Our Year of War

by Daniel P. Bolger

  Charles entered the U.S. Army Air Forces as a private. After stateside training, in 1942, he joined the 42nd Bombardment Squadron in Hawaii. They were a hard-luck outfit. At that point in the war, most of them were.

  The 42nd flew B-17E Flying Fortresses. Caught on the ground at Hickam Field on December 7, 1941, the squadron suffered nine killed and twenty-two wounded, as well as the destruction of five of seven assigned bombers. The squadron’s patch featured a snarling black panther leaping above a flaming Hawaiian torch.30 These airmen had a score to settle.

  The 42nd and its nine B-17s deployed south to New Caledonia and began operations on July 24, 1942. Missions in support of the Guadalcanal campaign kept the crews busy. They staged forward to Espiritu Santo in November and continued reconnaissance and bombing flights until February 7, 1943. In 363 combat sorties, the squadron lost eight aircraft and eight crews, seventy-two airmen in all, plus another pilot killed in action and two ground mechanics dead in a jeep mishap.31 Hollywood made a wartime movie titled They Were Expendable. The 42nd lived it, and it didn’t end after two hours. The remnant returned to Hawaii to regroup.

  With but one plane left, the 42nd converted from the graceful, iconic B-17E to the blunt-nosed, slab-sided, high-winged, twin-tailed, unloved Consolidated B-24D Liberator. The Germans called the B-24 dickewagon, the “furniture van.” It looked like one, and it handled like one, too, a flying semi-trailer truck laden with high explosives. But it had longer range than the B-17, and carried more bombs.32 Charles Hagel would be back in the tail for most missions, although he sometimes flew up front as the radio operator. He’d be one of six enlisted crewmen working with four officers.

  Except for the pilot and copilot, every other man joined Hagel as a gunner, to include the officers serving as navigator and bombardier. Eleven .50-caliber machine guns firing inch-and-a-half slugs protected the plane. Three pairs of these long, dull gray-black weapons were twinned in electric turrets—one Plexiglas bubble on top, one on the belly, and Hagel in the back. The other five .50 calibers poked out of the plane’s nose and sides. 33 Whether in the motorized turrets or the single mounts, all the machine guns had to be aimed by hand. It helped to be young, to have good eyesight and fast reflexes.

  In theory, all of this B-24 firepower meant an opposing airplane couldn’t get close, especially when the Americans flew in tight formations. But in reality, Japanese interceptor squadrons soon figured out the holes in the defensive gunfire arcs. The enemy’s single-seat, single-engine fighter planes proved fast, nimble, and tough to track for overmatched American gunners. Japanese Zero pilots swarmed in, determined to confuse and overwhelm the defending bomber crews.34 To coordinate shooting back at several speedy, twisting tormentors at once—and to avoid punching bullets into the neighboring friendly bombers—U.S. gunners used a clock technique to call out hostiles, with the right wing as three, the tail as six, the left wing as nine, and the nose as twelve. A favorite enemy tactic involved using a Zero or two to distract the American gunners to one side, then sending a bold fighter pilot, guns blazing, to dive right at the B-24 cockpit, the infamous “twelve o’clock high” position. Go straight for the brain. Kill the guys flying the bomber. That usually did not turn out well for Liberator airmen.

  The 42nd trained with the new Liberator bombers in and around Hawaii through most of 1943. These weren’t milk runs. The B-24s looked for lost U.S. planes, searched for Japanese submarines, and bombed enemy-held Wake Island. During these months, three bombers crashed, with two complete crews erased and the third set of airmen injured but recovered. Among those missing, and subsequently captured, was First Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic athlete. His survival story became famous after the war.35 In May of 1943, he was just another lost bombardier. Mission after mission, loss or no loss, the pace did not slow up.

  For bombing raids, missions followed a well-known routine. After taking off and forming up, each crew experienced hours of droning over-ocean flight. Bored gunners often dozed at their stations. Then the target came into view. Things got very interesting very fast. For thirty frantic minutes or so, ten young Americans, amped on pure adrenaline, fired away at swooping, rolling Japanese Zero fighters and hoped those black clouds of exploding antiaircraft shells didn’t do mortal damage. At the height of the mayhem, the B-24 steadied up and settled into the death-grip bombing run, straight and true over the aim point as flak fragments pounded on the hull. Now and then, a few hot chunks ripped through, exposing unexpected patches of blue sky where there should have been solid metal. When the bombs came loose, the plane rose like an elevator starting up. Then, duty done, each B-24 turned away, engines straining as each bomber worked to regain its place in the squadron array. Enemy flak batteries, already jumping on the next set of U.S. bombers, often tossed out a few parting shots. As fliers caught their breath, men looked around, counted friendly planes, and checked damage to men and machines. If any of the men aboard had been cut up or shot, young airmen wrestled in the freezing air to staunch the bleeding and keep the wounded alive. Battered bombers also needed attention; dead engine props had to be shut down, failed controls bypassed, and excess gear dumped out to reduce the stress on laboring motors. The sturdy Liberator could make it back with a hole in the wing or an engine out, or even worse, but the formation didn’t wait for stragglers. If a B-24 fell back, that crew was on their own. Then came another long, lonely trip across the wide water, headed back to the landing strip. Sometimes bomber crews avoided all the perils and did everything right. Then some control wire snapped or a flap came unflapped and the four-engine B-24 cartwheeled into the water right off the end of the runway. Nothing was guaranteed.

  Its Hawaiian defense stretch complete, the 42nd Bombardment Squadron and its twelve new B-24s staged forward to Funafuti in the Gilbert Islands on November 12, 1943. For two months, the 42nd flew into the heat of the action, backing up the marine landing on Tarawa and the army landing on Makin, and then the follow-on efforts in the Marshall Islands. In sixty-nine tough missions, three more bombers went down, with thirty men lost.36 Charles Hagel found out how you made rank in the U.S. Army Air Forces. You stayed alive.

  Another stint of retraining and replenishing in Hawaii followed, with more local search and surveillance operations. The crews traded in their remaining B-24D models for the latest J models, sporting a fully automated nose turret among other upgrades. By September of 1944, the squadron again entered combat, working from a forward airfield on Guam. The big, shiny B-29s also flew from that island, and nearby Saipan and Tinian, too. By now a sergeant, Charles Hagel and his crew flew reconnaissance and bombing runs against Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They dropped sea mines in Japanese home waters. Missions piled up: 96 in November, 124 in December, a similar number in January, and 115 in both February and March. U.S. aircraft still went down, with three more Liberators and more fellow airmen gone. As spring turned to summer, the unforgiving tempo continued. The squadron lost another two B-24s and more airmen in June of 1945.37 No matter how many missions you flew, the next one might be the last. You never knew.

  One more move followed. On July 2, 1945, the 42nd repositioned to Okinawa. Missions went against enemy airfields, ports, and railroad lines in Kyushu, the southernmost of the four Japanese home islands. Other raids struck military sites in southern Honshu, the largest island. Squadron bombers hit Japanese facilities in China and Korea, too.38 These operations represented the opening rounds of preparatory strikes for the U.S. amphibious invasion of Kyushu itself, set for November 1, 1945. The Japanese fought back, but not like the old days. Their planes lacked fuel. Enemy ack-ack guns still banged away. But you could tell the shooting had gotten ragged, disorganized. The Japanese were barely keeping it together.

  In July and early August, the 42nd bombed Japan in concert with Curtis LeMay’s fleet of B-29s. A dozen years later, when that SAC officer referred to LeMay’s plan to reduce the USSR to a smoking, radiating ruin, he might as well have been talking about Japan in the high summer of 19
45. By August, even the radiation arrived right on schedule, courtesy of Enola Gay and Bockscar. The 42nd Bombardment Squadron’s Liberator crews saw the ravaged cities, and smelled them, and added their share to the pain. Charles Hagel went through it all, looking down from his perch in the tail, peering through the smudged plastic bubble over his double machine guns, gagging in his oxygen mask from odors he hoped never to smell again. If some wise guy later insinuated that, unlike riflemen on the ground, airmen didn’t really understand combat, Charles Hagel could have set him straight.

  But then again, he didn’t talk about it.

  CHARLES HAGEL CAME HOME from the Pacific and went to work at the Cook Paint and Varnish Store in North Platte. Only a few decades before, just outside the town, the great showman, sometime army scout, and self-proclaimed hero of War Bonnet Creek, Buffalo Bill Cody maintained a ranch.39 Charles Hagel’s prospects were nowhere near as grandiose. He’d already had his adventures. In December 1945, Charles married Elizabeth “Betty” Dunn, one of six hard-working daughters of an Irish-Polish farm family with roots in the homestead era. In October of 1946, the couple’s son Charles Timothy arrived, right on the baby boom timeline of that generation. The boy shared his first name with his father and paternal grandfather. They called him Tim, to avoid confusion with grandfather Charlie and father Charles.

  With little Tim in hand, Charles and Betty moved back to Ainsworth. They’d be there for ten years. Charles took a position with the Hagel family lumberyard. Three more sons followed: Thomas Leo in November of 1948, Michael Patrick in 1950, and James Joseph in 1953. Family, the Catholic Church, school, and the American Legion defined the Hagels as they grew up among the thousand souls of dusty Ainsworth, a cattle town that proclaimed itself the “Middle of Nowhere.”40 Shadows of long-gone Indian braves stalked the low, windy sandhills and rustled the dry, waving prairie grass. And if you looked up in the cornflower blue dome of the sky, you could see the thin contrails of Curtis LeMay’s jet bombers—some launched from Offutt Air Force Base—the younger, faster siblings of the B-24s dad Charles flew in the world war.

  Boys experience life as it is. For Tim, Tom, and their brothers, Ainsworth felt just fine. Thoughtful journalist Myra MacPherson later characterized it as a “hard-scrabble childhood,” and maybe it was. The Hagels worked from a young age. Beginning at age seven, Tim started his winter mornings by walking south to the Chicago and Northwestern railroad station. As a train rumbled by in the predawn gloom, somebody tossed out packs of Omaha World-Herald newspapers. Tim Hagel grabbed his share, clipped the binding wires, loaded them on his sled, then made deliveries around town.41 In Ainsworth, children did that. Nobody thought it unfair or harsh.

  Writer Carlyne Berens tagged the Hagel upbringing as a “Beaver Cleaver kind of world,” echoing the popular 1957–63 television series. Perhaps that fit, too. The brothers played war, rode horses, hunted snakes, and threw around the baseball and the football.42 As Wally and Beaver did on many a TV show, the young Hagel boys “messed around.” But Beaver grew up in suburbia, not on the open prairie. June didn’t have to work outside the home. And Ward never went to the American Legion to say nothing much, nor did he ever take a drink, nor worry about his next paycheck.

  In 1957, the same year so many American households met Beaver Cleaver, something went sideways in the Hagel family. For Charles, the occasional shots of liquor grew more frequent, maybe too frequent. Earning a living at the Ainsworth lumberyard became difficult, a “hostile workplace” in today’s verbiage, although nobody in Nebraska would have considered such a description back then. Tom Hagel later described his dad’s situation: “He was ill-treated by the man he worked for and refused to see it.”43 That unforgiving superior was Charles Dean Hagel’s own father, Charlie. They just could not work together.

  So the moves began. Charlie sent his son Charles to the family’s other lumber store in Rushville in 1957. Handsome, engaging, with a winning smile, Charles had skills. “Dad could sell ice to Eskimos,” his son Mike remembered. True enough, but in the end, Charles was about as popular as you’d expect the boss’s son to be. He couldn’t fit in. Frustrated, he cut ties with the family business.

  More jobs and more moves followed in short order: Cox Lumber Company in Scottsbluff later in 1957, the same firm’s place in nearby Terrytown in 1958, and then E.S. Clark Lumber Company in York in 1960. The boys switched schools year after year. The family moved in and out of houses, to include a six-month stint all packed into a basement efficiency apartment in York. Dad Charles struggled to keep his series of jobs. Mom Betty worked. “We didn’t have anything,” recalled the eldest Hagel son.44

  In all of that shuttling around, Tim became Chuck. A Rushville football coach casually renamed him when he heard the eleven-year-old’s full name. Determined to make the team, the boy went with it. He’d be Chuck Hagel from that day onward.

  With their nomadic life, the four brothers grew close. Chuck was the natural leader, the one with the good grades, the top athlete. When playing army, “Chuck was always the general,” brother Mike remembered. “The rest of us were privates.” Brother Tom, always a quick study and a cut-up, rebelled a bit, frustrating his busy mother and upsetting his distracted father. But Tom respected Chuck.45 Somehow, through it all, the oldest brother just kept doing things right.

  In 1962, the family relocated to Columbus. Betty got a good job as a secretary at the Rural Electrification Association. Charles left the lumberyards behind and gave it a go at Gerhold Concrete Company. But he was drinking more. There were some binges and ugly interludes. For whatever reason, Charles took out his frustrations on Tom. Betty and even sixteen year-old Chuck tried to intervene. After each go-round, things would subside. But these seemed like truces at best. You never knew when to expect another bad day.

  Christmas Eve of 1962 turned out to be one of them. Tom and his youngest brother, Jim, were horsing around. They knocked down the Christmas tree. Dad Charles didn’t like it at all. He’d been drinking. He chased Tom through the house. Bitter words followed from all involved, the father and the sons. When the uproar subsided, Charles went upstairs to sleep it off. He never woke up.

  The medical report read “heart attack.” But an empty bottle of sleeping pills hinted at something darker.46 Suicide? Who really knew? Still, as with so many old soldiers, you had to wonder. “Broken heart” would have been just as fair a verdict on Charles Hagel. His own father had given up on him, he couldn’t keep a job anymore, the wife and sons he loved had been embarrassed by his drinking—and God knows what he saw or did out on all of those bombing missions in the Pacific. There wasn’t enough whiskey on earth to wash all of that away.

  It was a very sad Christmas that year. Betty Dunn Hagel, always made of sterner stuff, pulled the family together. She kept working, and made it clear that her sons needed to step up. They did. All four boys took a series of jobs, and not for spending money, either. Their salaries went toward the family’s needs. Work, church, school—the Hagels stuck to their familiar routines. But they didn’t visit the American Legion post. Not anymore.

  Chuck graduated from St. Bonaventure High School in 1964 as student council president and football stand-out. He earned a scholarship to Wayne State College. Tom managed to get “encouraged” out of the Catholic high school—too much comedy schtick and too many questions in theology class. He was so smart that he read encyclopedias for fun and cruised through public high school, skating along right above the bare minimums, but well on track to graduate in May of 1967. Mike and Jim hung in there, too. The four industrious brothers reflected the character and love of Betty Hagel. As Mike Hagel put it: “We are who we are because of that woman.”47

  Yet at every meal there was an empty chair at the table. Each passing year allowed the sons to put aside the memories of the rough days. Instead, they remembered Charles Dean Hagel the combat veteran, the patriot, the guy who worked hard, the parent who taught them all to love their country and go when called. The missing man, their fathe
r’s hole, affected all four sons. They owed him, and each other, and their mom, and Nebraska, and the country.

  Chuck Hagel didn’t do all that much after high school. An injury ended the Wayne State football opportunity, and an attempt to try again at Kearney State flopped, too. He went to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and enrolled at the Brown Institute of Radio and Television, a technical school. He earned a certificate and in 1967 found work at KLMS, a radio station in Lincoln, Nebraska. He liked the job, but he knew he wasn’t living up to his potential, not even close. “I couldn’t stay disciplined or focused,” he said. “Those were kind of lost years.”48 Restless, he didn’t know what he wanted to do.

  The Platte County draft board solved Chuck Hagel’s problem. Alma Hasselbach had run the board for decades. She contacted Chuck and warned him to get enrolled in college or he’d soon be wearing a uniform. For a lot of young men in America in 1967, that amounted to a lethal threat. For Chuck Hagel, it seemed like an opportunity. Brother Tom, about to graduate from high school, thought it sounded good to him, too.49 They could go in as a package deal, the brothers Hagel as a team, just as they’d been for years back home. What better way to honor their father, make their mother proud, and do their part for America?

  So Chuck volunteered for the draft, and reported to the military induction office in Omaha in April. Brother Tom was right behind him, as soon as he graduated from high school in late May. Some people who heard what the Hagels did, especially years after the Vietnam War ended in misery, figured the brothers as rural rubes from what one reporter described as “a land of superpatriots.” Yet both Chuck and Tom read widely growing up. Chuck subscribed to Time and Newsweek and the family dinner table often featured serious discussions of politics and history. Their parents were Republicans, like most in Nebraska, so Tom, of course, declared himself a Democrat.50 Neither brother could or would claim to be an expert on the ongoing Vietnam conflict. Then again, in 1967 America, who was?