, and from whom he was inseparable. And Roy Stohldrier from Bronxville and Rutgers. And Herman Koss, the concertmaster of the Milwaukee Symphony, who was persuaded by the other soldiers to perform one evening in the hut for almost an hour, and then played “lighter tunes” with a guitarist.

As to English friends, when my father first arrived in England in August 1944, he was billeted with Walter and Rita English, at #1 North View, Loose Road, in Maidstone, Kent. They had married during the Battle of Britain, and they had a two-and-a-half-year-old and a 10-month-old. Even when he was stationed in Norfolk, he returned to visit them whenever he had a chance. A 48-hour pass gave him enough time.

As a little booklet distributed to American soldiers arriving in the United Kingdom reminded them,

You are coming to Britain from a country where your home is still safe, food is still plentiful, and lights are still burning. … If you are invited into a British home and the host exhorts you to “eat up there’s plenty on the table,” go easy. It may be the family’s rations for a whole week spread out to show their hospitality.

And the subject of food did cause my father anxiety. He had lived on the Englishes’ civilian rations while billeted with them, remarking, on September 22, 1944, that

the diet was doubtless adequate … but it was not too varied, and meals were not remarkable for their quantity. By contrast, the food back here [at the base] is all the more amazing. Listen to this dinner of two nights ago: baked ham with raisin sauce; mashed potatoes with gravy; boiled carrots, mashed parsnips & sliced fresh cucumbers; canned pears for dessert; bread, butter, and jam; and coffee and/or lemonade!

A letter of invitation from the Englishes allowed him to draw Army rations that he took to them. As he wrote on November 8, 1944, “We stayed up until 1:30, talking about this and that, drinking beer, and eating cheese sandwiches.” Eggs were particularly rare, and a moment of tension arose in March 1945, when Rita insisted on preparing him an egg, “perfect, sunny-side up,” for breakfast, and rather than hurt her feelings by refusing, he ate it. My father even enlisted his mother and his wife back in the States in sending gifts to Rita, since so little was available in English shops. She was particularly happy with a clear comb. This was an environment in which my father flourished, in the company of a small number of friends.

 

IV

 

For furloughs in London, my father may have ridden to Liverpool Street Station on the same line I took to Norwich. Many years after the war, he told me about the German V-1 and V-2 rocket attacks on London. The V-1 rockets came first. Their German name translates as “Vengeance weapon,” and they were also called Hellhound or Doodlebug or Buzz Bomb because of the sound they made. But my father described it instead as a kind of “choughing” overhead. You needed to worry only when that choughing cut out because then the rocket would fall like a brick and explode.

Before arriving in Norwich, I stayed with a friend for a week in East London, in Mile End, and every morning on my run, I passed a blue plaque on Grove Road where the first V-1 rocket fell on June 13, 1944 (it killed eight civilians). But my father also described the V-2 rocket attacks on London, which began in September 1944 and were even more frightening because these were ballistic missiles traveling at three times the speed of sound, and there was no defense against them. You would be dead before you even heard the sound of an explosion that left a crater 66 feet wide and 26 feet deep. In November 1944, my father wrote,

I did go by the Guards’ Chapel. You will remember that it was hit by a buzz-bomb, and … it was pretty well demolished. The streets are full of bustle and activity, however, and as far as its life is concerned, the city shows few evidences of the beating it has taken. That is not, of course, true of its appearance.

Is this so different from the devastation my gentle father, with his German surname and his German ancestors and his wartime buddies with their German surnames, was dealing out from the air to the German cities? My father was interested in but not swayed by such questions of moral equivalence: There was a war to be won, as far as he was concerned.

And he seems to have had a road map for surviving it—or at least a motto, which was, “Keep your head down, and never volunteer.” After his last mission, to the city of Rechlin in Germany, on April 10, 1945, when it was clear that he would not be flying over Europe again, my father cut out from the lining of his flight suit (that was the story) two double-sided escape maps printed on rayon that would have helped him if he had been shot down. Eventually my father had these maps framed under heavy glass. But no one in my family ever remembers having seen them on a wall: not in his office, where his course through the corporate hierarchy was marked by caution and equivocation, and not at home, where his wife hectored him and his mother expressed rage and disappointment at his younger brother’s having died in the Pacific theater when my father had come home alive. I have had the maps reframed, and they are now in the front hall of my house. They are extremely detailed and cover a good deal of Europe.

To look at a map is almost always to imagine a course. Yet my father did not believe he had the right to invent a narrative. And so, to some extent, he did not fully control his life. As a writer, I have always wanted to invent narratives, but I also learned long ago to shelter behind information and behind the voices of others, rather than risk contention and debate. This allowed me plausible deniability for an unwise opinion or an inaccurate statement: It was not I who had said it. At the moment, though, information is remaining stubbornly external for me, like the contents of the unattended little museum I visit in a Nissen hut on the site of the Old Buckenham airbase. Once, the gods walked here, though not the God of Dame Julian. Walter Matthau, eight months younger than my father and like him a staff sergeant, was a radioman-gunner at Old Buckenham before he began his acting career. Jimmy Stewart, like my father an Ivy League graduate, was a pilot and a major, already established as a film star. There is a photograph of Stewart, possibly just back from a mission, standing in front of a plane. He looks exhausted, the diamond of concentration visible in the furrows of his brow, his hair brilliantined and swept back, making a kind of planar surface like the angled bills of the caps worn by the enlisted men beside him. He is saying something: I can hear his drawl across the years. Maybe he is saying that all manner of things shall be well.

But now the museum is full of decaying objects: uniforms and flak helmets and flying suits, radios and life rafts and survival kits with long-expired rations and crumbling Hershey’s chocolate bars. It is all like Crusoe’s pitted knife blade from the desert island, the one he prayed would not break, after his return to civilization. Each totemic object has lost its power and seems merely forlorn. This place will not answer any questions, though the earnest wall labels are full of information. Between 1939 and 1945, 444 military airfields were built in the British Isles. For a period in 1942, a new military airfield opened every three days. It was the greatest engineering project in British history. By the end of the war, there were 37 military airfields in the single county of Norfolk. Now at Wendling, where my father served briefly in the 392nd Bombardment Group, there are sheds for raising turkeys on what was the Americans’ main runway. A British writer suggested without apparent irony that there was some symbolism to this fact.

Here at Old Buckenham, I step outside into the June air. Everything is very green. A memorial stone in the shape of a B-24’s vertical stabilizer provides more information: 259 missions flown by the four squadrons (732, 733, 734, 735) of the 453rd Bombardment Group; 15,804 tons of bombs dropped; 58 aircraft missing in action; 366 aircrew killed. My father did not generally consider himself lucky, but he was lucky to arrive here near the end of the war, when the German Luftwaffe had largely been broken. When the 466th Bomb Group began operations at the start of 1944, Eighth Air Force losses were running at 25 percent, and although 35 missions were required to complete a tour, the average operational life of an aircrew was 15 missions. My father’s group, the 453rd, was a lucky group, even if Dame Julian asserts that “nothing happens by accident or luck, but by the eternal providence of God’s wisdom.” Perhaps she is dismissing narrative, or perhaps she is suggesting a different lens by which to interpret narrative. Staff Sergeant Thomas Neilan, a nose turret gunner with the 733rd Bomb Squadron, which was the luckiest squadron in that lucky group, said that

the accountants of war had no keys on their calculators for adding up the cost of fear or of seeing a best friend’s ship go down in flames or the weird feeling produced of joy mixed with guilt on returning unharmed from a mission from which so many others would not. … Aerial combat was probably the most frightening warfare of all, we could not hide, we were simply marooned aloft in an aluminum coffin that seemed to creep as slowly across the hostile sky as a fly across the wall, vulnerable to all who wanted to shoot us down.

My father was not lucky to fly in a B-24 Liberator, known as the “flying coffin,” but he was lucky to survive his 21 missions, and lucky to avoid being redeployed to the Pacific.

One story my father did tell me long after the war was of his passing through midtown Manhattan in July 1945. He had not yet been discharged from the Army. Looking up, he saw a B-25 bomber sticking out of the north side of the Empire State Building between the 78th and 79th floors. Lieutenant Colonel William Smith, a veteran pilot on a milk run, had become lost in a heavy fog. And though he had survived 100 combat missions over Germany, this was the way it ended for him (as it did for two other crewmen and 11 people inside the building), leaving a crude phallic vision for my father, who was returning to his young marriage, and a warning about the whimsicality of “the eternal providence of God’s wisdom.”

Was my father lucky to have been given his vision at 28,000 feet, as well? Such a thing would be sufficient to bend a life’s trajectory. But it is not for me to say, or ever to wish such a vision upon him. Perhaps, in his quiet way, my father’s baptism and confirmation in the Episcopal Church 22 years later was a response to that vision and to his deliverance from the war. My father lived an honorable life. He fulfilled his responsibilities to those who depended on him. Without question, he was a loving man, but there was something unknowable and untouchable about him. The optic nerve makes a blind spot at the back of the eye, though all vision depends on it.

 

V

 

The enduring truth of Old Buckenham may be the fact of flight itself, as a number of small Cessnas rev up their puny strength one after another and then launch themselves from the surviving main runway, wobbling only slightly as they become airborne. Little of Old Buckenham seems to remain, but then the buildings and structures were widely dispersed because of the possibility of aerial attack. My father was so pleased to find a Raleigh Sports Model bicycle for £8.19 while on a pass to Norwich in October 1944, reducing the amount of walking he had to do on the base. But within days, or weeks, the Army, with its unfathomable logic, forbade civilian bikes on the base, and his new acquisition went into storage until almost the end of the war.

The fact of flight: I stayed in a Norfolk village called Snettisham on June 6, the 80th anniversary of D-Day, and audible in a sky of broken cloud was the tearing sound of fighter planes, perhaps from the RAF Holbeach Weapons Testing Range nearby. Snettisham is on that great shallow inlet of the North Sea called the Wash, and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds operates a sanctuary there. Aggregate for building all those runways during the war was quarried from just behind the beach; filled with rainwater, a series of narrow lakes now attracts migratory birds. But I was there between seasons. Instead of being mined against invasion as it was in my father’s time, the beach was off limits during my visit, to protect the nests of the ringed plover, the oystercatcher, and the little tern.

My father numbered the letters he wrote to his mother during the time he was in England. There are 55 in all. The first is dated August 9, 1944, and the last is dated July 10, 1945. But the very last piece of correspondence is a postcard of the Civil War monument and Congregational church in the village of Norfolk, Connecticut. It is undated, but the postmark is sometime in August 1945. My father is safely home and discharged from the Army; he and his wife, Barbara, whom he knew as Beasy, may be celebrating their honeymoon three years late. My father writes, “I’m half asleep after tangling with another of Beasy’s blueberry pies. (I picked the berries this morning!) … Everything is perfect.”

Julian of Norwich is often credited with saying that “all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” but it is Jesus who says this to her. My father tried to lead his life as though all would be well, with his books and his magazines, his packages of food, his bicycle and his friendships. He did this in spite of, or because of, the vision he was given. But Julian has one more thing to say: “It is God’s wish that we should know in general terms that all shall be well; but it is not God’s wish that we should understand it now, except as much as is suitable for us at the present time.”

All shall be well, yes: but not now, not in this life. My father tried to find what was suitable.