January 2011

To say that the Brewster Buffalo was the most underrated is not totally untrue. The Japanese loved it! Just ask the Marine fighter squadrons that took off from Midway to provide targets and gun practice for those carrier-based fighters. The Buffalo’s flying range that Mr. Smoler celebrates didn’t do any good when the return leg of the mission was straight down.

Fredric Smoler’s rating of the B-17 bomber may catch more flak than last year’s smear of Robert E. Lee. As an old B-17 navigator, I was livid! Then I saw his version of the most underrated warplane. Now I can see it all. Smoler doesn’t like the name Flying Fortress because the B-17s couldn’t bomb Germany off the map without a lot of them being shot down. But the picture of the Buffalo shows that never has an airplane been so aptly named. So I guess it’s all in the name.

Everyone knew that large, slow-flying bombers would be vulnerable to fighter attack. We needed a big plane with a bomb load and range capable of hitting targets in Europe. The design had to be simple because mass production was planned. The B-17 was the right plane at that time. The airframe designed from 1934 specifications lasted through the war. Mr. Smoler seems to have mistaken wartime propaganda for “designers’ claims.” What did he want them to call the B-17, the Flying Coffin?

Fredric Smoler must know that calling the B-17 bomber overrated is risky. He limited his opinion to the question of whether it met its design criteria. In the opinion of this B-17 pilot who flew over Germany and France and back thirty-two times, the B-17 far exceeded whatever the designers may have had in mind. As for the capability of the B-17—and its guns were a basic part, especially when massed in close formation—well, ask the German fighters. Our B-17s brought a big bunch of aircrews home, for which I am forever grateful.

Overrated? Ha! Fred, were you an envious B-24 pilot?

Fredric Smoler’s position on overrated and underrated aircraft of World War II seems certain to raise a firestorm of controversy among surviving airmen who flew and fought in those aircraft. In finding fault with the designers’ claims, Mr. Smoler failed to take into account the time factor between the design criteria and the deployment of those aircraft. All the aircraft cited were designed in the mid- to late 1930s, a time when most of the world’s air forces were equipped with slow open-cockpit biplane fighters with fixed landing gear, armed with one or two machine guns of about .30 caliber.

The B-17 might well have held its own against fighters of this type, such as the Italian Fiat C.R.32 or the Russian Chato or Rata, which were then heavily engaged in air battles in the Spanish Civil War. To call the B-17 a failure when measured against the 20mm- and 37mm-cannon-equipped fighters that were just then coming off the drawing boards in Germany and Japan is both specious and unfair. A better evaluation of the B-17 may be found in the postwar writings of surviving Axis airmen who had to attack that bomber.

I enjoyed your feature “Overrated & Underrated,” but when I read the section on children’s books, I could not believe the writer reduced Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree to a story of exploitative gender issues. I have read this book to each of my children, and the message was always: You cannot expect to take all your life; you must be prepared to give.

I couldn’t agree more with Ellen Handler Spitz’s choices for the most overrated and underrated children’s classics. However, I wish that she had mentioned that there are now two excellent alternate versions of Little Black Sambo . Sam and the Tigers , rewritten by Julius Lester, was published by Dial, and The Story of Little Babaji was published by HarperCollins, both in 1996. These books eliminate the offensive stereotypes in language and illustration of the original version.

I was pleased to see that Ellen Handler Spitz considers Little Black Sambo an underrated children’s story. It was my favorite back in the early 1950s, when I was a child. I loved it because it made me realize that a child could use her intelligence to outwit big, scary things. Although as an adult I am dismayed by the racist elements, as a child I was totally unaware of them and enjoyed the story for what it taught me.

For those of us making a living playing music before and after the Beatles, there were precious few musical entities that would make us close the doors, exclude the world, and listen, knowing nothing we ever did could come close to what we were hearing. Every new album was a shock to the system. While interesting, nothing in Creedence’s repertoire would ever have the influence on all of us that Rubber Soul or Revolver did.

I looked at CCR the same way I looked at the Byrds or the Kinks. They were rarely boring, but I can’t ever remember locking myself in a room for a week to devour one of their albums.

While revisionism seems to spill over even to popular culture, one must put the Beatles into proper context. They were original. With the possible exception of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson, there was no one in this country approaching rock and roll as anything more than pulp for teenagers. In the beginning it was true that the Beatles covered many black American artists, but as they hit their stride as composers, this approach was abandoned in favor of their own original compositions. They pioneered artistic control when it was unknown in the music business. Their influence on popular culture was unprecedented. Witness the number of imitators and wannabes. No one to this day has had the impact that the Beatles had in those first heady years of 1964–65. Not Elvis, not Michael Jackson.