Driving with the Devil

by Neal Thompson

  “Look out, Hitler. Here comes the flood!” one headline blared, oblivious to the unintended irony of pitting Ford—a Jew baiter with sympathies for Hitler—as the Nazis' foe. For this war, Ford spoke not of peace. As a subcontractor for Consolidated Aircraft Corp., Ford built nearly half of the war's eighteen thousand B-24s, with help from such assembly-line workers as tomboy Rose Monroe of Kentucky (a.k.a. “Rosie the Riveter”) and a crew of midgets hired to crawl into tight spaces.

  At the time, the B-24 was hailed as one of the largest, ugliest, and most effective military planes ever built. A four-engine, propeller-driven aircraft with an incredible wingspan of 110 feet, the B-24 could travel three hundred miles an hour. Due to its huge fuel capacity, it could fly across the United States and partway back again without refueling. It had a stubby fuselage, its nose encased in glass, an odd-looking tail also encased in glass, a glass dome on top, and an udderlike bubble beneath. The crew of six to ten men was stuffed into ridiculously small spaces to make room for four to six tons of bombs.

  Charles Lindbergh, who worked briefly as a Willow Run test pilot, complained of the B-24's “mediocrity.” But in Germany, B-24 crews praised the workhorse that could fly even when slashed and pocked by enemy bullets and flak. The Army Air Force launched a propaganda campaign that touted B-24s as “the greatest flying machines ever made.” The army air force even hired John Steinbeck to write stories of proud, patriotic, and free-spirited B-24 pilots, whom Steinbeck called a mix of “Daniel Boone and Henry Ford.”

  Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable were among those assigned to B-24 crews; so were future newsman Walter Cronkite, future Catch 22 author Joseph Heller, and future presidential candidate George McGovern, who later said that flying in a B-24 “literally exhausted every resource of mind and body and spirit I had.”

  When Red Byron completed his training and transferred to Adak as part of the Eleventh Air Force, he joined the ranks of those who had— or would soon develop—a love-hate relationship with Ford's B-24. The aircraft had no windshield wipers; during rains, the pilot had to stick his head out the side window to see. There was no heat and no bathroom. On flights that lasted eight to ten hours, the crew had to peel off the many layers of insulating clothing to urinate into small tubes. At higher altitudes, dizziness and nausea were common symptoms because the aircraft wasn't pressurized, and the crew had to breathe with the help of cold, clammy oxygen masks that often froze to their face.

  Many pilots complained that the Liberator was incredibly difficult to fly. With no power steering, pilots had to use their left hand to turn the huge steering wheel while constantly adjusting the throttle and fuel mixture with their right hand. The seats were cramped and unpadded, and in the frigid temperatures of twenty thousand to thirty thousand feet above the earth, more men were injured by frostbite than enemy fire. As at the Battle of the Bulge, men wore every stitch of clothing they owned. Back on the ground, they lived in frigid, metal-sided Quonset huts, a war village amid a “gaunt and majestic” landscape that, one soldier wrote in his diary, seemed “out of place in a world that belongs so little to man.” Byron's younger sister sent care packages of warm socks, cookies, and books, and Byron sent home long letters about the native Inuit tribes who came to sell handmade crafts to the soldiers.

  Now twenty-eight, Byron was five to ten years older than most of the others, and they often called him “old man.” The average age of a B-24 pilot was twenty-one, and one airman observed that the younger ones were “not smart enough to be afraid.”

  Byron served as a navigator, flight engineer, tail gunner, and occasional bombardier, depending on which job was needed on that particular flight. Each job carried different duties, and dangers. Just getting into position was a chore in itself. Byron wore a layer of long underwear, then his woolen uniform, then a pair of pants and a heavy coat lined with sheepskin. Thick boots came last, and Byron had to waddle along narrow catwalks into the plane's bowels, then squeeze himself into a cramped seat in the nose, tail, or belly. Byron's career as an automobile racer likely helped him withstand many hours seated uncomfortably in one spot inside a noisy machine.

  As flight engineer, Byron's job was to start the B-24's engines. The roar on takeoff was deafening, and every piece of equipment rattled as the plane gained speed and finally, oh-so-slowly, rose into the sky. Above ten thousand feet, Byron would keep chattering into the radio, making sure none of the crewmen had passed out from the lack of oxygen.

  If Byron's job of the day was tail gunner, he'd man one of the ten .50-caliber machine guns that bristled off the B-24. But he knew, as did every B-24 crewman, that his bullets were no match for a well-timed barrage of flak from an enemy far below. Flak was the term for antiaircraft artillery shells fired into the sky and timed to explode at, say, twenty thousand feet. When the shells exploded, hundreds of pieces of shrapnel could handily penetrate a B-24's aluminum skin. A flak jacket, with a steel plate stitched over Byron's chest, might protect his heart, but flak could also take off a man's head. Often, as one airman wrote, “the flak was so thick you could walk on it.”

  One particular B-24 battle sent ripples of fear through the air corps. In an effort to cripple Germany's main oil supply line, a squadron of U.S. B-24s was sent in 1943 to attack oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania. Fifty-four planes—nearly a third of the squadron—never returned, and 532 men were killed or taken prisoner. Until that time, many B-24 crewmen had felt a romantic separation from the grisly, bodily risks taken by ground-based soldiers and ship-bound sailors. But the Ploesti disaster was a humbling reminder that B-24s were hardly impervious to enemy flak. It reverberated throughout the air corps, and Byron realized, I could die—or worse.

  George McGovern would later say that flying into the angry black cloud of a flak barrage is what he imagined hell looked like. Soon after Ploesti, Red Byron found himself in the middle of that hell, and he would not escape unscathed.

  Japan had feared that the buildup of American (and some Canadian) troops in the Aleutians meant the Allies were planning to use the Aleutians as a staging ground for attacks on the Japanese mainland. That's why Japan had established bases on Kiska and Attu in the first place. In February of 1943, Japan's military headquarters issued orders to the troops occupying those islands to “hold the western Aleutians at all cost.”

  Soon after, U.S. troops launched a ground attack on Attu. The Japanese soldiers, seriously outnumbered, made banzai charges, screaming maniacally as they ran headlong into U.S. gunfire. Finally, the Japanese realized they were outmanned. Instead of surrendering, hundreds killed themselves, many with their own hand grenades.

  That left Kiska Island as the last Japanese stronghold, and Byron's crew was sent repeatedly over the island as part of a continuous bombing campaign. The Kiska raids were considered very risky, because of the island's jagged volcanic mountains, strong winds and snows, unpredictable weather changes, and the constant, pea-soup fog.

  The bombing campaign demoralized the entrenched Japanese troops; one wrote in his diary that the U.S. attacks were “most furious.” Japanese headquarters finally ordered an evacuation, and five thousand Japanese soldiers left Kiska one morning under the cover of a thick fog, setting the U.S. Army up for an embarrassing fiasco.

  Due to reports of phantom flak attacks, American B-24s continued bombing the vacant island for another three weeks. Planes even dropped propaganda pamphlets calling on the Japanese to surrender. The U.S. Army wouldn't learn that the Japanese were gone until it launched a ground attack. When that attack began, edgy American soldiers fired on one another, and twenty-five men died; seventy more died when their boats sank—one hundred men dead at the hands of an absent enemy. Soldiers searched caves and huts but found only mongrel dogs. A song about the failed battle of Kiska went:

  It took three days before we learnt,

  That more than dogs there simply weren't.

  Still, removing a Japanese foothold from so close to U.S. soil was a huge tactical and moral victory—one th
at Red Byron would not be around to enjoy for long. Byron had managed to survive dozens of successful missions, many more than the Army Air Force required. The army typically sent its flyers home after thirty-five missions, but Byron— whether by choice or by force is unclear—had by now flown more than fifty missions. He must have felt assured that he was nearing the end of his service time. But one day, Byron volunteered to replace a fellow flight engineer whose wife was expecting the couple's first child. It was his fifty-eighth mission, and it would finally be his last.

  Although the Japanese had been chased from Kiska, to deter them from regrouping and attacking the Aleutians once more, U.S. B-24s were sent on long missions west across the Pacific to the Japanese air base at Paramushiro, northernmost of the Kuril Islands, which stretched northeast from Japan toward Russia's eastern extremes. The fifteen hundred-mile round-trip Paramushiro raids were among the longest over-water night missions conducted by the United States. Still, it was considered relatively light duty compared to the previous risks above Kiska and Attu. And in the early stages of bombing Paramushiro, not a single U.S. plane was lost. Byron's spirits were high as he and his crewman looked forward to easier duty in the coming months, and maybe even orders to go home.

  Unfortunately, the enemy was still on the offensive. While dropping a load of bombs on Paramushiro, Byron's B-24 and its thin aluminum skin were shredded by antiaircraft fire. It was one of the only U.S. planes damaged in that campaign. Hot shards of shrapnel plunged a jagged course deep into the Ford-built aircraft, and at least two hunks of razor-sharp hot metal sliced into Byron's left thigh. Byron let loose a terrible howl as blood began to gush from the wound. The pilot turned the damaged bomber toward home, an unbearably long and painful journey for Byron. The wounded plane and its 4,800-horsepower engines had barely enough power left to reach the nearest runway, and the pilot crash-landed on the too-short, crater-pocked runway at Kiska.

  At a makeshift army hospital, a doctor took a quick look at Byron's injuries and immediately suggested amputation. One shrapnel fragment had burrowed too deep into Byron's hip for the doctors to extract it. If Byron didn't bleed to death first, he'd surely die of infection. Byron was furious, refusing to let the doctors saw off his leg. Back home, he made his livelihood with that leg. He implored them to find another doctor for a second opinion.

  Byron was stabilized, then evacuated to an army hospital in Seattle, where his father came to visit. Jack Byron was shocked at how terrible his son looked. He learned from doctors that Byron had lost all use of his leg, from the hip down. The leg was dying.

  At one point, his 160-pound frame had shrunk down to half its size. Byron knew he was likely dying, too. One night, he asked a Red Cross worker for a pencil and paper, so he could write a farewell letter to his family. The Red Cross worker refused, in a gesture intended to prevent Byron from giving up. Byron was as angry as he could be in his weakened state and vowed to bad-mouth the Red Cross ever after—if he survived.

  The army, expecting the worst, relocated Byron to Fitzsim-mons Army Hospital in Denver,* to be nearer his family. On Sunday afternoons, former high school friends and his ex-girlfriend would visit from Boulder, cringing at the sprawling but cramped ward full of wounded men. Byron's friends helped him walk around on crutches; he'd lost so much weight, it was hard to walk without help. A few months later, the doctors told him his best chance for survival was to amputate the withered leg. Again, Byron refused.

  Finally, after two years of shuttling to and from various military hospitals for tests, second opinions, and unsuccessful attempts to rebuild and rehabilitate the leg, doctors told Byron they had done all they could. If he wouldn't let them amputate, his recovery was as complete as it was ever going to be. As World War II came to a close in late 1945, they sent him home to his father's house, with a bottle of painkillers and a brace that attached to his hip, ran down the length of his leg, and was bolted to an orthopedic shoe. Despite the jagged break in their relationship ten years earlier, Byron and his father repaired their relationship as Red moved into the downstairs family room. Byron began receiving monthly disability checks—small recompense for a dead leg. His father then watched in amazement as his son forced his withered body back to health.

  With growing determination, Red would rise early each day and maneuver the four steps up into the bathroom. After showering, he'd attach his leg brace and practice walking back and forth across the family room, day after day. Thanks to a family doctor's prescription of iron pills, an infection that had developed at the army hospital began to clear up. That doctor also prescribed painkillers, but Red found they made him drowsy and unfocused; he only took them on days when the pain was especially piercing.

  His stepmother, Peg, prepared hearty meals that helped him gain back most of his weight. Two army nurses visited every other week to change his bandages and clean the fluids and blood that constantly oozed from the wound. His ex-girlfriend, Laura, visited often, bringing books and magazines for him to read. He developed an affinity for romance novels, especially the sexy ones. In the evenings, he began drawing sketches of hand-operated clutches he hoped to build if he ever got well enough to drive.

  One day, Laura and Red's sister, Virginia, suggested it was time for Red to really get out and about. Why not take some of your soldier's pay and buy yourself a car? Maybe even a convertible? At first, it was just a joke among them. In time, the idea found a comfortable place in Byron's mind. He found a well-priced, secondhand Ford with a sporty red paint job and had it taken to a local mechanic, where he unfolded the sketches he'd drawn of a clutch he could operate with his hand.

  “Can you make this?” Byron asked the guy.

  When the car was ready a few weeks later, Byron started spending his afternoons touring all over central Colorado, in the mountains west of Boulder and east across the endless yellow plains. He drove to visit relatives in Fort Collins and old friends at Pike's Peak. He was free once again, and his morale began improving along with his strength.

  One day, he announced to his father that he was headed back to Dixie.

  “I'm going to try to get back into racing,” he said.

  * In an awkward display of his apparently dual loyalties — to his German heritage and American existence — Red Vogt had named his sons Tom and Jerry.

  * During Byron's time at Fitzsimmons, U.S. Senator and 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry was born there —on December n, 1943. Kerry's father, an Army Air Force pilot, was receiving treatment there for tuberculosis.

  The muscular coordination, satanic humor and split-second timing.…

  Sugar Boy couldn't talk but he could express himself when

  he got his foot on the accelerator.

  — ROBERT PENN WARREN, ALL THE KING'S MEN, 1946

  10

  “It's too late now to bring? this

  crowd under control”

  U intil the 1940s, many rural-born southerners had been exposed largely to a male-dominated culture defined by geographic isolation and an inferiority complex born of the Civil War. In that war's wake, a majority of southerners grew up poor, on a farm, with little access to transportation, public or otherwise, except maybe the family tractor. Up North, trains and buses allowed people to see many cities and states beyond their hometowns. In the Deep South, a man's world view took in a five-mile radius of the farm.

  At the onset of World War II, southerners had eagerly surged into recruiting offices. On the battlefield, emboldened by patriotism and a zeal for adventure, they took home a greater share of Purple Hearts than northerners. During the initial four-day fight of the monthlong Battle of the Bulge, the actions of six men merited the Medal of Honor; four of them were southerners. Hard-fighting, hard-living southerners had always admired the Daniel Boone lifestyle. Despite the gore, pain, and heartache, World War II gave them a chance to live it. They saw wild corners of the planet, places that bore no resemblance to the red-clay fields they knew. In the ridges of the Belgian Ardennes, in the skies above
the Arctic, in the steamy jungles, and on the Pacific, they were tested.

  As James Webb writes in Born Fighting, the largely Scots-Irish citizens of the former Confederacy had always been hunters, competitors, and agitators—”probably the most antiauthoritarian culture in America… naturally rebellious… filled with wanderlust.” They were also “the most intensely patriotic segment of the country.”

  World War II gave soldiers, sailors, and flyers from the South the chance to live heroically in places where killing the other guy wasn't a crime but a ticket to a medal of goddamn honor. The war had placed a gun in their able hands, shown them an enemy worth dying for, and told them to swallow any fears and to attack, and attack again.

  When soldiers returned to the South from their far-off and exotic killing fields, few were ready for the same old life. Some men returned home bruised and battered, ready for nothing more exciting than a steady job, a wife and kid, a dog, and a two-bedroom split-level. Many others came home itching for more adventure, and they weren't about to let, say, a crippling leg injury force them into a desk job.

  Turns out, there was plenty of adventure to be had in the postwar South. Revenue agents were still a dangerous adversary for those who returned to moonshining. And for those eager to return to racing, the red-dirt ovals and hard-packed sands would soon become the new battlefields.

  For moonshiners and racers alike, Ford Motor Company was there waiting with the artillery.

  By the time war ended in 1945, Henry Ford was a sick, sad, lonely man of eighty-two. His only son, Edsel, after serving half his life as president of his overbearing father's company, had developed stomach ulcers that became cancerous. Henry blamed his son's “high flying lifestyle,” at times calling him “dilettante” and “dandy.” He told Edsel that if he simply lived healthier, and gave up drinking, he'd recover.