Men at War and the Planes they Loved
GELERNTER, DAVID
Men at War and the Planes they Loved By David Gelernter It’s past time to consider America’s Second World War fighting airplanes as a body of artwork—one of the most remarkable the world has...
...The planes are striking and they are witnesses to a lost social order...
...we are trying to invent a new man, but there was nothing wrong with the old one and we know it...
...So we ought to approach carefully...
...the fastest fighter in the world by a cool 100 mph when it first flew (at 400 mph) in early 1939...
...Narrating a wartime recruiting film for the Army Air Force, then-lieutenant Jimmy Stewart drops into a confidential closeup murmur: “When you find out the effect those shiny little wings have on a gal—it’s phenomenal...
...Their propeller shafts usually terminate in a pointy spinner like a rocket nose cone, which blends smoothly into the fuselage or engine nacelle...
...You could argue that it is the most beautiful machine ever conceived...
...Why do men go off to war and fight...
...P not for “purr” but “pursuit”—an aircraft type that was later subsumed under “fighter...
...they have a theme...
...The work world, too, got meaning from the domestic world...
...Killing can take on the taut, elegant zing (clear as a struck bell) of a P-38, or the majestic nobility of a B-17...
...No one defended it...
...The old ideal returns from the grave—like the murdered Commendatore at the end of Don Giovanni—just long enough to condemn each goofy new “men’s movement” to hell and then vanishes again, to lurk like a local daemon in these old airplanes...
...There is a larger sense in which America used to believe in husbands in planes and wives on beaches...
...They show us how to defend ourselves and (on a deeper level) why we need to...
...Men become artists out of frantic despair...
...They were named Bonnie, Mary, California Cutie, Memphis Belle...
...Manliness used to be a lens to focus the vague blur of male desire...
...It is a strange and moving symptom of male craziness that a man who is unable to tell his wife that he loves her (but why should he...
...But this P-51 now . . .’ His eyes go a trifle soft...
...Without wives to make homes, male sacrifice would have been meaningless...
...Our civilization has immeasurably less respect for women than that old one did...
...and dreaming up one crazy utopia after another...
...I mean that...
...In 1945, the idea that a rich nation at peace might one day fire its housewives and send them to join their husbands at work would have seemed bizarre, like demolishing a city in order to build up its defensive walls...
...only one Jeep,” says a billboard near my office...
...Flyers had no monopoly on family life, but it’s easy to forget how many soldiers were married...
...Manliness, too, crumpled up and fell right out of the sky...
...Of course, to be a man is to stand and fight...
...John Steinbeck makes a remarkable assertion about American GIs who are about to assault Salerno in September of ’43...
...The Lightning is a “twin boom” plane: The fuselage ends right behind the cockpit...
...By suppressing manliness, feminism has created a monster whose real nature we are only beginning to understand...
...The airplanes were fast and armored but thin-skinned, inflammable, explosive...
...Take one out of dozens of masterpieces, Clarence Johnson’s Lockheed P-38 Lightning...
...As artworks they are arresting and the best are gorgeous, and they have the overwhelming importance, here and now, of Banquo’s ghost...
...We killed him out of spite...
...You can’t miss the theme...
...On the eve of battle, all the men have written letters to be posted “to wives, and mothers, and sisters, and fathers” in case they die, and these letters “all say the same thing...
...These first-person combat narratives form a large literature, voices like ours but from another world, wholly outside today’s cultural mainstream...
...One wife plans to get work in a war factory, and the other two are pregnant...
...It’s an unpleasant truth, but dangerous to deny...
...We know that effeminacy is thriving, but tend not to notice that sadism is too...
...will write the message on a plane, fly the plane straight into hell and never look back...
...The Guggenheim’s show was deeply traditional...
...They are directly behind the propeller, and so the propstream cools them...
...the engine housings intersect the wing on either side, then streak backwards until they meet the broad horizontal stabilizer...
...To look at a Second World War airplane in this way is to consider its physical beauty and the emotional significance (positive or negative) of its history...
...Pilots,” says a pilot, “come as close as anyone can to love and affection for an inanimate machine...
...And when the Lightning flies, the trapped slice of sky skims ahead like a flat, gleaming stone skipping over surf...
...But we can only approach within the proper moral context...
...Her engines quickly took on a special sound unlike all other engines,” writes a navigator about the day his crew picked up its own B-17...
...No radiator or coolant lines to be holed by enemy fire, with subsequent loss of the engine and, often, the aircraft...
...American troops would have fought bravely with crummy, ugly weapons, and often did...
...Last year, the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan held a hugely popular exhibit of motorcycles...
...So the P-38 has a rectangular slice of sky trapped inside, edged in (like the water of a formal garden pool) by the wing in front, twin booms to the side and stabilizer in back...
...They all say: ‘I wish I had told you, and I never did, I never could . . .’” For some married flyers, words on a plane were a last-ditch attempt to get the message out...
...The only outrageousness on display was the Guggenheim’s claim (in the exhibit catalog) that it was challenging “the conventional notion of the art museum...
...If you could it would look like these aircraft...
...but when we scrape ourselves off the floor and start rebuilding this society, they will be practical guides...
...Two other principles once selfevident, now forgotten: To be a man is to compete for, not with, women...
...wives define the fixed center of this social order...
...The aircraft and the ideal that made them fly were equally, terrifyingly vulnerable in the end...
...The feminization of America has been discussed at length...
...the Lightning was “so spectacular in appearance,” he wrote years later, “it instantly attracted the attention of everyone who had the pleasure of seeing it...
...Do we dare condemn the “sexism” of soldiers who actually aspired to be gentlemen...
...Extruded male violence—elegant killing tools...
...Occasionally a new “men’s movement” arises and lopes around for a while like a wounded buffalo, broadcasting confusion and despair, and disappears...
...Men contribute the fighting, women the meaning...
...You could argue that it is the sleekest thing that ever flew...
...Both principles are built into the culture that created these planes...
...For that matter it covers such women as Margaret Thatcher...
...On the other hand, you could argue that the P-51 is even prettier...
...Blunt, belligerent noses make these aircraft powerful and aggressive but rarely sleek...
...Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is a sentimental movie about the Doolittle raid that was released while the fighting was still in progress...
...The planes were shaped by their engine types...
...Throughout this century the public has felt, in mind and gut, the emotional pull of beautiful machines...
...The world’s greatest art originates in the fundamental male inability to communicate simple emotions directly...
...Maleness properly seasoned and sublimated is the world’s most powerful creative force...
...The men seem like the star players, but they are (literally) peripheral...
...A B-24 pilot names his plane “Sweet Eloise” after his wife and pays a GI to paint the name on the nose...
...We ought to do justice to both their roles...
...In a radial-powered singleengine fighter—a P-47, Hellcat, Corsair—the big, broad engine is a balled-up fist about to strike...
...Besides, violence interests us, just in itself—though we don’t like to admit it...
...They rarely can...
...Their grace and beauty tell us that, under the right circumstances, killing comes easily to us...
...Many of the artworks we treasure most, from the Iliad to the Last Judgment, depict violence and also endorse it...
...they wind up despising the military and police, allowing moral standards to lapse (who needs them...
...Most were junked like empty beer cans after the war...
...Philip Ardery waits in Denver with his fellow officers to ship out for combat...
...And it’s clear that the planes absorbed a lot of history and emotion and are now quietly radiating it back—the few that survive...
...that for all its soaring grace was easily brought down...
...But when I tell them what it used to mean, my claims are so strange-sounding in today’s world that I’m not sure they can believe me—although I know they try...
...Ardery describes a direct flak hit on a nearby B-24: “When the shell went off inside the bomber the sides of it seemed to puff out momentarily...
...The aircraft and the system were trouble-prone and took constant, tricky maintenance...
...The clincher was: This is a manly thing to do...
...But the twin booms of the 38 grab the wing in a powerful, two-fisted grip...
...Aircrews decorated their planes with scantily clad pinups and no one minded...
...These planes are not only lovely but chilling, and if we fail to be chilled we are missing the point...
...A twin-engine fighter of strange and unprecedented design...
...On the other, they stand for desperate, reinedin male longing...
...Men at War and the Planes they Loved By David Gelernter It’s past time to consider America’s Second World War fighting airplanes as a body of artwork—one of the most remarkable the world has ever seen...
...Philip Johnson might have made that claim when he mounted the famous “Machine Art” show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1934...
...It kept male violence and male longing in balance...
...Like a woman...
...On a regular airplane, the fuselage intersects the wing in a T-shape— grasps the wing with one hand, gracefully, like a bullfighter grasping his muleta...
...A bomber pilot mentions the Distinguished Flying Cross: “In those days a pilot with a DFC was quite a man...
...In America today this theme is critically important, because we are just starting to grasp (in slow nightmare horror, with a sense of gathering insanity) that we are losing our understanding of what “manliness” means...
...The art world oscillates between fascination and revulsion...
...A B-17 bombardier reports that he likes England, which helps him “stand my separation from Muriel,” his wife...
...Manliness required that you compete for (not with) women...
...Which was trying to kill him...
...In one scene, three young wives sit on a beach as their husbands buzz over in B-25s...
...You see a different and deeper aspect of the same thing in the attachment of Second World War flyers to their planes...
...Just simply blow up and drop through the sky...
...Each man describing in direct and quiet words from his own angle the same stupendous event, which he can’t wholly grasp but explains as best he can: These narratives are destined to be a new cultural scripture someday...
...Many people have seen the P-40’s Flying Tigers paintjob— furious eyes, gritted shark-teeth...
...With manliness shot down, boys are just as likely to overplay maleness and become violent louts as to underplay it and turn sissy...
...You can approach any machine as art, but obviously they are not all equally significant...
...Mainstream intellectuals like to deny it...
...A recruiting film describes flight cadet school: “It’s a man’s world...
...But it’s clear that the loveliness of these planes inspired the men who flew them...
...Raw, it is sadism—the world’s most destructive force...
...On the one hand these warplanes embody male violence tamed and disciplined, turned to patriotic ends—aimed and fired at the enemy, but still deadly...
...The principle applies to moral and not just physical stands...
...Because they are long and narrow, they fit into slinky, low-drag fuselages...
...Did the pilots care...
...The F4U Corsair (says a former pilot, looking back with admiration) was a “meanlooking machine...
...The pilot sees one prop to his right, one to his left...
...Wives created the gravity that gave weight to male fighting and flying, living and dying...
...They went dutifully but in the casual, mildly self-deprecating way in which they went to war...
...One B-17 is not like another...
...Liquid-cooled aero-engines are like overgrown car engines...
...Obvious phallic symbols...
...it required also that you get a family and support it...
...But violence is a central theme of Western art, whose most important image shows a Jew brutally murdered by Romans...
...The very word is gone from the language...
...So what are these things...
...A training film illustrates the “first rule” for combat pilots (“keep your eye on the ball”) by means of a beautiful lady golfer straddling the tee in a short skirt...
...Plenty of decent people are unable to approach on aesthetic terms at all...
...Humans want to know what it is to be human...
...You can’t draw a picture of manliness...
...She could easily be the best man of her time...
...We are less willing to confront overplayed maleness...
...Violence and death are part of what it is, and so they will always be central to art...
...But the women at home (once again) imbued the work world with dignity and purpose despite them—you worked to support your wife and family—and saved the country from the commercial equivalent of militarism...
...Men who have something to say of a simple, emotional nature rarely say it...
...Tony LeVier was Lockheed’s chief test pilot on the P-38 project...
...From these neat spinners all the way down their gently undulating, shimmering aluminum bodies to their tails, such planes as the Bell P-39, Curtiss P-40, and the legendary North American P-51 have the uncanny poise and balance of living creatures...
...Homes are important enough to this longago nation to be the main occupation (with due allowance for wartime emergencies) of a large segment of the population...
...Such ads might be crude or silly, but they reflect our longstanding tendency to respond emotionally to machines...
...Soldiers and airmen reacted emotionally to these planes from the start...
...Some men enjoyed fighting for its own sake— but the women at home imbued the fight with meaning despite them and saved the country from any chance of slipping into militarism, or treating war as an end in itself...
...Women become artists because art seems like a fine occupation...
...But how many machines can accommodate a painted-on face and not look silly or cute but inevitable, perfectly natural...
...The girl wasn’t only for decoration...
...The theme is manliness...
...many of the planes had female names (as ships have often had), and crews who actively imagined them as sort-of women...
...The old ideas took the country through the great war and created a prosperous peace...
...But to approach machinery as art has become one of the twentieth century’s most characteristic maneuvers...
...The life expectancy of a waist-gunner on strategic bombing missions was three minutes of firing...
...by the mid-60s, the system had erased all the old legal constraints on women and come to grips with its own deepest bigotries—and that was the point, in the mid-60s, when the country’s new cultural leadership opened up on “manliness” with murderous fire and dead aim...
...Its broad wing looks like a drawn-back bow laid horizontal, crossbowstyle, with the fuselage in place of the arrow...
...Where do they leave us today...
...A pilot tells a reporter during the war, “You know you can talk to a plane...
...Its visual power is extraordinary...
...Second World War aircraft sound a consistent emotional note...
...But manliness is no simple idea...
...To inspire men to valor, this nation used to make every conceivable use of femaleness short of allowing actual women to be treated disrespectfully...
...His first answer of several: “Because women are watching...
...An American bombardier: “I saw three B-17s in the different groups around us suddenly blow up and drop through the sky...
...Next to the words is a beaming smiley-face, and that’s the whole ad...
...In a recent Wall Street Journal, Stephanie Gutmann describes a co-ed company on the obstacle course at a Navy training camp...
...You see it in popular Web sites, rap lyrics, and computer games...
...Their cylinders are arranged in a chorus line, or two lines joined at the bottom—making a V from in front...
...it covers the combat aircrews, and such men as Churchill and FDR too...
...There’s David Gelernter is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Jerome Klinkowitz cites these statements in his 1996 study, Yanks Over Europe...
...These airplanes help us picture what manliness used to mean...
...The exercise starts with “a lot of preparatory giggling” and goes downhill from there...
...Fighter pilots “queued up like housewives at a bargain sale” to admire the gorgeous P-51...
...They remind us that we had better be on guard against ourselves, because we are dangerous characters...
...To be a man is to get a family and support it...
...Nose-art pin-ups shock us...
...Some critics attacked the museum for pandering, but the average motorcycle is far better art than the average minimalist abstraction by Ellsworth Kelly...
...A mechanic describes an American fighter pilot’s latest exploit: “Lieutenant Hoelle is a real man...
...Maybe all you can say about them for sure is that they worked well enough, and they were beautiful...
...To compete “for women” doesn’t mean only to impress and win them, it means to fight on their behalf...
...In many cases the airplane’s dual significance is painted on its nose: ranks of swastikas or Rising Suns to register kills, next to a pin-up girl...
...We might gawk at those old nose-art pin-ups, but how can we grasp their meaning for a civilization in which actresses could drop by the Hollywood canteen and show the visiting GIs a good time, and no one would snicker...
...Flyers even responded to the art of enemy machines: Piloting his B-24, Philip Ardery is attacked by “a beautiful, perfectly-streamlined Focke-Wulf 190...
...Or gracefully curvaceous abstract females, objects of desire...
...Men fly the planes as their wives sit on the beach: The picture of a successful and complete civilization...
...The cylinders of an air-cooled radial flare outward like petals from the propeller shaft (in one layer or several —stacked bracelets on a shaft instead of a wrist...
...Like the old planes themselves, the antique system of “manliness” and “womanliness” behind them worked imperfectly...
...They represent the lingering remains of an idea that was easily murdered but is not so easily disposed of...
...It didn’t blow to bits, but big chunks of it flew off and tongues of flame licked out of its spread seams in all directions...
...In his exhaustive survey of American wartime fighters, Francis Dean calls the P-38 “the sleekest thing around” when it first flew...
...We admired her gleaming flanks...
...As art-objects they can be read at least two ways...
...Women (for the most part) made homes and men went to work...
...To get men to risk everything and fly repeatedly into deadly combat, the nation advanced many powerful arguments...
...A perfect illustration of destroying the village to save it...
...Talked about our wives...
...It permeates these airplanes like the smell of wet leaves and sweaters on a rainy spring night...
...The sound of the P-38 was a “smooth purr...
...The president of the United States is accused of rape and that doesn’t shock us...
...Manliness, too, turned out to be an ideal (who would have thought it...
...A training film introduces pilots to the P-38 fighter: “It’s a man’s airplane...
...Aluminum Barbie Dolls for lonely men who had wished but not expected their girlfriends back home to sleep with them—and would never have dreamed (unlike so many soldiers down through history) of raping the enemy’s women...
...what did they do while they waited...
...Some men enjoyed work and getting money for their own sakes, too...
...They are guyed-up by mutually opposed meanings straining against each other, death and life...
...It had a rare beauty that was unmatched...
...To treat some object as “art” is to consider its emotional versus its practical significance—its subjective effect on the world inside your mind as opposed to its objective significance for the world at large...
...So the wing slashes forward like a blade...
...asks bomber pilot Vincent Fagan...
...The mark of good planes, good social ideals, and good men is not that they are hard to kill but that they are hard to forget...
...A journalist reports on a conversation with an airman: “‘I couldn’t talk to a Thunderbolt...
...Saved us from an obsession with money and careers that turns out to be just as ugly as militarism, and just as empty...
...The pressure of history’s biggest war on the men who fought it would have turned these planes into great art even if nothing else had...
...In their overlooked role as witnesses, the old planes spell out three principles of manliness as it used to be...
...A medium-bomber pilot reports a flight instructor’s comment: The B-26 “was proof that a lethal weapon could also be beautiful...
...No replacement for actual scripture...
...You see the public’s artistic predilections reflected (as if in a chrome bumper, darkly) by the ad industry in its push to sell everything from a fifty-thousanddollar car to a fifty-cent bar of soap on the basis not of how it works but of how it makes you feel...
...Strategic bombing missions over Nazi-held Europe were perilous, and yet (astonishingly) a gunner could look outside and register “the beauty of 500 four-engine bombers in orderly formation, a thousand contrails streaming behind, forming a spectacular sky-scape...
...In discussing his ten-man crew, a pilot arrives at Henry V, more or less: “We had shared a unique and special brotherhood...
...My two young boys have never heard it (literally never) except in old books, old movies, and from me...
Vol. 4 • May 1999 • No. 31
