Month: September 2015

Dreams and Nightmares

World War II was big. It’s not something you can, say, take this arm and wrap around this way, and that arm and wrap around that way, so that your fingers entwine and suddenly you’ve wrapped your arms around World War II. This was way bigger than that. This was The Great War. As awful and staggering as World War I was in terms of human suffering and human stupidity, well, World War II raised the stakes and won the pot.

Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Eighth Air Force by Robert Matzen

Jim Stewart rises to the rank of 1st lt. in the Army Air Corps, July 1942.

I haven’t been around much lately and I apologize, but I’ve been learning a whole lot about WWII and the men who fought it. I know that women fought it as well, but I’ve interviewed only men, 90-plus in chronology. In particular, I’ve been working with three guys who a) were in Jimmy Stewart’s squadron of the 445th Bomb Group and with him from Boise, Idaho on; b) were shipped to UK with him; c) flew missions with him; d) were shot down over Germany; e) survived German prison camps as POWs; and f) likewise survived the Führer’s order to execute all POWs as Germany was about to lose the war. These guys live on today after enduring all that, with Jimmy Stewart (who wasn’t shot down and never parachuted out of a burning plane only to be roughed up by Germans on the ground) gone 18 years.

I think my next book could be called, How to Survive to a Ripe Old Age, and I could base it on these three fit and active, terrific guys who are full of wisdom after getting out of World War II in one piece and thriving for 70 years beyond.

I was just thinking today about the exercise of writing Fireball versus what it’s like to write the new one, which is called Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Eighth Air Force. To me it feels like Fireball was a suit of clothes that I could wear in comfort—most of the time, except for the gut-wrenching parts. But the new one is confining and I can’t breathe because there’s so much to learn. There are the Nazi aggressions; there’s the Battle of Britain; there’s Pearl Harbor; there’s the war in the Pacific; there’s the air war over France and Germany; there’s the ground war in Africa, Italy, and Europe; there’s the Holocaust; there’s the ground war in the Pacific; there’s the battle for Berlin; and there’s the battle for Japan. How do you boil that down into one book, even when most of it’s background?

For the past week or so I’ve been writing the manuscript furiously and also looking around for topics for my blog. I toyed with the idea of republishing something from my old Errol & Olivia blog, but I couldn’t find anything suitable. I looked around for something from TCM to catch my eye and comment on. Again, nothing.

I’m stuck in 1944, people! You’ve gotta get me out of here! Actually, I have to get myself out of this one. I’m in the middle of rubble, starvation, heroism, and sacrifice on a global scale, and it brings me to tears sometimes. I don’t know how as a species we got where we got in 1944, but evidence says that, yes, humanity reached a low point, and a high point, right about then.

The interesting thing is, Jim Stewart and his colleagues of the Eighth Air Force fought a war to keep the U.S.A. safe and to liberate Europe. They fought the most righteous war ever, but the fact was, when you’re dropping bombs through cloud cover and your industrial target sits in the middle of a city, you’ll miss it often. Did you know that 70 years after the end of WWII, there are still people in Germany who call the Allies “terrorists” for the way they bombed German cities and civilians?

The goal of the British nighttime bombing was to exact revenge for the bombing of England in 1940. The goal of the American daytime bombing was to destroy German manufacturing, and also to break the will of the German people and cause the masses to turn on their government. This simply didn’t happen. In response to a terror campaign, the people in Germany in 1944 did the same thing the people in the United States did in 2001: They dug in their heels and said, You will not break us!

Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Eighth Air Force by Robert Matzen

The B-24 Liberator, Jim’s ship in the Air Corps, described to me the other night by a pilot in Stewart’s squadron as “that goddamn airplane” and a “widow maker” because it was so difficult to fly.

I find the story of Jimmy Stewart in the Eighth Air Force so human, because he believed in what he was doing, and what he was doing was right. Hitler had to be stopped. And there were a whole lot of humans under his bombs who had done nothing wrong, and who didn’t believe in Hitler, and were trying to survive, but the bombs fell on them and all memory of their existence was erased when they were blown to dust.

How fragile we humans are, and how cavalier we once were with human life. That’s what I struggle with now on a daily basis—on the one hand, here are these great guys, heroes in every respect, going up to 20,000 feet at 40 below zero against a brutal enemy, facing fighters and flak to hit a target, and on the ground at the target, mixed in with Gestapo men and German infantry and devoted Nazis running factories are people who don’t support Hitler and never did, old men and women and children who dare not speak out against the government on penalty of death, along with forced laborers from conquered nations, and Jews in hiding, many living without running water and scavenging for food.

Bombs away.

It’s no wonder I have dreams and nightmares about this book I’m writing.

The Force Awakens (the dead)
Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

The Star Wars style C one sheet from 1977, back when they were just a bunch of kids putting on a show.

Poor Sir Alec Guinness. I mean, here’s a serious thespian, a Knight Bachelor of the Order of the British Empire, an Oscar winner as Best Actor for Bridge on the River Kwai, nominated for The Lavender Hill Mob, key in Lawrence of Arabia—some of the great pictures in history. And in 1976 here he is on a movie set with one tall man in a dog suit, and another tall man in black armor and a cape, a perilously thin man in a gold ensemble, and a “robot” that looks like a garbage can on wheels. The human actors he’s working with don’t impress him. The blonde kid’s voice cracks; the dark-haired kid mumbles his dialogue; the girl with the bad hair is the best of the bunch, and only because she’s the daughter of Debbie Reynolds so she has at least something of a pedigree. This writer-director masterminding the nonsense, well, he seems to have no idea how to make motion pictures at all.

I have thought about the Guinness-eye view of the making of Star Wars many times over the past 38-odd years. Sir Alec must have thought, I’ll take my paycheck, cash it fast, this thing will bomb, and I’ll move on with my career and never speak of it again.

Then OMG what happened next. We all know what happened next. We are feeling the ripples through the earth, through popular culture, through time itself to this very day, Force Day 2015, yet another round of flak ballyhooing the upcoming next installment of Star Wars. Poor Sir Alec! He wouldn’t flee Star Wars, as he must have imagined. He would be forced onto all fours to be saddled with it. He would be—No, please, it’s an honor I DO NOT DESERVE—nominated for an Academy Award for it. He would be forced to take their money and appear in sequels of it. It will go down as the pinnacle of his career so that when you go to imdb.com and type in Alec Guinness, the thumbnail description reads, “Actor, Star Wars.”

Fireball: Carole Lombard and the Mystery of Flight 3 by Robert Matzen

Vader: “Once I was the pupil. Now I am the master.”
Kenobi: “Only a master of eee-vil, Darth.”
Guinness: (I can’t believe I just said that.)

I’m thinking about all this today because it is Force Day, and my mental exercise is to look at all the highly polished commercial ballyhoo in our stores and on our TVs about The Force Awakens and contrast it to those innocent first weeks of spring 1977 when Star Wars caught the world’s eye for being clean, all-American grade-school fun. It was a charming, loud, mindless two hours at the movies, exceedingly stupid if you thought about it, but why think about it? Just sit back and enjoy. George Lucas set out to make a tribute to Universal serials, to Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers—that’s all he ever intended, and now look what it’s become. It is now a—and I say this with disdain—Disney franchise. To me, the first one was the most enjoyable, although the second one, The Empire Strikes Back, was better in the sense that it was Star Wars Grows Up and in adolescence became a little darker. Not too much; a little. The third one was too stupid to enjoy and that second round where Lucas tried to make a story that hooked up across generations.

Just, ouch.

I can watch the original anytime and recite the dialogue with the characters. I can watch the second one if I’m in the right mood and have two hours to kill. But that’s it as far as the franchise and I are concerned. I have reached a point in life where I find myself going with great relief, “Well, I never have to do that again.” For example, “I never have to go to Kennywood again,” Kennywood being an amusement park here in Pittsburgh. I grew up loving Kennywood and counting the days until I could go with my cousin, but then it stopped being fun, and about 10 years ago after a work picnic there, I decreed I would never do it again. Just like I never have to endure Star Wars sequels again. Age can be empowering.

Or, in Sir Alec Guinness’s case, age can be imprisoning because roles for actors aren’t so easy to come by, and you take what you can get because it’s a living, and for Sir Alec in 1976 that meant signing on the dotted line for this horrible, loud puppet show that made no sense as undertaken by amateurs.

I can only think that the ripples of Star Wars are even felt wherever Sir Alec is now, and he is touching his suddenly headachy temple like he did when the Death Star blew up Alderaan, and saying in that caramel British voice, “Dear God, not again.”