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MY BRUSH WITH HISTORY
BY THE READERS
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The Eagle Still Aloft
Shortly after leaving the Navy in the summer of 1968 to become an airline pilot, I was at the third crew member’s station in the darkened recesses of the cockpit of a Boeing 707 airliner on the long, lonely leg from Honolulu to Manila.
Being a flight engineer offered little of the satisfaction of commanding a Navy aircraft, and it presented a formidable challenge in keeping alert during the long night over the featureless Pacific. By the time the purser entered the cockpit with a request from the cabin, I was weary of trying to identify stars and doing mental three-place multiplication problems.
“Captain,” she said, “one of the passengers has asked to visit the cockpit for a few minutes.”
“Do you know who he is?” the captain asked.
“No, I don’t know him.”
But the captain took no chances. “Please talk to him. For all we know he may be some kind of bigwig in the aviation industry or something.”
She returned in a few moments with a business card. A tiny high-intensity lamp used to read closely printed charts was switched on. In the small circle of light, the name Charles A. Lindbergh stood out.
It flashed in my mind: “Good heavens! The first man to fly across the Atlantic has just asked to spend a few minutes talking about flying.”
With a tight little cough, the captain said, “I think your passenger can come up here for a few minutes.”
My mind was doing backflips. “Can such a legend still be alive?” I recall thinking foolishly. “Does he still wear a leather flying jacket?” But Charles Lindbergh was in the door, filling it with a frame heavier than the one that earned him the nickname Slim.
He put us at ease immediately, introducing himself with an outstretched hand. “Good evening, fellows.”
To me the effect was as profound as if the Lincoln Memorial had spoken.
“Thanks for letting me come up to talk for a few minutes,” he said almost apologetically. “I don’t fly these days, but I like to look inside a cockpit from time to time.”
He drew us out, asking polite questions about our flying careers but never once mentioning anything more about his own. “I’m going to Manila on personal business,” he said. “I’m working on a research project of my own in the Philippines.”
More pleasantries, and he excused himself with polite thanks to us for sharing the time with him. The door closed, and the legend that became alive became a legend again.
Most pilots amass a collection of memorabilia: logbooks, photos, pieces of aircraft—that sort of thing. I’m no different, but my favorite memory doesn’t require a piece of picturesque hardware. My right hand will do. It’s the one that shook the hand of Charles Lindbergh … in flight.
E. R. Kallus lives in Danville, Callifornia.
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Not Quite Over, Over There
The November rain came steadily down, cold, persistent, promising snow, as it had for days. The last fallen leaves of autumn floated down the streets, carried along by the steady streams flowing toward the stormsewer gratings. Some people thought the rain was caused by the firing of the guns in Europe, where the Great War had gone on for more than four years. Others said, no, there had been many other Novembers with rain like this, at the beginning of winter.
In northern France the armies—German and Austrian on one side; French and British, and lately American, on the other—had dug miles of trenches, facing each other across the torn and ravaged strips of earth known as no man’s land. From time to time men from one army or the other would climb on crude ladders from the trenches, going “over the top” to try to take the positions held by their opponents. They advanced through no man’s land, in the face of rifle and machine-gun fire, artillery and mortar shells, and, if weather and wind were favorable, poisonous gases.
In America children ran up to each other, threateningly, shouting, “Are you for Kaiser Bill, or are you for Uncle Sam?” Grown people bought Liberty bonds and complained about the high cost of living. People ate “Liberty Cabbage,” instead of sauerkraut, and children got “Liberty Measles,” the German variety being out of fashion.
Out of the November rain a boy of twelve or so years crashed through the front door of one of the big houses, shouting, “School’s out! The war’s over!” In his hand he carried a newspaper, with great black headlines covering half the page.
His mother cried, “Let me see that!” She grabbed the paper, read the lead story, and ran to the telephone, to call neighbors and friends. Turning back to her son, she said, “Raymond, get the flag out of the hall closet and put it up on the front porch. Charles can help you.” So Raymond and Charles took the flag, carefully unrolled it, and inserted the staff in a bracket on one of the pillars of the front porch. It hung limply in the rain.
Charles, who was five years old, went back in the house and put on his cap and his sweater and his coat and his mittens and his red rubber overshoes. From his room he got an old brass school bell, with a black wooden handle, which was loose. He took the bell out on the porch and sat down on the wooden steps leading down to the sidewalk. He was close to the flag, and the overhang of the porch protected him from the rain. He sat there for a long time, ringing the bell, with the flag overhead. People passing by waved to him, and he answered with an extra ring of his bell.
Later that day the news came that it was a false armistice after all. The Allied generals had decided that the fighting would go on until the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, for the sake of symmetry and symbolism.
I grew up, and as a man, I did not remember the real armistice, two days after the false one; but I never forgot sitting on the steps, ringing my bell in the cold November rain.
Duane Charles Sours, a retired finance officer, lives in Hemet, Calif.
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Torn Curtain
From the time of Pearl Harbor we were told that Soviet Russia was our friendly ally against Nazi Germany. By the time the war ended it was becoming apparent that the Soviet Union was not behaving as an ally at all. Winston Churchill gave a famous speech in Fulton, Missouri, on March 5, 1946, in which he introduced the term iron curtain to describe the line behind which Stalin was holding Eastern Europe hostage. The term iron curtain is considered by most to be an original product of Churchill’s oratorical genius. It took me forty-five years to discover that I was in personal possession of evidence to the contrary.
When the German army was defeated in May 1945, the U.S. Army found itself in control of territory that was to be turned over to the Soviets as part of the controversial agreement with Stalin at Yalta. That included the city of Leipzig, which was to become part of East Germany, and for fortyfive years thereafter Leipzig was forced to lie behind what was to become known as the Iron Curtain. When we took Leipzig, weeks before Germany’s unconditional surrender, I found myself assigned with about a dozen other young artillery officers to the temporary military-government detachment that was to govern the city until the Soviets officially took over in July 1945.
It was not long before news of Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and the other horror camps was blanketing the world. Now every German was told that there was explaining to do. The law faculty of Leipzig University felt compelled to submit a paper to the military government defending the university faculty for having remained at their posts during the Nazi regime. We were amused that the distinguished professors considered us appropriate to receive their plaintive effort. We were only a minor appendage of the great machine that was the U.S. Army.
When the time came to turn Leipzig over to the Soviet army, there was no ceremony; we just left. We of the military-government detachment all had accumulated a large stock of combat points since Normandy and were eligible for quick return to the States. Records were scattered about, and somehow I was left with the Leipzig University law faculty’s paper. I put the paper with my gear and promptly forgot about it in the bustle of the times.
In 1990 Leipzig figured prominently in the news about German reunification. I was recently impelled to search the attic for my old footlocker with its war memorabilia. There I found the law faculty’s paper and read it thoroughly for the first time.
The paper, now yellowed and fragile with age, runs thirty pages, a laboriously typed compendium of defensive legalisms. But one phrase stands out as the writer’s attempt to justify German ignorance of the holocaust in the concentration camps: “In foreign countries one seems quite unable to imagine the density of the iron curtain which was drawn round the concentration camps.” The italics are mine.
Also, in another place: “But the possibility of getting information in the face of such iron curtain was extremely small.”
So now I knew. Churchill’s famous “iron curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, was not made until almost a year later. This paper was written in June 1945. The expression iron curtain was in common use in Europe by then. Recently I decided to research the use of the term and discovered that Joseph Goebbels himself used the term in February 1945, and in fact, it goes back at least to 1914, when the German-born Queen Elisabeth of Belgium said that between the land of her birth “and me there is now a bloody iron curtain which has descended forever!”
It is satisfying to know that the iron curtain is finally drawn aside. When will we need to use the term again?
Keith W. Bose, a technical writer, lives in Kings Park, New York.
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