Having presented Louis Falstein’s five New Republic articles, it’s now time to move on to Face of a Hero. To that end, it would do to present an overview of the novel, in terms of characters and events, relating these where possible to actual combat missions and aircraft losses of the 15th Air Force in general and the 450th Bomb Group – the Cottontails – in particular.
So, in three upcoming posts, I’ll present excerpts from the novel which illustrate Louis’ writing style, exemplify his thoughts and beliefs, and in one case, relate a turning point in the novel in terms of the life of Sergeant Ben Isaacs and his fellow crewmen.
And so, on to the highlights of the story…
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“And I’m not afraid.”
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Here’s an example of what an airman might fear, though in this instance with a fortunate ending!
The date? May 31, 1944.
The setting? A mission to Wiener-Neustadt, Austria.
The event? A rocket fired by a Messerschmitt-110, which perforated the starboard rudder of a 721st Bomb Squadron Liberator, B-24H 41-28827, otherwise known as “Number 34“, otherwise known as “Impatient Virgin The II“. The plane’s still-intact, white-painted rudder, clearly reveals the inspiration for the 450th Bomb Group’s appellation of “The Cottontails”.
Despite the dramatic damage, pilot Lt. Irving Weilert and his crew brought their Liberator back to Manduria, where it seems that the plane was repaired, for it reportedly crashed a few months later, on June 13, 1944. This official Army Air Force photo (52222AC / A23324) lists the men’s names as:
Front row, left to right:
Smith, Robert, Sgt., Chicago, Il.
Dobbs, Dal, T/Sgt., Copan, Ok.
Lewis, Richard, S/Sgt., Wareham, Ma.
Rizzo, Joseph, Sgt., Chicago, Il.
Rear row, left to right:
Harvey, Robert, Lt., Washington, D.C.
Weilert, Irving, Lt., Webster, N.Y. (pilot)
Gardner, John, Pvt., Albion, Mi.
Lumovich, Victor, Lt., Kenny, Mn.
Grossman, Donald, Sgt., Melrose Park, Il.
Crapps, Lorach, Lt., Miami, Fl.
A review of the National WW II Memorial registry reveals that all ten men survived the war.
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Back to the novel…
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Ben Isaacs’ fellow crew members:
Original Pilot: Albert Pennington, Jr., otherwise known as “Big Wheel”. From Boston, he’s married to Myrtle. Upon return from a mission to Ploesti, Rumania, he will be removed from the crew, due to breaking formation to provide escort to a straggling, damaged B-24.
Replacement Pilot: George “Casey Jones” Peterson (otherwise known as “Big Swede”), a truck driver from Minnesota.
Co-Pilot: Chester Kowalski, from Hamtramck, Michigan. In civilian life he sells plastics on Joseph Campan Street, Detroit. While stationed at Mandia, he’s having an affair with Miss Nellie Bullwinkle, Red Cross director in that city. She’s twice his age.
Navigator: Andy Kyle, from Opal, Missouri. (In our world, an unincorporated community in Lawrence County.) His wife is Opal.
Bombardier: Dick Martin, from New York. (State or city is unspecified.) Prior to the war he was a Civil Service employee.
Flight Engineer: Jack Dula, a.k.a. “Jack Dooley”, from Pittsburgh.
Radio Operator: Billy Poat.
Nose Gunner: Mel Ginn, a rancher from “Ozone” (in our world, Ozona), Texas.
(Original) Ball-Turret Gunner: Cosmo “Mouse” Fidanza, from Cleveland, who has family in Italy
(Replacement) Ball-Turret Gunner: Charley Couch, a gold prospector from Arizona. He has a predilection for no-limit poker, wears false teeth, and despises his wife. His main interest in life is reading Studs Lonigan.
Right Waist Gunner: Leo Trent, from Hollywood. Twenty-three years old, he sells perfume in civilian life. His twenty-one year old brother is a Marine Corps ace in the Pacific Theater.
Other dramatis personae
Master Sergeant Arthur Sawyer: In charge of the Squadron orderly room.
Major Paterno: A Squadron ground officer.
The anonymous crew chief of “Violent Virgin”, one of the B-24s in which Ben’s crew flies combat missions. This man is a Jew. A question he poses to Ben Isaacs marks a moment upon which Ben considers the symbolism of being a Jew in the context of flying combat missions over German-occupied Europe, and – in case of his capture by the Germans – the implications of being a prisoner of war, and identified as a Jew. This is not the only point in the novel at which Ben ponders his identity.
Three B-24 Liberators
Besides “Violent Virgin” and “Flying Foxhole” (the latter being the first Liberator which the Pennington crew flies after their arrival in Italy), Ben’s crew also flew combat missions in “Dinah Might“.
Ben Isaacs’ combat missions
#1: Wiener-Neustadt, Austria, over which the crew witness a B-24 being shot down by flak.
#2: Turno-Severin, Romania
#3: Ploesti, Romania, on June 6, 1944. Lt. C. Maxwell’s B-24 is missing. Though in “real life” the 15th Air Force lost 12 B-24s (and 1 B-17) on this date, none of the Liberators were from the 450th Bomb Group.
#4: Munich, Germany. Cosmo is wounded in the left leg by flak, and hospitalized at the 53rd Field Hospital.
#5: Ploesti once again. A B-24 is shot down by enemy planes, and the B-24 “Wolf Pack”, piloted by Lt. Wensley, drops out of formation over Yugoslavia and is abandoned by her crew.
A gap in the account follows, during which the crew completes nine more missions.
By July of 1944, the crew has also flown missions to:
Brod, Yugoslavia
Belgrade, Yugoslavia
Sofia, Bulgaria
Salonika, Greece
Budapest, Hungary
Miskolz, Hungary
Constanza, Romania
Pitesti, Romania
Giurgiu, Romania
Osijek, Yugoslavia
Zagreb, Yugoslavia
Ploesti, Romania
Events during subsequent missions
During the crew’s 27th mission, a “milk run” to Zagreb, Cosmo is killed in his turret by flak. He is buried at a U.S. military cemetery at Bari. His replacement is Charley Couch.
On a mission to Regensburg, Germany (did the 15th Air Force actually fly missions to that city? – I don’t think so!) the Liberator “Betty Lou” crashes into the Adriatic Sea, killing all ten crewmen.
Then, another B-24 is lost, but in very different circumstances: A bomber crashes on take-off while en-route to Naples, with the loss of a crew who’d completed all their missions “without a scratch on the plane”.
On a mission to Brux, Czechoslovakia, the crews of Vern Matchek (of Croatian ancestry, from Scranton, Pennsylvania), and Danny Smith are missing.
By now, Lt. Pennington has been removed from his crew to be replaced by George “Casey Jones” Peterson. With his departure Lt. Kowalski also leaves the crew, and is replaced by Oscar Schiller, whose family ancestry is from Vienna.
A crash-landing
Things get much, much worse.
On return from a mission to Vienna, “Dooley” miscalculates the quantity of fuel remaining in their plane. Pilots Peterson and Schiller, believing their aircraft incapable of safely reaching Mandia, crash-land their bomber 6 miles from their base. The result? Ben, Trent, Poat, and Couch, all in the aircraft’s waist, are stunned, but survive. Peterson, Schiller, Kyle, Martin, and Dooley, trapped in the nose of the aircraft, are freed from the wreck by two Italian laborers. But, two of the crew – Peterson and Ginn – are very badly hurt and have to be extricated and carried away from the smashed plane.
Ben, Peterson, Ginn, and Dooley are hospitalized. Peterson’s arms are broken, and his legs are so badly injured as to eventually necessitate amputation. Mell Ginn is hurt worse of all. Occasionally conversing with Dooley and Ben, sometimes to talking to no one-in-particular, sedated, passing in and out of consciousness, he succumbs to internal injuries before the next morning.
But, as Ben observes of Dooley, in anguish and guilt over Mell’s suffering, “Dooley could stand it no longer and wept like a little child. Only a man does not weep like a child. A man’s sobs are the sounds of anguish and despair. They come to the surface with the difficulty of dry heaves,”
A civilian diversion:
Then, an interregnum: Ben visits a refugee camp, in a passage presaged by Lou Falstein’s article “From a Flier’s Notebook” in The New Republic of August 20, 1945.
A return to combat
On the day after Ben’s return, Dick Martin flies with a new crew, and their plane is shot down over Bucharest. Later, Schiller is assigned to a newly-arrived crew.
The Tigertails commence missions to Southern France a few days prior to Operation Dragoon, which begins on August 15, 1944.
On August 14, aboard a B-24 piloted by Lt. Fitzsimmons, Andy Kyle cracks up and, while witnessing a fuel leak from the plane’s #4 (outer starboard) engine, attempts to parachute from the waist window. Restrained by the crew, he is grounded by a medical board.
The same and worse for Billy Poat: He jumps out a waist window while flying with a new crew over Vienna, after previously having requested to be grounded. This has terrible effects on Andy Kyle: Upon hearing this news, he goes berserk. Physically restrained and bodily placed on a plane going to Naples, he is sent back to the Zone of the Interior.
Ben’s original crew having thus fallen apart, he’s relegated to the position of “extra gunner”, to be assigned to fill in on other crews as needed.
On a mission to Vienna aboard Lt. Mathis’ Liberator, Ben witnesses a burst of flak shear the two port engines from Pennington’s plane, and then clearly observes Pennington himself bailing out. Lt. Smiley’s B-24 collides with another plane, and both aircraft explode. Worse: The ball turret gunner on Lt. Mathis’ plane commits suicide with a .45 pistol.
The final toll of the mission is “100 men missing from Group.”
Though in the novel there are no missions between October 15 and mid-November, in reality, the 450th Bomb Group completed nineteen missions between October 16, 1944, and November 15, 1944. Roughly during this interval, Ben suffers frost-bite in both feet.
By now, the only survivors of the ten members of Ben’s original crew – at least, those physically and mentally intact and remaining with him at Mandia – are Jack Dula and Charley Couch.
Ben’s 40th mission is to Munich, Germany.
Ben’s war is complete…
On December 16, 1944, he flies his final mission with the crew of Lt. Short, to Innsbruck, Austria. This date accords with the 450th Bomb Group’s history, which denotes the December 16 mission, to that city, as having been the Group’s 194th mission.
…and the novel concludes
“I felt suddenly as if my whole body was arrayed against me,
hurling its war legacy of pains at me, demanding submission.
And I retorted with numb lips,
“It is too late.
There comes an end.
This is the end.
And I’m not afraid.”
***
I remember that morning.
I remember how out of the blackness of the receding Alps three aircraft rose in our direction.
And suddenly I awakened from my numbness and my lips whispered over the interphone:
“Three unidentified aircraft at six o’clock high!”
I raised my guns and suddenly I dropped them and a cry of joy burst forth from me.
“They’re ours! P-38s!” I cried.
I remember that morning and the three pursuit ships which were the loveliest of all sights.
I lowered my guns and we lost some altitude and I felt warmer.
And the sun came streaming in through the Plexiglass and I began to cry.
How splendid were the mountains receding along the Po!
And how beautiful the earth!
I cried for the deep serenity inside me,
a serenity which made me forget,
momentarily that the war was not over and tomorrow men would be dying.
Yes, I remember that morning and the tears and the sorrow, and finally the calmness.
Some Books to Refer to…
Falstein, Louis, Face of a Hero, Harcourt, Brace & Company, New York, N.Y., 1950
Falstein, Louis, Face of a Hero, Pocket Books, Inc., New York, N.Y., 1951
Falstein, Louis, Face of a Hero, Steerforth Press, South Royalton, Vt., 1999
Rust, Kenn C., Fifteenth Air Force Story, Historical Aviation Album, Temple City, Ca., 1976