Revisiting B-29s and Red Erwin

"Nor law nor duty bade me fight/Nor public men nor cheering crowds..."

— William Butler Yeats

I've known about radio operator Staff Sergeant Henry "Red" Erwin's bravery under fire for almost as long as I've been alive. I did not, however, know Erwin until long after I first wrote about him. To save his B-29 Superfortress crew in embattled skies over Japan—The Empire,

American bomber crews called it—Erwin grabbed a loose phosphorous bomb burning at 1300 degrees Fahrenheit, held it in his grasp, and threw it from the bomber. The B-29 was named CITY OF LOS ANGELES and was piloted by Captain George A. "Tony" Simeral.

Sustaining burns over his entire body that should have been fatal, Erwin proved all of the important truths about those who fly and fight. Initiative, boldness and courage matter. Aviation, lest anyone think otherwise, is not solely about pilots. Erwin's deed rises to the standard for the Medal of Honor: "conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at risk of life above and beyond the call of duty..."

I first wrote about Erwin while living in San Diego, submitted the story to STAG magazine on April 3, 1962, and got a rejection slip. I submitted it to CLIMAX magazine on April 15, 1962. Editor-in-chief Al Silverman wrote back on May 8, 1962 ("you did a good job") and

offered $150. The story appeared in the October 1962 issue of CLIMAX under the title "Handful of Hell at 20,000 feet."

I did not get to know Erwin, however, until I wrote a book titled "B-29 Superfortress Units of World War II" (London: Osprey Publishing, 1992). All those years later, I had a brief acquaintance with the airman I was writing about. Suddenly, Red Erwin (1921-2002) was briefly a friend at the other end of the telephone. He could not have been more gracious.  I dedicated that book to Marc Reid (1951-2001), a dear friend who struggled with lifelong health issues without once losing his fanaticism for aviation.

Together with co-author Fred L. Borch, an expert on awards and decorations, I wrote about Erwin again in the July 7, 2008 Air Force Times newspaper. By then, Erwin was no longer around to assist. Despite the severe burns he'd suffered he lived a full life and died at age 80.

I wrote about Erwin a fourth time in a book titled "Mission to Tokyo"

(Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2013). The book covered the air campaign against Japan but focused on the March 10, 1945 firebomb assault on the Japanese capital, which was the most destructive bombing event  in history. Simeral's crew, with Erwin aboard flew that mission, ordered by Major General Curtis E. LeMay and witnessed on the ground by Yoko Ono. "Mission to Tokyo" is a current book and can be gotten from me, or ordered here.

On May 13, 2015, I flew abord the world's only airworthy B-29, named FIFI and operated by the Commemorative Air Force. I sat in the radio operator's position next to a plaque honoring Erwin.

It was not easy waging war in the skies of The Empire. In the fraternity of those who fly and fight, there was no braver man. There was no better man. Henry "Red" Erwin—all honor to his name.

Writing about Gates, the F-22, and air power

My next book will be about the dismantling of the U. S. Air Force.

The nation's air arm has never been smaller in size than it is today. It has never operated equipment as old as its equipment today.

The process has left us without all of the platforms we expected to have today—381 F-22 Raptor superfighters at the "high end" of the tactical air

arm; operational F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighters at the "low end;" the first examples of a new bomber; the first couple of squadrons of a new air refueling tanker; a new combat rescue helicopter.

We have none of these things today.

Robert Gates didn't begin the process of shrinking the Air Force. That process began right after the first Persian Gulf War in 1991. But the Gates years (2006-2011) were the years when we were supposed to recapitalize the nation's air arm. Instead, Gates assigned top priority to Iraq, surrounded himself by Army officers, fired the Air Force's top leaders (in 2008), killed the F-22 (in 2009) and was on watch when our bomber, tanker and rescue programs went astray.

Gates left this nation without the long-range, land-based air power that is essential to survival in peacetime and to success in war.

It would be better if someone who worked in the Pentagon wrote about this topic. Gates declined my request for an interview in 2006 and hasn't responded to my request for an interview in 2015. Gates treated his Air Force concerns with only a few pages in his memoir, "Duty." The book confirms his public statements that he was at odds with Air Force leaders from the beginning.

Retired General T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley, the former Air Force chief (2005-2008), shown in a photo taken with me in Paris in 2007, hasn't written a book. He should. Moseley is an articulate advocate for air power and for America's airmen. I've also urged retired Lieutenant General David Deptula to write a book. He is another staunch spokesmen for the profession of aerial arms and for those who fly and fight. There are others who could weigh in, too, like former Air Combat Command boss retired General John Corley.

I would also like to see a book from Moseley's successor, retired General Norton Schwartz. I believe Schwartz deserves enormous credit

for his efforts under difficult circumstances. The fighter mafia in the Air Force has not always been kind to Schwartz and I would like to see him put his thoughts on paper. The same goes for former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne.

With the exception of Gates, I've interviewed everyone named here more than once, both during the Gates era and more recently. We are fortunate to live in a nation where our top leaders are accessible and willing to talk about even controversial events.

Most of them, that is.

It would be better for them to tell the story. If they don't, I will. I hope to have my book completed at the end of July.

I'd like to find out how much interest there is. If you have thoughts about

my planned book or if you think you'll want one when it's ready, please let me know.

Any insights you have to offer will help. Make a comment here or call or write. I'd really like to hear from you.

Starting into the sixties with my Lettera-22

My first paid magazine item was a short op-ed in the November 1955 Air Force magazine.

I had other stuff published before my first full-length story, "The Night Intruders," which ran 5,000 words.

From an early age, I wanted to fly and fight. I was an airman from 1957 to 1960, in Korea.

I moved to San Francisco to become the great American writer. My literary prose looks laughable now, my poetry worse. I studied Ernest Hemingway and pretended to care about Andre Gide.

I loved a fiction account of a B-26 Invader bombing mission in a small literary magazine in San Francisco in 1960. I met Robert C. Mikesh who'd flown B-26s in the Korean War and was later a museum curator and author.

In 1960 in San Francisco, I was a file clerk for Bethlehem Steel. In 1961, I worked for Sherwin Williams Paint near my parents' home in a Washington, D.C. suburb. Photo shows me banging on my Olivetti Lettera-22 in my parents' back yard, age twenty-one.

Larry Harry, who'd been in Korea with me, blew into town. He suggested we hitchhike across the country to position ourselves to find work in the Far East. I'd submitted "The Night Intruders" to ARGOSY and SAGA and had it rejected. I sent it to REAL. Larry and I hitched across the country, getting 52 rides ranging in length from 800 feet to 1,200 miles.

Two strong but odd memories persist from crossing America that hectic, hot summer of 1961.

An Ivy League kid who reeked of Eastern Money (older than us, but still a kid) gave us a lift in his shiny new car and proclaimed, with some arrogance, "I'm a New Frontier Democrat!" The other memory: Gherman Stepanovich Titov.

Don't remember him? It's okay. "I am eagle!" cosmonaut Titov proclaimed on car radios of people who gave us rides, asserting Soviet supremacy. Until I looked him up just now to refresh my memory, I didn't know Titov shared my September 11 birth date (in a different year).

Returning to San Francisco where I'd lived months earlier, neither Larry nor I found a way to get to Asia. Larry went back into the Air Force, retired a colonel, survived cancer, and died of a heart attack on a cruise ship near Noumea, New Caledonia. Larry Harry (1938-2011) was one of my half dozen best friends throughout life.

I became a file clerk with the Western Pacific Railroad (a hefty, union-negotiated $16.96 per day). The boss would answer the phone by saying, "Hello, Miscellaneous," the name of our department.

My father telephoned person-to-person from the other coast to tell me something had come in the mail from REAL about my story. "They want to pay you a hundred dollars for it," Dad said.

"Oh."

Soon, I was living in a San Francisco boarding house called Baker Acres where I met Pierre M. and Jerome B. Curtis, two more lifelong best friends. I'm including surnames in these recollections only for those no longer with us. Oh, and I met Charlotte, too, but never mind about that.

UFOs, Washington, men's magazines, and Mario Biaggi

In 1978, I was a Foreign Service officer in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) in the Department of State. I was an authority on the political leadership in North Korea. We had two pre-school sons and lived on Valewood Drive where I'm typing this now.

Being the Kim Il-Sung watcher for U.S. intelligence was a more than full-time job.

Still, I found a time to write for magazines.Everybody knew it. My men's adventure magazine tales were a topic of water-cooler banter. I'd been getting paid to put words in print for twenty-three years but had not yet published a book.

I was reading the obituaries in the Washington Post every morning hoping—then, as now—to encounter a certain figure. I plan to remain on this planet until I do.

This morning, June 26, 2015, I read the obituaries. The person I want still wasn't there.

Mario Biaggi was.

The link to today's news story is here.

In 1978, Phil Hirsch, editor of MAN'S magazine in New York, phoned to say that a congressman had stated publicly that unidentified flying objects (UFOs) "are real." The men's adventure magazines were dying and their publishers had turned to UFOs for market share.

Phil was responsible for IDEAL'S UFO REPORT, where I was the editor and wrote all of the articles. I also worked with Martin Singer, editor of SAGA and of SAGA'S UFO REPORT, later re-named, simply, UFO REPORT.

Although I almost never interviewed anyone for my stories in those days, I visited Biaggi and took photos of him reading our magazine. He was gracious and courteous but very busy. He said enough about UFOs to enable me to write about him.

Biaggi was a former New York City police officer who spent two decades on Capitol Hill and much later was convicted of federal corruption charges. I don't know the details. I can find plenty of Americans who believe our whole system is corrupt and who classify those convicted, like Biaggi and Randall Cunningham, as amateurs. I remember Mario Biaggi as a generous host, hard worker, and dapper figure who was well liked.

And I remember a Washington where Americans could still walk into the government buildings they owned. In those days the security presence around the Capitol and White House was light and not terribly intrusive.

It's very different today. Americans, it seems, want to be secure, or at least to feel that way.

You can be secure. You can be free. You cannot be both.

My visit to Biaggi, easily arranged, was probably my first visit to a lawmaker on Capitol Hill. More than a decade later, I returned to visit high school classmate Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md), who is currently the second ranking Democrat in the House.

Mario Biaggi lived from October 26, 1917 to June 24, 2015. He died at age ninety-seven. For part of one day, he was part of my life. Thank you, Congressman.

Hitler's Time Machine: Everybody's question

I'm often asked if the bad guys win in "HITLER'S TIME MACHINE," my alternate history available for Kindle here. I started to post the answer and changed my mind.

Time Travel and Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA)

I graduated high school in 1957, age seventeen.

From 1957 to 1960, I was in the Air Force, in Korea. I finished before my twenty-first birthday (on September 11, 1960).

Beginning in the new decade, I lived in San Francisco, held odd jobs, and wrote for the men's adventure magazines. They were pulps with names like Stag, Male and Argosy.

In 1963, with little money and no job, I traveled in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong trying to get down to South Vietnam to write about the small and romantic war flickering there. But I ran out of money and had only a return ticket.

I stepped off the plane in San Francisco in March 1963 to be greeted by Bill R., who'd been in Korea with me and was now a station agent for Pacific Southwest Airlines, or PSA.

Bill was one of my half-dozen best friends throughout my life. With his help, I was hired as a station agent with PSA. I wore their heavy gabardine uniform replete with half-wings for non-flying employees, and mostly worked the ticket counter. Salary was $360 per month.

In those days, every departure was announced throughout the airport. At 8:45 a.m., the stern-voiced woman on SFO's public address system said, "Pan American World Airways Flight One for 'around the world' is departing from Gate 17. Passengers should be at the gate." I'd taken the iconic Flight One going out and Flight Two coming back from Hong Kong. In that British colony, I never found Suzie Wong but I talked about a job with the producers of "The Seventh Dawn," then filming in Malaya with William Holden and Susannah York.

Oh, those glory days. People dressed to the nines to fly on the seven-oh-seven. Less than ten percent of adult Americans had seen the inside of an airplane but passengers on Pan Am, PSA and other carriers were pampered to the hilt. It was a grand time when the nation had heavy industry, exported petroleum, had 98% literacy and enjoyed respect around the world. Even our enemies wanted to send their children to our universities even if I never found my way to one.

We had a vigorous young president. We'd stood up to the Soviet Union. We were at our height of prosperity and confidence. It was the period James Lee Burke calls the heyday of the Great American Empire.

If I had a time machine like the one in my new alternate history novel—see my book here—I would like to go back. For most of us but not all of us, it was the best time to be on this planet. More station agents were needed and a smartly-attired, very presentable young man appeared at the counter to fill out an employment application. While the applicant was walking away but still within eyesight, our boss Don B. ripped his application to shreds because the prospective employee was black. The airlines did not welcome Negroes, to use a word from that era, but were a haven to Americans who lived on the wrong side of a taboo: the word was not yet part of the lexicon but among men employed by PSA it seemed only Bill and I were straight. PSA was widely known to have the best-looking stewardesses in the industry and they were, indeed, walking wet dreams, but they must not have owned wristwatches. A few consorted with pilots. There were rumors of steamy "R.O.N. Parties" because aircrews often had to remain-over-night. But none of the stews would give us station agents the time of day.

Forty years later, Bill told me he had amyotropic lateral sclerosis. Of my half-dozen best friends, all but one are gone now, gone along with the Great American Empire, the factories, the literacy (fallen, now, to 76%), a society where people wore clothing to go out-of-doors and fine clothing as a requisite for an airline seat. Not long ago, actor Val Kilmer seated himself next to me in first-class bulkhead on United, slipped off his flip-flops, and placed his bare feet up in front of my face. By then, not even first class was first class.

Give me my time machine—more details here—and let me return to that grand period.

With tax, air fare between SFO and Los Angeles was $14.18. The plane was the Lockheed 188 Electra turboprop. Flying was a luxury. Credit cards were a new concept and in the airlines' climate of elitism, you knew you had arrived if you had an Air Travel Card. The red Air Travel Card for domestic travel was a sign you were in the top tier of society. The green Air Travel Card for international travel put you at the very top in a very class conscious world. One day, elbows on ticket counter, I looked up at an argumentative passenger and told him to shove his green Air Travel Card up his ass and, then and there, in September 1963, my career in the airlines ended.

Flake? Here's my take

Wondering what to do about people who annoy you?

In "PEOPLE WHO NEED TO DIE," author Victor Rook has the answer.

The year is 2021. Folks are fed up. Thirty percent of the population must go. Having already exterminated murderers, terrorists and rapists, the authorities now permit selective homicides of everyday people in order to reestablish a tranquil society. Apply for official sanction and you can whack somebody who annoys you.

Preferably by using some ghastly method.

Kindhearted and diabolical at the same time, Rook uses fiction to devise clever ways to exterminate bad drivers, Internet trolls, litterbugs, and (an especially deserving target) Black Friday shoppers here.

Rook combines humor and horror in conjuring up imaginative ways to rid the world of these people who need to die.

Perhaps without intending to, Rook also opens up a world of possibilities. Almost everybody knows some category of person who deserves to be stomped.

But one category is missing from Rook's treatise.

The flake.

In his fantasy/horror tales, Rook unfortunately provides no fictional way to wipe out people who are flakey. And it needs to be done. The world is being taken over by flakes.

To find one definition of a flake, click here.

I knew you'd look it up. You had to. You're not a flake. After all, you're reading this and supporting my work so you couldn't be flakey.

Could you?

Here are some examples of flakiness:

1. "Guess where I am."

Yeah, I know everybody does this but...

Why would anyone ever send an e-mail message that doesn't include his name, address, phone number, and e-mail address? People who would never omit this information from a business letter send messages asking me to call but providing no phone number, or asking me to ship but offering no address.

This is not the place to deal the privacy card. Anyone can find out where you are. Your contact information doesn't need to be secret.

My estimate is that this costs me about 300 hours of work time very year, or about 20 percent of every work day. I don't want anybody to mandate what ought to go into an e-mail message. I just want a little common sense and courtesy. Otherwise, you may find yourself in Volume Two.

2. Distracted walking.

A recent Washington Post article only touched on this colossal irritant. The article is here.

I don't get the thing with hand-held devices. With my own eyes, I watched a guy walk into a tree because he was looking down and texting. Think you're in control of that device? It's in control of you. There is no communication so urgent that it cannot wait until you're sitting down. I don't mean you, of course, but you know who I mean. Yes, it can wait.

3. "Track me down."

If somebody owes you money, whether it's for work performed, or purchasing your product, or whatever, your chances of collecting are directly proportional to the amount (the smaller it is, the less likely you're ever going to see it) and inversely proportional to the size and prestige of the debtor (one of the nation's largest publishers has owed me fifty bucks for two years).


Don't make me chase after you to collect a few dollars. Oh, I don't mean you, of course. I mean the flake. Honor your commitments. That way, you can stay out of Rook's sequel, if there is one.

4. Hands in pockets

This is mostly a guy thing, not applicable to women. The lowest level of The Inferno, and the harshest punishment fiction can mete out, must be reserved for men who stand or walk with their hands in their pockets.

I've actually seen a prominent person stand at a podium and put hands in pockets while addressing an audience. This is a way of signaling that you don't count. Get those hands out of those pockets. Or become one of the deserving.

The bottom line:

We all make mistakes. But let's do better. We may not succeed but we can strive for integrity, dignity and common sense. Well, maybe not common sense. And I know this doesn't apply to you, but:

Don't be a flake. Thank you very much. Oh, and click here.