Dead at 24

Forgot to publish this! 

For the week of Memorial Day

Today, May 30, is the real Memorial Day, as my grandparents assured me.  They hated that all our holidays were turned into three-day weekends, erasing their importance and meaning.  Memorial Day used to be a day everyone took off from work specifically to take them out of their ordinary lives to remember and honor those of their fellow Americans who no longer had lives, ordinary or otherwise, because they had been killed in our wars. There were parades, speeches, prayers, visits to cemeteries.

Oh, well.

Then 2nd Lt. Stiles when a B-17 co-pilot.

Here's one of my relatives from the Colorado branch of the family killed in World War II, lst Lt. George Wilbert "Bert" Stiles.  He flew 35 missions as the co-pilot of a B-17 with the 401st Bomb Squadron of the 91st Bomb Group from March through August, 1944, then volunteered for a fighter squadron flew P-51s with the 505th fighter Squadron of the 339th Fighter Group, which he joined in late October, 1944.  He was killed November 26, 1944 on his 16th mission in a dogfight with FW-190s over Hanover, which was defended by 400 Luftwaffe fighters.  He is credited with shooting down one FW before he failed to pull out of a dive while pursuing another, probably because G forces caused him to black out.  That was a common occurrence in those days before the invention of the G-suit. He was 24.

 Bert's passion was to be a writer. The Saturday Evening Post  published four of his short stories about life as a forest ranger in Estes Park, and he had others published in Liberty, The Writer and The American Mercury. While in England, he wrote articles for the Daily Mail as well as Yank and Air Force magazines.

I've read “Portrait of a Guy Thinking About an Island” which was published in Air Force, November, 1944; “Situation Normal” also in Air Force, February, 1945; “It’s a Sad World, Cardwell” published in The American Mercury, April, 1942;  “The Case of the Lucky Amateur” published in The Writer, June, 1943; “Solo” published in Yank, October 15, 1943; “You Can’t Win with Women” published in The Saturday Evening Post, November 22, 1941 (guys have been writing the same lament forever!); and “The Ranger Is a Dame” published in The Saturday Evening Post, February 27, 1943, about a female forest ranger (Do take note trad wife enthusiasts: even back in the good old days you'd be hard-pressed to find one. Women worked "men's" jobs even then.).

 I think Bert would have been a successful and popular writer had he lived.  He had an easy, friendly, conversational style, evidenced in his autobiographical Serenade to the Big Bird. If you want to know what a difficult job it was to fly a B-17 in formation, give it a read.

I can't help but wonder how much talent we lost in that stupid war that was none of our business.  Even the Pacific war, where the Japs attacked us first, we could have avoided if we had not started the Spanish-American war, and thus acquired the Philippines and Guam.  So the fighting in East Asia wouldn't have affected us. And had we adhered to the Neutrality Acts, we could have avoided any involvement in the European fracas.  Yeah, fracas.  Those Euros are always going at each other; they're doing it today.  It's what they love best, slaughtering each other.  Not our business.