He was the quintessential stick-and-rudder man. That was my friend and frequent flying companion, Howard Ebersole.
When Howard did coordination exercises like Dutch-rolls and lazy-eights in my Stearman, I would glance at the turn-and-bank indicator in the rear cockpit where I sat. Invariably, the ball was centred throughout the seesawing motions of each manoeuvre as if an infallible robot were wielding the controls and ever so meticulously massaging the inputs. The consistency was remarkable because the aircraft’s front cockpit, where Howard held sway, had no attitude instrumentation. I used to joke with him that his needle-and-ball was built-in, an imposing bionic component integral to his constitution.
Drawn to adventure in his early years, Howard sailed the Caribbean aboard a freighter. His knowledge of Morse code led to his employment as the ship’s telegraph operator. One Sunday morning an urgent coded message was unscrambled in the captain’s quarters. The old seaman, a southerner with a deep drawl, looked up from the deciphered scribbling and then gravely at his young telegraphy mate. ‘Sparks,’ the wizened sailor proclaimed, ‘wez at waah!’ As soon as the vessel docked, Howard ran to the nearest recruiting station and signed up for the Air Corps.
The dream of the young adventurer from the flatlands of Midwestern America had been answered. Howard was flying open-cockpit in helmet and goggles, silk scarf and leather jacket, soon to be adorned with the vaunted silver wings of the mightiest air power organization the world had ever seen. From the first day when his instructor swung the control stick around without warning, such that it battered the poor cadet’s knee caps, his infatuation with flight blossomed into a fully fledged love affair. The imperiousness of officialdom was a small price to pay for the privilege of soaring aloft in high-performance aircraft.
Howard was assigned to bombers during World War II, and some of his missions were historic for their impact on the course of the war. Targets included Magdeburg, Kiel, Wilhelmshaven, and even Berlin. Howard participated in all of these missions. Yet, when asked which was his most memorable, he said it was the low-level supply mission over the German town of Wesel as part of the big Allied push known as Operation Varsity in the war’s waning days.
It was supposed to be a milk run. Bundles of supplies were to be dropped to the troops who had crossed the Rhine the night before. When Howard, the deputy lead pilot, reached the drop zone, flak filled the sky. He watched helplessly as a B-24 from another bomb group cart-wheeled into the ground. Also, C-47 tugs and troop-carrying gliders littered the landscape, some still smouldering from fire they had taken during the prior day’s assault.
Howard belonged to the 578th Bomb Squadron of the 392nd Bomb Group. The group was known as the ‘Crusaders’ and the group emblem played off that theme (which by today’s standards would be considered so politically incorrect as to be unthinkable). The emblem depicted a knight in body armour and a tasselled helmet, clutching a heavy lance in one hand and a cross-laden shield in the other hand while riding a bomb on a downward trajectory. In retrospect, the emblem is almost comical for Howard was the last person in the world to harbour any classical crusading inclinations; he was, like his compatriots, an American flyboy, not a religious zealot.
The symbol of a crusading knight was simply meant to convey the 392nd’s unwavering determination to vanquish tyranny so that people everywhere could be free to think, act, speak and pray as they pleased. In filling the cockpits and cabins of their bombers with such motivation, Howard and the group’s other airmen differentiated themselves from most victors in the long history of warfare. These flyers, members of what has popularly become known as the Greatest Generation, were not conquerors, but they were, as the official nickname of their aircraft proclaimed, liberators. The group emblem was sewn into Howard’s leather jacket and worn at the beginning of a vocation in service to his country and the cause of freedom.
Late in his life, after accumulating more than 12,000 flight hours in a long and distinguished military and civilian flying career, Howard and I moseyed through the capacious display areas of the National Museum of the US Air Force. Etching a mark on a scratch pad every time we passed a type he had piloted, we tallied up the count at day’s end. The total came to twenty-eight types.
In a gallery of wood-and-fabric designs mixed with the earliest all-metal configurations, there were the obligatory trainers, first flown as a student, and later in some cases as an instructor. Then, in a corner flanked by familiar shapes, there was the big bomber in which, as a young man barely beyond his teens, he pressed on to targets amid blankets of fire. Soon after we came upon the early jets, in one of which he earned the enduring gratitude of his squadron mates for having saved the life of his wingman. In the middle galleries, there were the pointy-nosed and delta-winged jets in which he pioneered the métier of guided missiles. Lastly, there were the light transports used to shuttle generals.
The disparate aircraft were connected by a trio of threads woven by this quiet and unassuming man whose character manifested a yen for the sky, a penchant for the camaraderie of men at arms, and a commitment to the warrior ethos. One autumn day, he left the confines of the quaint airport near our homes for a trip abroad. Nearly a half-century since his deployment to foreign shores as a newly minted flying officer, he joined a small cadre of his surviving bomb group teammates to revisit the place where, with youthful exuberance, they had staked their claim as world-changing aviators.
On what was reported to be a typically ‘damp, cool, and misty morning’ reminiscent of the days when the 392nd Bomb Group formed up for long and harrowing missions over central Europe, Howard and his buddies gathered at the Eighth Air Force’s old Wendling Airfield, nestled in the back country of Norfolk in East Anglia, to dedicate a refurbished memorial to their 747 cohorts who did not make it home alive and to the base’s entire wartime roster. Much like the mythical post-war Archbury air base in the definitive World War II bomber movie Twelve O’clock High, Wendling had deteriorated into a fragment of its glorious past.
Most structures, including the control tower, had disappeared while the balance of the wartime buildings had been converted to sustainable, if pedestrian, uses. The officers’ club, once the social hub for lonely airmen far from home, was transformed into an auto parts warehouse. The runway that had launched the group’s Consolidated B-24 Liberators on 285 combat missions appeared derelict, a victim of time’s inexorable ravages. Strewn across its remnants were large rectangular buildings of a turkey farming business.
What mattered, though, on that blustery morning of Saturday, 7 October 1989 were the memories of those thirty veterans who came to honour their fallen comrades. Under the American flag that waved briskly in the breeze and enveloped in the warm graces of the local townspeople, the aged warriors paid their respects. There were speeches that attested to the faithfulness of all who had served at Wendling. A wreath was laid at the memorial’s pedestal. Then a minute of silence followed that left everyone in tears.
The next day dawned uncharacteristically sunny. Howard and his fellow veterans went to the American Military Cemetery at Madingley near Cambridge to offer a tribute to their colleagues who rest there. Again, the American flag fluttered in the wind. However, this day the stars and stripes were cast against the brilliant sun. The verse of John McCrae inscribed at the base of the flagpole held especial import for the visiting veterans. Surely, the poet had these men and their silenced comrades in mind when he wrote,‘… To you from failing hands we throw the torch – Be yours to hold it high.’
Still shrouded in morning shade to the east, across the reflecting pools with their borders of polyantha roses, the majestic Wall of the Missing could be seen. Formed from English Portland limestone, the wall contains 5,125 names of American servicemen never recovered or identified. Of these, 115 served alongside Howard in the 392nd.
Getting closer, the lettering became readable, the names familiar. Engraved atop the wall and within view of the 3,812 neatly aligned white headstones that define the cemetery’s emerald grounds is an excerpt from a testimonial by Howard’s most senior wartime leader, indeed, the supreme Allied commander in the final push to liberate Europe.
At the wall’s dedication, Dwight Eisenhower praised those who had sacrificed ‘to defend human liberty and rights.’ He spoke these words fittingly in St Paul’s Cathedral in London. (Miraculously, during the relentless aerial blitz of London, with bombs exploding all around, St Paul’s escaped unscathed, a symbol of the free world’s determination to hold on for a better tomorrow.)
The engraving in homage to those consecrated by the wall continues, ‘All who shall hereafter live in freedom will be here reminded that to these men and their comrades we owe a debt to be paid with grateful remembrance and the high resolve that the cause for which they died shall live eternally.’
About a decade after Howard’s trip to Wendling, he signed an album of personal anecdotes and candid snapshots that had been privately published by a memorial association devoted to preserving the history of the 392nd. On a page with a picture of one of his group’s B-24s approaching to land at Wendling Airfield, Howard inked a note of thanks to my wife, Mary, and I for our friendship and then added, ‘Enjoy these stories. In them you will meet some real American heroes. I am proud to have known and flown with many of them.’
In turn, I am proud to have known and flown with Howard.
