Wings Of Morning – Thomas Childers, 1995 ★★

"A Very Unnatural Way to Live"

Bomber duty in World War II left a particularly grim shadow. For those who served, life ground down into long stretches of tedium jabbed by bursts of tension and fear; and occasionally a hard, fiery death. The utter randomness of it all, dropping bombs on unseen targets and being potted at by flak guns, must have been cosmically unsettling. Its sense of absurdity would be encapsulated in a novel written by one bombardier veteran called Catch-22.

Thomas Childers’ Wings Of Morning is a serious dive into the world of a U. S. bomber crew in World War II. They were decorated and respected, but became notable less for any accomplishment than for how they wound up becoming casualties. It was their fate, or simple misfortune, to be aboard the last U. S. bomber shot down over Germany, in April, 1945. Only two out of its ten crewmen survived the war.

“Some moments [slip by] fast and some just drag by,” waist gunner Bob Peterson once wrote home. “To say the least it is a very unnatural way to live.”

Peterson didn’t make it home; neither did Howard Goodner, Childers’ own uncle. Goodner’s absence was something Childers grew up with as an aching fact of life; as an adult and an Ivy League professor who studied Germany, Childers took to researching his uncle’s experience in order to answer what had happened to him, and why.

Childers succeeds in giving you more than a taste for what it was like to serve on a bomber. You had to be very careful in flight, especially in winter, as normally freezing temperatures made touching the plane’s metal skin without gloves on a frostbite hazard. The men wore suits electrically heated from rheostats they awkwardly plugged themselves into. Getting into formation was dangerous itself; after climbing up over the clouds, bombers then flew wingtip-to-wingtip across vast water bodies into enemy-held territory, risking sudden death all the way.

Fragments of flak produced a sound “like rocks thrown by a kid against an empty garbage can.” A bomber’s fuselage was thin and easily punctured. In some parts of the bomber, like the gunner in the belly turret, escape could only be managed with the help of another crewman.

Complicating matters was the nature of the craft flown by Goodner and his comrades, the B-24 Liberator. Childers lays out the dilemma of Liberator service:

The Liberator was the most modern aircraft in the U. S. air arsenal in 1944. It flew faster, carried a heavier bomb load, and possessed greater range than its sister ship, the B-17, and more B-24s were in production than any other bomber. Yet, unlike the graceful Flying Fortress, which had become the glamour plane of the war, the Liberator was an ugly aircraft. Its squat fuselage, stubby nose, and enormous twin vertical stabilizers lent the ship an ungainly, pugnacious look. Dubbed the banana boat, the flying brick, the pregnant cow, and the old agony wagon, it was a plane that, as one of their instructors put it, “you just couldn’t form an attachment to.” None of the pilots coming out of flight school wanted to fly the Liberator.

A B-24 was a lot nicer to look at in the air than they were to serve inside, according to Thomas Childer's book. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_surviving_Consolidated_B-24_Liberators

Though not a book I had heard of before I was given a copy, Wings Of Morning has fans. There are 62 positive reviews on Amazon.com as I write this, and just two negative ones. Some of the most glowing reviews come from bomber-vet relatives, including one related to the co-pilot on The Black Cat, the doomed plane aboard which Goodner and Peterson rode to their last mission, an ill-fated bombing run that took place a week before Hitler’s death.

I wish I could say I enjoyed reading Wings Of Morning as much as they did, but my experience was clouded by a couple of major problems.

First and foremost is Childers’ attempt at giving his uncle’s story a real sense of narrative by inserting long stretches of invented dialogue. In his account, we hover over the barracks rooms and watch as Goodner and his friends pass the time, joke around, share photos of girls, and commiserate in detail about a difficult member of the crew, a “time bomb,” they agree whom they eventually manage to get reassigned.

Obviously the barracks weren’t wired for sound; CCTV was still a ways off. How did Childers manage to record all this? An Author’s Note at the end lays out his approach:

In researching the book, I employed methods normally used by professional historians, but in telling the story I have turned to narrative techniques usually associated with fiction…I have used the device of dialogue to present some scenes.

Childers assures us that the dialogue is based off letters from the deceased crewmen as well as interviews with survivors, but it’s clear the letters could not have related anything like the detail we get here. We get no indication where research ends and imagination begins. It really became intrusive when Childers incorporates thought bubbles for various characters. We even witness a couple of the crew in their final moments, realizing they are about to die.

I suspect Childers felt compelled to write this way out of a sense of obligation for his late uncle and his comrades, to restore to them a similitude of the life they were cheated of. But there were times watching them crack wise to each other where I found myself recalling old episodes of “Baa Baa Black Sheep” rather than feeling myself bearing witness to real war experiences.

The other issue I had with the book also tied into this compulsion of Childers to relate what happened in moment-by-moment detail. Even when he writes well, which he often does, his lyrical approach gets to be very slow-going as he itemizes what they saw and felt.

Take this account of the skyscape over the English air base where the 466^th Bomb Group operated:

Ghostly, diaphanous streamers trailed across the terrain, leaving wispy tufts to settle eerily in the treetops. A soft, driving rain spread quickly across the field, and a blanket of cold mist enveloped the landscape. As he watched, transfixed, the flowing canopy of gray opened for an instant, revealing through a tiny rift a patch of brilliant, boundless blue, as if a sapphire had been rubbed suddenly clean on the dusty hilt of an ancient sword.

Childers did visit the site of the airfield of the 466th Bomb Group as well as the site of the crash in Germany, so descriptive passages like this have merit, however pocked they are by narrative intrusion. I found myself wondering many times whether he could have employed his writerly craft more wisely by keeping facts and suppositions more clearly divided.

Toward the end of the book, Childers presents a first-hand account of his research into the fate of The Black Cat, when he visits Germany and quizzes local witnesses to the crash. He even tracks down what was at the time of the book’s writing the last survivor of the flight.

I found myself riveted, for the only time reading this book, when Childers describes placing a call, tensely waiting for someone to answer, then talking to someone who it turns out spent most of his life waiting for his call.

“The most beautiful guy I ever knew,” the former gunner, Albert Seraydarian, tells Childers when asked about Goodner, beginning a long relationship that winds up with the two visiting the crash site together.

Author Thomas Childers holds a portrait of his uncle Howard Goodner, the radioman on The Black Cat. Image from http://urania-josegalisifilho.blogspot.com/2012/01/prof-thomas-childerss-wings-of-morning.html 

If only the book began on this episode, rather than spending 250 pages building up to it! As it is, Seraydarian arrives on the scene too late to make much of an impression. For most of the book, he is one of many crewmen described in only a cursory manner while Childers focuses on his uncle and a couple of others.

Even the wrap-up of Wings Of Morning left me disappointed. Childers tracks down contradictory accounts of what exactly happened to the crew of The Black Cat. Were some of them captured and executed, as a Russian prisoner alleged?

Childers goes back and forth on this point for some time, more than I thought it needed. In the process, he leaves another mystery, just as dark, unexplained. Why was the plane exposed to its final peril?

Apparently the flight commander refused to accept the fact there was no way to complete the mission given bad weather conditions. Even after navigators made clear this was a wash-out and the best course of action was to return to base, the commander persisted in pushing forward.

I was reminded of the sad story of Palmito Ranch, the last battle ever fought in the American Civil War because of one bullheaded commander’s apparent desire to get some combat experience on his resumé. Was that the case here as well? If Childers’ probed this mystery, he leaves it unexplained. He tells how flight survivors were “so bitter toward the [command pilot] none wanted to talk to him at all,” yet despite building up so much anger in the commander’s direction, Childers never even names the guy. He quotes an after-action report: “It is believed that this mission never should have been dispatched in view of the forecast and the actual conditions.”

Investigating this aspect of the story more extensively would have made for a better book for me. What you end up getting instead is a sort of Catch-22 where the answers prove to be more maddening then the questions.