Excerpts

Brave Men, Gentle Heroes American Fathers and Sons in World War II and Vietnam Chapter One "His death affected me greatly." Mike Novosel Sr. MIKE NOVOSEL SR. RETIRED CAREER MILITARY OFFICER FORT WALTON BEACH, FLORIDA CAPTAIN, UNITED STATES ARMY AIR FORCES, WORLD WAR II CHIEF WARRANT OFFICER THREE, UNITED STATES ARMY, VIETNAM From June 1944 to March 1945, American B-29s, known as Superfortresses, carried out daylight precision bombing raids over Japan with little success. High winds at thirty thousand feet, as well as Japanese fighter planes and antiaircraft artillery, frustrated American efforts to cripple Japanese war production. On March 9 over three hundred B-29s of Major General Curtis E. LeMay's XXI Bomber Command tried a different tactic. Flying at low altitude to avoid the jet stream, flying at night to minimize the effectiveness of enemy flak and fighters, the bombers carpeted Tokyo with 1,665 tons of incendiaries. Although the targeting was anything but precise, it did not need to be: Factories were dispersed throughout the city, and in the process of setting the city on fire, the bombers laid waste to twenty-two major industrial facilities. Even so, disrupting Japanese manufacturing was not the sole purpose of the attack; American war planners intended it also to convey to the empire's population the price of continuing resistance. The signal sent was a horrific one: As many as a hundred thousand people died as a result of that one night of bombing. A quarter of a million buildings were destroyed. Night incendiary bombings continued through March, and then in April, emboldened by new complements of P-51 fighter escort aircraft, LeMay instituted nighttime and daylight raids that dropped a carefully prepared mix of ordnance -- as Michael J. Novosel Sr., a pilot of one of the attacking B-29s, explains. The raids continued into August, halted only by the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the resultant Japanese surrender. Generally, presidential inaugural speeches are made on January 20 and then forgotten on the twenty-first. But I didn't forget John F. Kennedy's. Kennedy was a political breath of fresh air. True, he was a politician, but he was of my generation. If you were one of the voters of that time, you saw the change that he was trying to bring about -- a change in attitude, a change in doing things. I just liked what he stood for. "Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans" -- that's what I mean: that torch was now given to us, not the old fogeys; we're the new youngsters in charge of this country -- "a new generation of Americans -- born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage -- and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this Nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world." And I often want to say in addition that our generation was reared in the crucible of the Great Depression. I wish he had mentioned that. The Depression was great training -- great training in survival and in getting along -- for winning that damn war. Everybody that fought in World War II was the product of the Great Depression. I was born in '22. I was not materially affected by the Depression, but I saw all around me what it did. I lived in Etna, Pennsylvania, a small town just outside of Pittsburgh. My father had his own business there: He was a shoemaker. He was born in Croatia and had learned his trade as an apprentice in Vienna. He prospered during the thirties because people were not buying shoes, they were repairing them. The people during that Great Depression would never think of throwing a pair of shoes away just because there was a hole in it. Because we were able to sustain ourselves in quite a nice way, I wouldn't even think about missing a meal. But my mother, who was also from Croatia, always made it known at lunchtime that there was an extra bowl of soup for whoever was hungry. We knew people were hungry -- we saw people living in tar-paper shacks on the edge of town. So every day someone would come to the door. But only one. There would never be a clamoring -- "Hey, you gave him something, how about me?" Nothing like that. We were disciplined in those days. The Depression welded us together. We knew that we were all in the same boat. Sure, some of us may have had a dollar or two more than our neighbor, but we didn't gloat about it. You knew you had to cooperate to get along. And this I found to extend right into the service life. The cohesiveness of a unit is amplified when people are out to help one another, not stab one another. I made my first model airplane at the age of twelve. There were two of us that worked together on this -- Louis Duderstadt, a good German friend of mine, and I. I must have made a dozen or more with him. He always completed his before I completed mine, but his were not as fancy-looking and not as detailed as mine would be. I think the models cost us a dime. It was the rubber-band variety. Later on, my younger brother and I actually made a trainer in our cellar. When I say a "trainer," it certainly had no engine. But it was an airplane we made out of wood that had movable ailerons and movable rudders, and we would pretend that we were flying this thing. He became a pilot, too. He flew P-51s in World War II, when I was flying the bombers. My father was successful in that we were never hungry and always had a nice home to live in. But he was not wealthy enough to afford the Pennsylvania higher-educational system ... Brave Men, Gentle Heroes American Fathers and Sons in World War II and Vietnam . Copyright © by Michael Takiff. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Brave Men, Gentle Heroes: American Fathers and Sons in World War II and Vietnam by Michael Takiff All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.