The Sacrifices of Those Who Came Before Us
One of the most colorful stories my dad used to tell me about growing up in West Virginia (there were many) was a time in the mid-1920's when, one Sunday, a bunch of Model T cars pulled up and parked on the road in front of the house. Out came Ku Klux Klansmen, in their Klan garb with hoods over their heads to hide their identity. They carried makeshift torches, and had come to burn the home of this family of "cat lickers," as Catholics were often called by bigots back then. These Klansmen simply had no Blacks or Jews nearby to harass, so they'd come after the Catholics. My grandfather sent my grandmother and all the kids to the basement, and went to where his rifles and shotguns were kept, upstairs in the room with a window facing the road. He opened the window just as the first Klansman was putting his hand on the iron gate, and the click-clack of a lever-action rifle caught everyone's attention. My father was watching it with his brothers from the basement window, and they heard their father shout from the top window, "I may not get all of ya, but the first one through that gate gets it!" The Klansmen conferred with each other for a minute, then got back in their cars and left.
Life at Meadow Farm wasn't easy, but the family had a farm, and on nice days after the chores were done my father fished in the part of Sleepy Creek that ran under a bridge just down the road. An apple orchard was at the crest of the hill behind the house, and my dad used to tell me how, when he was eight years old, he would grab an apple off a tree as he sauntered through the orchard on his way to a little schoolhouse, where he had a crush on his attractive young teacher.
In 1929 the bank foreclosed on Meadow Farm, which my grandfather had mortgaged to pay his siblings their share after the untimely death of my great-grandfather. My dad's family lost everything in the foreclosure, and they moved to nearby Martinsburg where they would face the Great Depression as sharecroppers.
The local Diocese offered some help, including tuition-free schooling for my dad and his brothers, but the family was very poor throughout the 1930's. My grandmother, a Pennsylvania native who had moved with her family from Somerset County to Berkeley Springs not long before marrying my grandfather in 1913, had inherited polycystic kidney disease and was mostly bed-ridden by the time my dad reached his teens. He was very close to his mother, and his faith in God was reinforced by hers. The priest would come by on Sundays to give her communion, since she couldn't physically make it to church for services.
When I was growing up, I would say "oh no... not another damn story about The Great Depression," but later in life I would walk these grounds with my father, he showing me where he could always find a turtle as a kid -- and sure enough it was still (in 1997) a little spring in the now-abandoned yard of the Meadow Farm house, its sturdy frame still standing. "And over here, one time my kid brother Ed was playing and he damn near got bitten by a Copperhead!" The stories I'd grown up with became vivid for me, and my respect for what my dad went through so early in life started a much deeper inquiry into that period of America's history. I have asked myself a thousand times over the past 30 or so years, "what was it really like back then?"
In 1935 my dad graduated high school and, with his mother's blessings, went to Baltimore to study in a Catholic seminary for priesthood. The next four years of his life were spent in great devotion and intense study, and it wasn't until 1939 that it occurred to him that he was absolutely, positively not going to live the rest of his life in celibacy. He had a meeting with the Monsignor, who told him he owed nothing to this institution but a promise that he would do well and do good in the world. He left with a degree in Philosophy, and became a teacher at a one-room schoolhouse back in West Virginia.
His older brother, Peter William Atkinson ("Bill," he was called) had gone into the Army Air Corps first as an aircraft mechanic and then entered pilot training. Bill had lost a school year to typhoid fever when he was very young, so he and my dad were in the same class until graduation, sitting next to each other each day and fiercely competing in academics. Now in their 20's, there was no way my dad was going to accept his brother being a fighter pilot while he worked as a schoolteacher, so dad joined the Navy and went to Pensacola as an aviation cadet. Their younger brother Ed, more physically powerful than either of them but with a gentle soul my dad often spoke of, saying, "if only one of us was going to survive the war, it should have been Ed," enlisted in the Army as a typist before finally being accepted into pilot training. In the Spring of 1941, the New York Times ran a story about the three of them. They were the first three brothers to become U.S. military pilots, and as Hitler rampaged in Europe and Japan ravaged China, everyone knew a war was coming so we needed more stories about farm boys manning u
General Claire Chennault, a veteran World War I fighter pilot, came to Mitchell Field on Long Island in early 1941 looking to recruit military pilots to go with him to Burma as paid civilian mercenaries. Known as the American Volunteer Group or AVG, they were funded and approved by President Roosevelt and their mission would be to push back against Japanese expansion. Pearl Harbor was still months away when the AVG, my uncle Bill on its roster of pilots, started setting up in Rangoon in the summer of 1941. The AVG wasn't yet known by the name which would make the squadron famous, the "Flying Tigers," nor had the squadron yet seen combat, when Bill's P-40 disintegrated one morning during a power dive. He was testing the plane after maintenance, and the exact cause of the mechanical failure would never be known. He died on October 25th, 1941, at age 25.
The news arrived at my grandparents' house in a Western Union message, and it hit the family hard. They had lost their youngest daughter Ruthie to diptheria in 1934, so eight children was now down to six. My dad used to tell me how his brother's death, plus the many deaths of his peers in Navy flight training, took away a lot of his love of flying. Flying had been a romance with the sky for him since his first flight as a kid at the County Fair in Martinsburg, where he'd been the passenger of a barnstormer; but losses were mounting.
Now a commissioned officer and a flight instructor at Anacostia Naval Air Station in Washington DC, dad was able to get back to Martinsburg whenever he had leave. Ed finished his flight training in Alabama and in 1942 was sent to Trinidad to fly anti-submarine missions in Bell P-39's. German U-boats had been sinking oil tankers coming out of nearby Venezuela, but this wartime duty was pretty light -- Ed never saw a sub, and worked a lot on his harmonica playing.
Late in 1942, Ed's luck changed. He was ordered to pack up for a transfer to Kunming, China, where the former AVG "Flying Tigers" had now been absorbed back into the Army Air Corps as the 74th, 75th and 76th Pursuit Squadrons of the 14th Air Force. He was told he couldn't have a last visit to West Virginia to see his family, but when he wrote directly to General Hap Arnold, Commander of the Army Air Corps, explaining that his chances of coming home alive were slim, the leave was granted and he saw his family in Martinsburg before shipping out. At the end of March, 1943, after three months of intensive combat missions, Ed's P-40 was shot down on a low-level strafing mission. He had just turned 23 and had just been promoted to the rank of Captain. He was classified MIA until two years later, when U.S. forces found his remains buried next to the wreck of his aircraft. The plane he was flying was a veteran of the same initial shipment of 100 P-40's which the Flying Tigers had made operational in Rangoon a year and a half earlier -- it was from his brother's squadron.
In the letters written by my grandmother after losing Ed, she refers to her two heroic boys as "my tigers." She gave the house in Martinsburg -- bought with the payouts from their insurance policies -- the name "Eagle's Rest" and she lived the remainder of her life there. That house is still in the family today.
Later in 1943 it was my dad's turn to join a combat squadron. He would have gone home as last surviving son, but he had a younger brother -- my uncle Bud -- who was about twelve at the time. Initially ordered to the Pacific, dad asked for and received land-based anti submarine duty, flying twin-engine Lockheed Ventura aircraft. In 1944 he joined Navy Patrol Bombing Squadron 127 at their base in Kenitra, Morocco, and for the remainder of the war patrolled the Straights of Gibraltar and a vast swath of ocean off Northwest Africa. He told me many times how badly he'd wanted to find a U-boat and blow it out of the water, but how after the war he was glad he'd never found one. He liked the fact that he'd never killed anyone, and spoke of how his brother Ed would ask the Chaplain, after a mission, to give blessings to the souls of the enemy combatants who had fallen victim to his guns. Many years later, I would sit in the attic of "Eagle's Rest" and read all the letters written from 1939 to 1943 between my dad and his brothers. All the stories he'd told me were right there -- in their handwriting, inside old envelopes stored in the wooden chest that had been sent back from China with Ed's personal belongings in it.
The stories of bravery and sacrifice from my family are no different from the stories of hundreds of thousands of other families who have given their own flesh and blood so that the United States -- The American Experiment -- can continue. I've taken a great deal of time in my life to ponder that sacrifice, and to try and uncover what it really means. What's it like to strap yourself into the cockpit of a plane, ten thousand miles from your West Virginia home, and take off on a mission with no better odds of survival than playing a round of Russian Roulette? They accepted such risks so that future generations could have what they'd had: a free country.
In recent years, however, we've been tormented by messages which are completely at odds with what my uncles died for. Can you imagine a Lieutenant yelling to his men as the ramp drops on a landing craft at Omaha Beach on D-Day, "OK, MEN, GO HIT THAT BEACH AND FIGHT WITH ALL YOU'VE GOT -- SO SOMEDAY A U.S. PRESIDENT CAN COME TO THE CEMETERY HERE AND CALL YOU SUCKERS AND LOSERS!" It is simply too much to take. We cannot allow ourselves to be guilty of tolerating it. We cannot allow ourselves to become exactly what we were fighting against. We owe it not only to ourselves and future generations to be brave enough to resist it; we truly owe it to the memory of our fallen to be as brave as they were, and resist. The fight for freedom is never over, and it will never reward cowards and go-alongs.