One interesting comment from Andy about movies of WWI aircraft is that all of them since “The Blue Max” have had aerial sequences that looked like video games.  The reality is that flight is much more fluid and graceful, and no recent movie has captured that.

And the SPAD has colors on it now, honoring James Norman Hall.

Well, despite what Hollywood thinks, you don’t have to specifically show blood and gore to be horrifying.  And you don’t have to be horrifying to convince the reader that something was an unpleasant experience.  If anything, it’s counterproductive even with adults because most adults, especially if they’ve watched a few violent movies, have learned ways to talk and think about horrible, disgusting things while blocking the horror of it out of their minds.

Anyway, there are some people who understand that while children don’t need to know the details, they do need to know history, from people who were there.  Especially since a 17-year-old counts as a child, but an 18-year-old could end up in a place like Iwo Jima.

It sounds like there is someone already interested in publishing this book if I can write it well enough.  So this is turning into a big project, and I’m going to take a vacation from this blog to concentrate on it.

But it sounds like what was more important was that it was hard to fly from Saipan without going past Iwo Jima, and the Japanese forces there would let Tokyo know that a bombing flight was on its way.  There is much less point in bombing at all if they know you’re coming.  So they had to stop Iwo Jima from being an early warning system.

The Japanese survived all the bombing because they were dug in on the island, living in 14 miles’ worth of holes, tunnels, and caves, some big enough to stand up and run through.  The only way to take the island was personal, on-the-ground fighting for each hole and tunnel entrance.  As the Japanese did not expect to live, but had been ordered to kill 10 Americans each before they died, it was kill or be killed.

It seems you are safe from the air if you can dig yourself far enough into the earth.  But you have to watch out for those Marines.

In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away….

It results from this that perfection of invention touches hands with absence of invention, as if that line which the human eye will follow with effortless delight were a line that had not been invented but simply discovered, had in the beginning been hidden by nature and in the end been found by the engineer.  There is an ancient myth about the image asleep in the block of marble until it is carefully disengaged by the sculptor….

In this spirit do engineers, physicists concerned with thermodynamics, and the swarm of preoccupied draughtsmen tackle their work.  In appearance, but only in appearance, they seem to be polishing surfaces and refining away angles, easing this joint or stabilizing that wing, rendering these parts invisible, so that in the end there is no longer a wing hooked to a framework but a form flawless in its perfection, completely disengaged from its matrix, a sort of spontaneous whole, its parts mysteriously fused together and resembling in their unity a poem.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars, trans. Lewis Galantiere (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1939), 42

Little by little the machine will become part of humanity.  Read the history of the railways in France, and doubtless elsewhere too:  they had all the trouble in the world to tame the people of our villages. The locomotive was an iron monster.  Time had to pass before men forgot what it was made of.  Mysteriously, life began to run through it, and now it is wrinkled and old.  What is it today for the villager except a humble friend who calls every evening at six?

The sailing vessel itself was once  a machine born of the calculations of engineers, yet it does not disturb our philosophers.  The sloop took its place in the speech of men.  There is a poetry of sailing as old as the world.   There have always been seamen in recorded time.  The man who assumes that there is an essential difference between the sloop and the airplane lacks historical perspective.

Every machine will gradually take on this patina and lose its identity in its function.

–Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Wind, Sand, and Stars, trans. Lewis Galantiere (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1939), 46-47

One fine day we flew our large battle plane to entertain the English with our bombs.  We reached the target and dropped the first bombs.  It is, naturally, very interesting to watch the results of such a mission.   At least one always likes to see the explosion.  But my large battle plane, which was well-suited for carrying bombs, had a stupid peculiarity that made it hard to see the explosion of the bombs dropped, for immediately after the drop the airplane moved over the target and covered it completely with its wings.  This always made me angry, since one  had so little fun because of it.  When the bomb bursts below and one sees the lovely gray-white cloud of the explosion near the target, it is very pleasing.

–Manfred von Richthofen, The Red Baron: The Fabled Ace’s Story in His Own Words, ed. Stanley M. Ulanoff, trans. Peter Kilduff (New York: Ace Books, 1969), 38

This reminds me of the Lafayette Escadrille, US pilots fighting for France before the US entered WWI.  As the very first US fighter pilots, they set a lot of precedents, and they were the generation whose stories a Battle of Britain pilot would have grown up with.  I think it summarizes their reputation to note that their mascots, named Whiskey and Soda, were two actual lion cubs.

I think it makes sense that when spending the day faced with life and death, mindless entertainment isn’t going to be a big enough distraction, and your mind would be too tired for any mental challenge.  Besides, what game or puzzle wouldn’t seem trivial in comparison?  I can imagine there would be only two choices: focus on the God you might be about to meet, or do the most forceful things you can to get your mind off any subject that reminds you of Him.