by Bill Yenne
As Billy Mitchell had written two decades earlier, “Even if hostile armies and navies come into contact with each other, they are helpless now unless they can obtain and hold military supremacy in the air.”
PROLOGUE
One day, two boys were headed home from school. It was a day like many others, a day like those that live in our memories more as a day than a date, a day whose date might have fallen in the spring, or the early summer before school let out, or even the early autumn. It might have been in the waning months of their fifth-grade year, but it was certainly around about that time. It was a day when the willows were leafed out, but a day on which the green leaves of the willows were unimportant, a backdrop, not a fixture. One of the boys idly grabbed a fistful of leaves, and just as idly tossed them away, as a country boy might idly pull up a long stalk of grass to chew on for a moment or two before casually discarding it.
It was one of those years that is inclined to be recalled, by those who were there as well as by those who can experience them only in their imagination, as from a “simpler” time. The year was 1929, though it could just as easily have been 1928, or even 1920. For boys who are ten or eleven, years are years, not dates in a history book. In retrospect, for those of us who were not there, and who experience them only in our imagination, these were the formative years of the Americans whom we have called, since Tom Brokaw coined the term, the Greatest Generation.
As is often the case, people destined for greatness do not know it. Usually, it is for us who were not there, and who know them only in retrospect, to bestow the mantle of greatness.
The latterly named Greatest Generation grew up believing that they were merely the “younger generation.” Like all generations, they grew up in the us-and-them world that placed them in the shadow of that enigmatic cast of characters known as the “older generation.”
Archie Mathies and Johnny Ferelli had been friends since the second grade, sharing laughs, sharing tall tales, sharing secrets, and sharing adventures. Sharing adventures was then, as always, something that boys did. Sharing secrets was part of the age-old divide between the generations, and the punch line to the phrase “if our mothers knew half of the trouble we got into…”
For Archie Mathies and Johnny Ferelli, one of the stories that would be most often shared—though not willingly with their respective mothers—was the one that began on that day as the two boys were headed home from school in the waning months of their fifth-grade year.
Somewhere along the way, they met up with some other boys and continued on their way. Their destinations were their homes in a row of duplexes on the west side of Library, Pennsylvania. In some recountings of Archie’s early days, the town is called “Liberty,” which would fit the narrative more smoothly, but the town bore a more eccentric name. It was called “Library,” because someone along about the turn of the twentieth century remembered that a man named John Moore had set up a library in these environs way back in 1833. Before it was so named, the place had been known for years as “Loafer’s Hollow,” a name that would be even more idiosyncratic when set to the kind of serious narrative that you might want to take home to your mother.
In fact, Library was not then, and still is not, a town at all, but merely an unincorporated corner of South Park Township in Allegheny County, about a dozen or so highway miles south of downtown Pittsburgh. It was, in the lexicon of the Greatest Generation, “just a wide spot in the road.”
Pittsburgh was then, and for some years before and after, a steel town. Indeed, for America, it was the steel town. The steel industry runs on iron ore and coal, and it came to Pittsburgh because the ground under your feet there is filled with coal. They call them “coal patches” and they are everywhere in western Pennsylvania. You cannot usually see them, but you can see the mine entrances and the former mine entrances everywhere.
Dirty, dusty, black, and choking, coal became the lifeblood of western Pennsylvania. When Archie Mathies and Johnny Ferelli were growing up, nearly everybody’s dad worked in the coal industry, mostly at the Montour Number 10 Mine, and nearly everybody lived in the duplexes that were bully and owned by the Pittsburgh Coal Company.
The terrain around southern Allegheny County, like the terrain in most of coal country, is comprised of steep hills and deep valleys. The valley around which Library had been built was cut long ago by the stream folks knew as Piney Fork. To get from one side to the other, you had to go down, then climb up—or take a shortcut.
Boys being boys, and boys being disinclined to exert more effort than necessary in the accomplishment of a walk home, they elected to take a shortcut. That which presented itself most conveniently, and which had been used so often as to make it a routine part of the route, was the trestle used by the Montour Railroad, which crossed the canyon one hundred feet above Piney Fork. Walking the trestle thus saved considerable trouble in climbing down and climbing up.
As this writer can attest, having used railroad trestles as a boy of ten or eleven himself, trestles are unnerving in the first crossing but grow less daunting with the frequency of their use.
Another truism about being ten or eleven that is obvious only in retrospect is that boys this age have not yet seen everything. This was about to be illustrated most dramatically.
Archie and Johnny, and their friends, were about halfway across the trestle, when the ties and the rails upon which they walked shivered and shook with the portent of an oncoming coal train. They had never previously encountered one while in mid-span. By the time they looked up, the train was coming around the bend, and there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
With fifty tons of coal in every car he was pulling, there was no way the engineer could stop, and nothing he could do but frantically blow his whistle.
Being one hundred feet above the safety of the ground, there was nothing the boys could do but to crawl beneath the ties, hang on and pray.
“I can still see Archie high above us, hanging by his toes from the railroad ties as the train crossed the trestle,” Johnny later told Archie’s brother, David. “We were clinging to the girders for dear life.”
As Archie later explained to his brother, he had slipped down between the ties and immediately cantilevered his feet up into another set of ties.
“He wasn’t really holding by his toes,” David recalled in a recording in the collection of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell AFB. “He was hanging by his arches…. You can imagine the vibration that was set up in that trestle…. I have had occasion to stop by that trestle on several occasions just to look at it. It’s still there. I judge that from the point where they were trapped, it is at least seventy-five to one hundred feet off the ground. That might not seem like much, but when you’re hanging like a bat, and you fall, you’re going to break your neck.”
Archie Mathies had embraced danger and looked death in the eye. On that day in 1929, death blinked.
Archie was meant for greater things.
Archie Mathies was born Archibald Hamilton on June 3, 1918, in Stonehouse, South Lanarkshire, twenty miles southeast of Glasgow, Scotland. He never knew his father, nor did he ever know Scotland. His earliest memories formed on Jacobs Creek in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. When his mother remarried in 1921, to William James Mathies, the family, including Archie’s older sister, Jessie, immigrated to the United States. William Mathies went to work for the Pittsburgh Coal Company at Van Meter, in Rostraver Township, north of Pittsburgh.
It was a few years after David Mathies was born, in 1922, that the family moved to another coal patch. Mary Mathies was relieved to get out of Van Meter, where they were still mourning one of the worst mining disasters in American history, which had claimed 239 lives in 1907. The Mathies family was now living in Library, on the south side of America’s great steel town, where William went to work at the Montour Number 10 Mine, also owned by Pittsburgh Coal.
As David would recall, soon after they arrived in Library, Archie was challenged by the
“patch bully” in his age bracket, but promptly “turned him everywhere but loose.”
Archie Mathies faced adversity and the bully more than blinked.
Those were the days when dairies still made home deliveries, and the milkman serving Library had a particular dilemma. It seems that the same bully who had challenged Archie had also been stealing from the milkman, slipping into the milk truck as the driver made his rounds to the backs of the houses.
When the milkman learned of Archie’s having thrashed the bully, he hired Archie to ride shotgun. His pay at the end of the day was 50 cents and a quart of chocolate milk.
Around the time of the Piney Fork trestle incident, Archie’s mother informed William that, in brother David’s words, “she’d had enough of that coal patch living,” meaning that she was tired of raising her family in a company-owned duplex. The family, which included Jessie, now at the threshold of becoming a teenager, along with seven-year-old David, and Nettie May, just turned two, lived in four rooms, with an outhouse in the backyard. Mary was ready for a place of their own, so she sent William down to the small town of Finleyville, four miles away—where he was able to rent another house—with five rooms.
Archie adapted quickly to life in Finleyville, and discovered Patton’s Garage, where the proprietor ran a car repair shop by day and a boxing club by night. Pugilism suited Archie’s competitive nature, and he boxed continuously until he hurt his arm one night in 1933.
“That’s enough,” William Mathies told his knight errant son. “There’s no money for hospitals, and furthermore, it’s time to start high school.”
The older generation had spoken.
When he graduated from Monogahela High School, Archie went to work. This being coal country, he went to work in the mines, specifically up in Library, at the Champion 3 Preparation Plant, adjacent to the Montour Number 10 Mine where his father had worked since Archie was a little boy. He got on working at the tipple, where they loaded the coal cars, for five dollars a day.
“He could have made a lot more money if he had worked inside the mine,” David explained. “But my dad was not about to hear tell of that. There’s too much danger involved in coal mining.”
In 1939, when Archie turned twenty-one, he joined the volunteer fire department. “He loved that, flying around on the back of the truck going to all the field fires—there were very few house fires.” David laughed in the recollection. “He liked the speed, but there was an extra bonus involved. We had the volunteer fireman’s marching band. It was a bonus because he got to see all the girls. They played music by America’s greatest band master, John Philip Souza. His favorite tune then, and my favorite tune now, is ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’”
David went on to recall that even though Archie was making only five dollars a day working for Pittsburgh Coal, he wasn’t selfish. “I remember coming home from school one day and there was two pairs of Chicago roller skates. There was a pair for him and a pair for me. In 1941, the first year that Archie was in the service, he bought my mother a four-hundred-dollar fur coat. I wondered how he managed this. Did he rob a bank or something? Then I remembered that Archie was good with cards and he was also good with the galloping dominoes.”
On December 30, 1940, Archie decided that, in David’s words, “it was time for a new adventure,” and he joined the US Army Air Corps.
Archie Mathies would never meet Richard D’Oyly Hughes, but their lives were intertwined. Both were born in the United Kingdom, both became citizens of the United States, both served in the uniform of the USAAF, and both men went on to become iconic figures in the story of Big Week. Their stories become intertwined in the narrative of this book.
Aside from that, the two men were as different as night and day. A generation older than Mathies, Hughes was born into one of those upper class British families where military service is a sacred duty. He attended Wellington College in Berkshire, founded as a national monument to the Duke of Wellington, and where the faculty still includes commissioned officers from the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. He went on to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, the British equivalent of West Point, where the British Army trains its officers, and he served in World War I. An item in the London Gazette of December 1916 finds him assigned to King George’s Own 1st Gurkha Rifles, also known as the Malaun Regiment, who had fought the Germans at Ypres and who were then battling the Ottoman Turks in what later became Iraq.
A dozen years later, Dick Hughes would be found in the Northwest Frontier Province in India. It was here that he met and fell in love with an American woman. He pursued Frances back to St. Louis, Missouri, married her, settled down, and started a family. Their daughter, also named Frances, was born in 1929, and the twins, Richard and Guy, were born in 1934. Dick went into business and developed an excellent reputation for understanding the nuances of the interrelationship of businesses and economic forces, which would make him uniquely qualified to serve as one of the key men in the later planning and execution of the Big Week mission.
Guy D’Oyly Hughes, the namesake of one of Dick and Franny’s twins, had taken the route in life that led him to His Majesty’s Royal Navy. As Dick was with the British Army, fighting Turks in Iraq, Guy was fighting the Turks beneath the waves of the Mediterranean, as first officer aboard the submarine HMS E11. Mainly during the Dardanelles Campaign, the sub was credited with sinking more than eighty vessels of various sizes. In 1915, Guy earned a Distinguished Service Order by swimming ashore to blow up a portion of the Constantinople-to-Baghdad railroad.
World War II would find Guy above the waves as captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious. On June 8, 1940, the carrier and two escorting destroyers were intercepted near Norway by the infamous German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. In one of the war’s major surface actions involving the German Kreigsmarine and the Royal Navy, all three British vessels were sunk. Guy was killed by a shell from the Scharnhorst before Glorious slipped beneath the icy waves.
By the late 1930s, Dick Hughes managed St. Albans Farms, a former dairy operation that was evolving into a comfortable suburban residential community. Overlooking the Missouri River in northeastern Franklin County, about thirty-five miles west of St. Louis, St. Albans Farms once provided around 2 percent of the milk that was sold in that city. Over time, it would supply a similar proportion of commuters to St. Louis.
When the war began in Europe, and especially after his own brother was killed by the Germans, Dick Hughes yearned to get into the war somehow. It was partly an eagerness for revenge, or so he stated in his unpublished memoir, and partly a yearning to be a part of the twentieth century’s biggest adventure.
ONE
THE BIRTH OF AN IDEA
“I can see it falling through the sky for a couple of seconds and then it disappears,” a thirty-year-old Italian pilot named Giulio Gavotti recalled breathlessly of his first bomb run over a target in Libya. “After a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment. I have hit the target!”
In 2011, the world watched as NATO airpower provided the critical edge in the defeat of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two-year rule in Libya. In the history of airpower, compared to the great battles of World War II, the Libyan campaign of 2011 was a footnote.
In the history of airpower, 2011 was neither a turning point nor a tipping point. It was the centennial.
Exactly one hundred years earlier, in 1911, in the skies over exactly the same place, Lieutenant Gavotti’s first bomb run had been the first bomb run in the history of aerial warfare.
With the advent of heavier-than-air flight early in the twentieth century, the armies of the world had been buying airplanes, but as with the balloons used by the armies of the nineteenth century, they were only intended as passive observation platforms.
Among the wars being fought by European countries in the early twentieth century was a land grab by Italy that involved the seizure of Ottoman Turkish colonial possessions in North Africa, specifically
in the area that later became Libya. November found a squadron of Italian aircraft involved. One of the pilots was Giulio Gavotti.
“Today two boxes full of bombs arrived,” Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father in Naples. “We are expected to throw them from our planes. It is very strange that none of us have been told about this, and that we haven’t received any instruction from our superiors. So we are taking the bombs on board with the greatest precaution. It will be very interesting to try them on the Turks.”
The rest is history.
Three years later, the armies of Europe’s great powers, each of them now equipped with small aviation sections, were in the opening throes of World War I.
Meanwhile, the mainstream technical establishment had been slow to grasp the tactical importance of such operations. In October 1910, Scientific American dismissed the idea of airplanes as war machines, noting that “outside of scouting duties, we are inclined to think that the field of usefulness of the aeroplane will be rather limited. Because of its small carrying capacity, and the necessity for its operating at great altitude, if it is to escape hostile fire, the amount of damage it will do by dropping explosives upon cities, forts, hostile camps, or bodies of troops in the field to say nothing of battleships at sea, will be so limited as to have no material effects on the issues of a campaign.”
