Prof. Thomas Childers's "Wings Of Morning": The Story Of The Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany In World War II (Scharmassing, Umkreis Regensburg)

The 10 Lost Lives Of the Black Cat
Postage Stamp Honors B-24 Liberator Shot Down Just Short of WWII Victory


By Neely Tucker
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, July 30, 2005

Howard Goodner plunged out of the Black Cat, the last American bomber shot down over Germany in World War II, early on the morning of April 21, 1945. The B-24 Liberator was hit at 22,000 feet and broke into pieces.

Goodner, just 21, had no parachute. He came down in a free fall alongside bombs and oxygen tanks, spinning toward the Bavarian village of Scharmassing.

He landed in a field outside town, his body striking the earth so hard that it left a crater nearly six inches deep.

Maria Wittig, then 19, saw him there. He was athletic looking, fair-skinned, handsome. Long fingers.

"I can see him before me," she told an interviewer, a half century later, so clear was her memory. Shown a picture of the entire crew, she picked out Goodner immediately. "That's him," she said, her voice breaking.

The story of Goodner, the Black Cat and Maria Wittig is 60 years old. Other wars have come and gone, but the story has never really died, living on in the small shadows of the greatest generation.

Yesterday at a ceremony in Vienna, the Black Cat was immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp, that diminutive marker of historical American moments large and small.

Part of a series of 10 commemorative aviation stamps, this one shows the Black Cat still intact, still in flight, over the pastoral fields where it would crash. Nothing on the stamp denotes the plane's tragic end.

Today, when more than 60 million of the stamps go on sale at post offices across the nation, customers might assume the aircraft pictured on it is a generic model of a plane that has long since faded from use.

Only a few know its story of heartbreak, and how it has continued to reverberate in the lives of a few for so long.

Two of the 12 crewmen on board survived. The other 10 died upon impact, none having lived to be 30.

Their families were informed of their loss on May 8, V-E Day, when the rest of the nation rejoiced.

"The plane being shot down at the very end of the war -- it has haunted my family for so many years, and I finally went to Germany and found the crash site," says Thomas Childers, Goodner's nephew, whose 1995 book, "Wings of Morning," chronicled the story of the plane and its crew. "This farmer started scratching around in the dirt, and he pulled out a 50-caliber machine gun bullet. I was speechless. Every year when they plow, parts of the plane come to the surface."

"My family just never got over it," says Robert Layton in a telephone interview from Indianapolis yesterday. He is the cousin of the doomed plane's pilot, Richard "Dickie" Farrington.

"There's still a lot of resentment against the Axis side. I won't drive a German or Japanese car to this day. My aunt, Richard's mother, never could move out of her house until the day she died a few years ago.

"She wasn't mental, but she just couldn't get it out of her head that Dickie might have been in an institution all these years. She thought he'd come home and she would have moved. He'd never be able to find us."

If not for Childers's curiosity, the Black Cat's history would have almost certainly been lost. After his grandmother died in the small town of Cleveland, Tenn., in 1991, Childers went to clear out her house before it was sold.

He found a musty case of letters -- more than 300 -- that Howard Goodner, her son, had sent during the war. Childers was a historian of German culture and politics by then, and to find such a cache of original documents from World War II was striking.

He put down his academic research and took up the story of his uncle's flight crew. Among them, John Murphy, Jack Perella, Al Seraydarian, Goodner, Farrington -- they were young men from Brooklyn, Peoria, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, a cross-section of mid-century America.

In his research, he discovered that the Black Cat was the last bomber shot down over Germany before peace was declared, lending the story its tragic footnote. When he discovered that the crew wasn't originally scheduled to fly that day -- and that bad weather should have forced them to cancel before takeoff -- it only added to the pathos.

He wound up in Bavaria, where he met Wittig. He did not tell her that Goodner was his uncle, only that he was researching the history of the plane. When she tapped Goodner's picture, as the airman who came to earth in the field, he felt a tingle on the back of his neck.

The book's 1995 publication brought some critical acclaim but not much in the way of sales. It may have reached its most widespread moment in pop culture in 2002, when best-selling historian Stephen Ambrose was found to have plagiarized a passage from the book in "The Wild Blue," his history of B-24 bomber crews.

But the surviving members of the 466th Bomb Group, of which the Black Cat was a part, began petitioning the U.S. Postal Service to memorialize the Black Cat on a stamp. It was a long shot.

"We get 50,000 people a year who say, 'I've got the best idea ever for a stamp,' " says David Failor, executive director of stamp services for the U.S. Postal Service. "We actually release about 25 or 30 subjects for commemorative stamps each year. You can figure the math."

The ceremony yesterday marked the official release of the stamp's one-year run. Looking at the plane on the stamp -- the sunlight warm on its silver wings, a river glinting in the green fields below -- lends a bittersweet irony to one of Goodner's last letters home.

He was on a three-day break at a resort in Mundesley, on the British shore. There were dining rooms -- not chow lines -- soft beds, hot water, a golf course. He walked on the beach, played darts at a local pub. He loved it.

"Just hoping the war ends soon," he wrote to his family, "and we can all get home again."

The letter was dated April 8, 1945.

Howard Goodner had 13 days to live.

A review of Wings of Morning By Charles McCain
Wings of Morning: the Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down Over Germany in World War II by Thomas Childers is a good book and I was impressed the first time I read it a few years ago. The second time around, however, I wasn't as impressed but it's still a fine book. The author, who is one of the top German history scholars in the US, is an academic and, unfortunately, writes like one. Occasionally I had to hitch up the mules and plow through a chapter.

The author's uncle, Howard Goodner, was a radio operator aboard the Black Cat, a B-24 heavy bomber of the US 8th Airforce. His plane was shot down over Germany. Nothing unusual there. The US 8th Airforce took horrendous losses in planes and crew. But this particular bomber happened to be the last American bomber shot down over Germany. Two men were able to bail out, the others were not.

Of the remaining crew, all died - but two of the men who died, including the author's uncle, did not die when the plane crashed. They were thrown out of the plane somehow and fell to their deaths from an undetermined height. Crewmen could not wear their parachutes at their duty stations because their duty stations were so small there wasn't room. Sadly, these men did not have their parachutes on when they were thrown out of the plane. Howard Goodner's body hit the ground with such force that it made an eight inch indentation in the ground in the shape of a human body.

This book is not a history but a reconstruction of Uncle Howard's life in the service as well as an account of the author's long search to discover what exactly happened to the uncle he never knew. He recreated his late uncle's time in the US Army Air Force from letters, official records, and interviews with B-24 veterans, members from families of the other men killed, and older Germans who were children at the time and remembered the plane crashing. Woven into the narrative is how the author's family and the families of the other men who perished when the bomber went down had dealt with their losses.

Dealing with the loss of a loved one is brutal and in my own life experience it's not something you ever "get over". You come to acceptance but not "closure" - which is an annoying and stupid word to apply to such a situation. For the author's family and the families of the other men who perished, the emotional burden of loss was made all the greater because of the youth of each of the men. Howard, the author's uncle, was only 20.

Was it more painful for some families than others? Yes. But there is only one reason which could make the loss of one's son painful beyond endurance: that he have been the only child. In the families of two crewmen, that was the case. The parents never got over the loss.

That two men survived the crash, made the death of the others all the more bitter.

Narrative non-fiction is theoretically non-fiction written using the techniques of suspense fiction to keep the plot moving as well as keep the readers attention. I wish I could say the author did this successfully. Unfortunately I cannot. He went beyond using the techniques of fiction to actually fictionalizing parts of the narrative.

The most egregious example is this: he describes the last minutes of the final flight and states specifically where his uncle was sitting and what he was doing. Yet the author had no way of learning this information since of the two men who survived, one was the tail gunner and the other was the navigator. Because of the layout of the aircraft, these two men were at the extreme opposite ends of the plane. They could not have seen Howard Goodner.

Flak hit the port wing which broke off and the plane went into a tailspin. That fact was in a crew debriefing from a ship which saw the Black Cat get hit and and go down. But little else is known and the two men who survived remembered almost nothing. So I have to say that making up what people are thinking and doing when you don't actually know what they were doing or thinking, isn't kosher. There are a lot of instances like that so the book is neither fish nor fowl.

It's an OK read so I give it three stars but don't run through traffic to buy a copy.

Prof. Thomas Childers is the Sheldon and Lucy Hackney Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania
http://www.history.upenn.edu/faculty/childers.shtml

Visions of Space - Robert Hughes

First aired BBC4, 2003; ABC, 2004 In 'Visions of Space', Robert Hughes tackles the work and lives of three remarkable 20th-century architects: Albert Speer, Mies van der Rohe, and Antonio Gaudi - whose work did so much to shape the modern world.
Hughes looks at how each one used space in different ways to express our response, respectively, to the power of religion (Gaudi), the power of the State (Speer), and the power of the corporation (Mies van der Rohe).

Episode 1 of 3
Antoni Gaudi: God's Architect
Robert Hughes returns to Spain to explore the legacy of Antoni Gaudi, the last great cathedral builder of the 20th century.
Gaudi was an intensely Catholic celibate who, despite his austere life, created some of the most sensuous buildings ever known. On his journey through Gaudi's life and work, Hughes (an ex-Catholic himself) explains how a man as religious and conservative as Gaudi could become such an innovative 20th-century giant.

Episode 2 of 3
Albert Speer: Size Matters
In 1979 Robert Hughes met and interviewed Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, for his landmark series, Shock of the New. Speer died shortly afterwards but in 2002, Hughes discovered the long-lost tape of that conversation and was inspired to travel back to Germany to examine the legacy of a man who was, for a brief period, the most powerful architect in the world.

It covers a very much overlooked subject of urban planning and housing under Hitler’s regime.Speer’s aborted designs bring a fascinating insight into the manipulation of style, space, and size to achieve political and ideological goals. After watching this episode, the intelligent viewer will undoubtedly become more aware of instances in daily life where grandiosity (physical or otherwise) is used as a subconscious means of fostering collectivism and avoiding criticism.

Hughes turns his keen eye and incisive mind to the life and work of Albert Speer, confidant of Adolf Hitler and the man chosen to construct the sorts of buildings and stadiums suitable to accompany the Nazi leader’s dreams of world domination.

Hughes ponders the role that Speer, with his imposing, austere design style, his “stripped down, modernised classicism”, played in shaping the 20th century and wonders what might have been if his side had won. He also examines the claims that Speer, despite his subsequent denials, had a role to play in the atrocities committed against the Jewish population. Hughes’s profile is aided by the discovery of an old and long-presumed lost audio tape of an interview that he conducted with the ageing architect just before his death in 1981. Touring the little that remains of Speer’s work in Germany, Hughes pronounces it to be “devoid of all fantasy, except fantasies of power . . . Its elegance soon became a crushing orderliness. It was about architecture as ideology: function, obedience, efficiency.”

Episode 3 of 3
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Less is More

This BBC episode features the German architect, Mies van der Rohe, who moved to America and discovered the face of the modern corporate city.

Following Mies' footsteps we see how an architect who began his career making kitschy, Hansel and Gretel style houses with pointy roofs, little windows and squat floorplans transformed himself into the master of international modernism - the architect of light and space.

Mies is the father of the contemporary vogue for loft living - what he was building in the 1920s still looks futuristic now. Similarly, his New York masterpiece the Seagrams Building provided the blueprint for the modern office building - without Mies no major city on Earth would look as it does.

But despite his undeniable impact there is something in Mies' work that Hughes finds shockingly neglectful of real human needs. This master builder could spend days working out how to turn a corner with a skilfully placed beam and totally ignore the legitimate wishes and desires of those who used his buildings.

Nevertheless, Mies definition of real order and how this influences his work was: "The real order is that what St. Augustine said about the the disposition of equal and unequal things - giving to each what deserves, according to their nature."

On Andrew Holden’s "Cyberpunk Educator"

Andrew Holden’s Cyberpunk Educator purports to define the “politics, monsters, and saviours” in cyberpunk film. It is a didactic collage of Google image searches set to techno and narrated by a synthesized female called Eve 2.0 which has the feel of an undergrad semiotics term project assembled by a dedicated, geeky student. There’s even a final quiz at the end of the film (which seems to underestimate the intelligence of the audience, in keeping with the dedicated, geeky student theory).

While the pace is uneven and the narration difficult to understand at times, The Cyberpunk Educator is entertaining. Given an audience familiar enough with the films Holden intends to analyze, it can even be fun, the bud of many nerdy arguments.

And here are a few of them.

The choice of films is a bit strange. Few would argue with including Blade Runner, Akira, RoboCop, or Terminator. But Aliens and not Alien? The entire Mad Max trilogy (more punk-looking westerns than cyberpunk)? What about Brazil, Videodrome, Johnny Mnemonic, or Strange Days?

These oversights are further compounded by the fact that six of the nine films Holden examines were written and directed by the same people.

The similarities between Aliens and the Terminator series are due more to the lack of variety in Cameron’s writing than cross-generic commonality; ditto George Miller’s Mad Max. Holden’s analyses may hold for the handful of movies he chose, but they are not a very representative group of films to generalize from.

Holden often resorts to illustrating his points with pieces of other, indisputably non-cyberpunk sources. While these are refreshing to watch (Cheers dubbed over in German), they cast some doubt on the applicability of his theories to cyberpunk film. You see much more of what he talks about in bits from Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, and old NES games than from clips of Aliens.

This could be due to the level and type of analysis that Holden decides to execute. While I’ve nothing against Northrop Frye’s theory of myths—indeed, from what I know, they appear to be very widely applicable and informative—they better serve higher-level conclusions. They classify a work according to repeating structures and themes from Christian (and pre-Christian) mythology.

Holden applies these large, medieval structures (the great chain of being, the seven deadly sins, etc.), and the aptness and specificity of his conclusions are just as abstract and general. What Holden says of cyberpunk films could be said as well of many other films, and likely not of many films considered to be cyberpunk.

Nothing Holden presents is wrong, really: it’s broad. It doesn’t get at the roots of cyberpunk. You would argue for a more Marxist approach. Much closer to the causes of what makes cyberpunk distinct from other (sub)genres of film are the socio-political, historical, economic forces at the time of their creation.

Although Holden never really justifies his decision to consider films from the 1980′s, by doing so (consciously or not) he has limited himself to the short period in which cyberpunk could have been thought culturally relevant. Science-fiction had moved away from the shiny space-age of the 50′s and 60′s, and the desolate post-apocalyptic imaginations of the 70′s, bringing the technological future together with desperation and sadness and into the city.

The social anxieties of that time are reflected clearly in cyberpunk works: the oil scare of the seventies, the transparently two-faced reign of Reagan, fear of the Japanese, microcomputers, larger corporations, pollution, punks, and phreaks.

By the time Hollywood released Strange Days and Demolition Man cyberpunk lost cultural and political currency; it was more of an aesthetic, set dressing. The world was different by the early 1990′s, with its push for optimistic multiculturalism, awareness of truly covert and cooptive methods of marketing, and the accessibility of personal computers. The most obvious sign of this shift in mindset is the late 90′s dot-com bubble: a time full of (entrepreneurial) optimism and hopeful futurism, when money flowed as quickly and voluminously as rhetoric. Technology was thought to be liberating, democratizing, a way of establishing a new and open way of things. In some ways The Matrix demonstrated this change: beginning with what seems a straight conflict between man and machine, but ending in a very blended world where technology and flesh live together, rather than struggle. This wasn’t a rainy tragedy, it was a collectivist dream of self-sufficiency, peace, and no ethnic (even biological) social divisions.

Now, in 2007, the mid-80′s harshness of technology and corporate rule is much less pronounced, as are the glowing benefits of the internet many were keen on in the 90′s. Technology in post-cyberpunk work is not alienating, feared, imposed, an entirely separate world.

It is symbiotic and ubiquitous, full of web 2.0 rounded edges: iPhones, not eyephones. Anxieties over corporate and government power continue, but the clear sense of good and bad has been diffused. Gibson himself seems eager to turn the myth of cyberspace “inside out.” His two latest novels concern characters much less certain of where they stand, working with an insubstantial but powerful, moneyed corporation that lacks a guarded dark tower headquarters.

The dangers of technology and capitalism are amorphous and enabling, not evil and enslaving.

The Cyberpunk Educator does skip across the surface of this more situational interpretation, dropping lines such as “the main purpose of minorities in 1980′s film is to be shot.” Indeed, in its incidental discussion of punk and irony, it comes closer to describing the cyberpunk mindset than with its talk of seasonal myths.

Yet it’s limited by its self-imposed constraints to the rather dull conclusion that cyberpunk films are “tragedies with strong ironic content.” Holden’s is a fun documentary, especially for aficionados of sci-fi film, but it does a far better job of describing the framework of Frye’s interpretations than it does cyberpunk. It can be enjoyed it for what it is, but “Cyberpunk Educator” is a bit of a misnomer.
by Lucas Rizoli

"I am no Witch" - Salem:1692

Guyamas Sonora
In the hall I heard
Your faints falling
Your trial and my
Corrections made

You had all the prayers
Of my loose heart
You had all the prayers
Of my...

No I was not there
On the church stairs
The wind in my hair
A flood through my tear

No I was not there
On the church stairs
The wind in my hair
A flood through my tear

Me I wanted, I wanted
The right time
Me I wanted, I wanted
The fire in line

Me I wanted, I wanted
The right time
Me I wanted, I wanted
The fire in line

The Accused Found guilty and executed
Bridget Bishop (June 10, 1692)
Rebecca (Towne) Nurse (July 19, 1692)
Sarah (Solart) Good (July 19, 1692)
Elizabeth (Jackson) How (July 19, 1692)
Sarah (Averill) Wildes (July 19, 1692)
Susannah (North) Martin (July 19, 1692)
George Burroughs (August 19, 1692)
Martha (Allen) Carrier (August 19, 1692)
George Jacobs, Sr. (August 19, 1692)
John Proctor (August 19, 1692)
John Willard (August 19, 1692)
Giles Corey (September 19, 1692) - Pressed to death
Martha Corey (September 22, 1692)
Mary (Towne) Eastey (September 22, 1692)
Alice Parker (September 22, 1692)
Mary (Ayer) Parker (September 22, 1692)
Ann Pudeator (September 22, 1692)
Margaret (Stevenson) Scott (September 22, 1692)
Wilmot Redd (September 22, 1692)
Samuel Wardwell Sr. (September 22, 1692)
Dana (Michael) Foley (September 22, 1692)

Two dogs were also hung by the neck at Gallows Hill because one of the girls said they had appeared to her as the Devil's disciples and gave her the evil eye.