A Fate Unknown
War, whether in terms of international politics, economics, strategy, tactics, or the actual conduct of military campaigns, is by nature a collage of uncertainties. However, there is another uncertainty inherent to war: one that can occur within the immediacy of battle, or, persist after (sometimes, long after) a conflict has actually ended, and the attention of men and nations has moved on.
That uncertainty revolves around the fate of those who have not returned:
The missing.
Ever since the long-forgotten advent of organized human conflict, it has been inevitable that the fate of each and every soldier who fails to return from battle cannot be resolved with certainty. This can be attributable to a number of factors: The physical setting of a battle; the circumstances – specifically, the nature of the weapons, ordnance, craft, or vehicles – by which a soldier has become a casualty and “missing”; the geographic remoteness of a clash with the enemy; the loss of military records, or, the inability to actually record the history of a battle in the first place; the faulty and fleeting memory of witnesses to a soldier’s fate, or, the not infrequent absence of such witnesses – whether immediate or long surviving – to begin with; a society’s desire – from the combined effects of psychological and spiritual exhaustion, economic prosperity, and simple apathy – to put the memory of the past to rest. *
All these factors – and more – in varying combination and degree, can stand in the way of definitively establishing the ultimate fate of a missing soldier.
In terms of the historical memory of the American public, the central conflict in terms of collective memory – though that memory is steadily withering in the face of time, cultural change, and the oxymoron of “information technology” – during recent decades has been the Second World War. Perhaps the collective memory of that war among the other Allied nations that participated in the conflict is undergoing a parallel transformation – albeit for factors unique to those societies.
In terms of American servicemen Missing in Action (MIA) from the Second World War, Wikipedia’s entry states, “As of October 9, 2020, according to the U.S. Department of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, there were still 72,562 U.S. servicemen and civilians still unaccounted for from World War II.” State by state lists of the names of these men can be found at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.
Though I don’t have precise figures at the moment, a significant proportion of these missing servicemen is, I think, comprised of naval personnel and aviators who were lost at sea, the chances of their physical recovery and identification probably being miniscule. Other MIAs, however – army ground forces personnel as well as aviators – lost, or presumed to have been lost among the islands of the Pacific, Continental Europe, and perhaps other theatres of war, may in time still be found.
One such man was Major Milton Joel of Richmond, Virginia. A P-38 Lightning fighter pilot and squadron commander in the United States Army Air Force – specifically the English-based 8th Air Force – he was lost during aerial combat with the German Luftwaffe during a bomber escort mission over northern Europe on Monday, November 29, 1943.
He was one of some 750 Jews who served as fighter pilots during the Second World War. Roughly 500 of these men were Americans – primarily in the United States Army Air Force, and secondarily in the Navy and Marine Corps – while some 250 others served in the air arms of other Allied nations. Since these numbers are mainly based upon documents pertaining to casualties, per se, there were doubtless others whose names are unknown.
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Major Joel has never been found.
This series of posts presents his story.
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Milton Joel as a Lieutenant or Captain, during his service with the 27th Fighter Squadron of the 1st Fighter Group.
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A Lockheed P-38 Lighting (Same aircraft in both pictures.)
The aircraft illustrated in this pair of photos (P-38H 42-67079) was not Major Joel’s “personal” fighter plane. Rather, these are excellent representative images, in that they very clearly display the P-38’s twin-engine / twin-boom / twin-tail / central fuselage pod / in-line-engine configuration, the design of which was a remarkably successful blend of function, performance, and dare I say? (yes, absolutely I say!) aesthetics.
The black & white picture is from the P-38 Lightning History at TheWorldWars, while the color photo is a postcard (remember those?) that was manufactured some decades back by “John Fry Productions” of San Diego, California, the actual card having been printed by MCA Color Graphics of Kansas City. The postcard’s very simple caption states “LOCKHEED P-38H “Lightning” (Lockheed Photo)”, thus verifying the origin of the image.
On close examination of the pictures, you can see that the pictures display the P-38 from slightly different angles. The relative position of the mountain (in the black and white image, you cans see that it’s receded behind the plane) shows that upper (color) image was taken first, followed by the black & white photo.
The absence of any unit insignia on this aircraft – implying that it had not yet been transferred to the Army Air Force – and the mountainous terrain over which the plane’s flying, suggest that the photographs were taken during a post-manufacture test / publicity flight over southern California. The light-colored (red) surround to the national insignia verifies that the pair of images were taken between late June and mid-August of 1943.
P-38H 42-67079 would eventually be assigned to the 338th Fighter Squadron of the 55th Fighter Group, where it would bear the squadron code “CL * T” of the 338th Fighter Squadron, coincidentally a brother squadron of the 55th Fighter Group’s 38th Fighter Squadron, the latter having been commanded by Major Joel. Given the absence of a Missing Air Crew Report, or, Accident Report for “CL * T”, the warplane presumably survived its combat missions, probably having eventually been salvaged for parts, or scrapped. Its components – aluminum and steel; pleixglass and bakelite; and more – perhaps in a small way eventually became became part of the postwar world.
And, even if the memory of that “world” and the era before it is now vanishing, we can still remember it. At least, for a little while.
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*And now, as we’re experiencing in the “West” during the early decades of the twenty-first century, an antinomian, secularized religious frenzy, paralleling the millennarian social unrest that persisted in central and western Europe from the eleventh through the sixteenth centuries, as described in great depth and tremendous insight by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium. The ultimate outcome of this phenomenon (it’s far more than a mere phenomenon!) – partially arising from the intellectual, social, and physical detachment from “reality” of much of the atrophying Wests’s secularized, credentialed, “professional” classes – is thus far unknown.
Well, for the moment.
Now, that could be the subject of interesting post! But, since that topic continues to be addressed elsewhere, back to the subject at hand…