The Painting in My Living Room by a Prisoner of War

 A Picture of Bavaria on My Living Room Wall

Painted by an Afrika Korps Prisoner of War

When I look up from reading on the couch at night when the house is quiet, I see this painting. It was painted by an enlisted man serving in the Afrika Korps who was a Prisoner of War of the American Army.

The POW camp he was a prisoner in for more than two years was in Reading, Pennsylvania. The site is now the Reading Airport.

The painting was a gift from the prisoner to the camp commandant, my father, Capt. George Gussman. When my father took command of the camp in 1944, most of the prisoners had been there for more than a year.

On the day he took command, my father lined up the officers to introduce himself and let them know what he expected from the prisoners. One of the officers whispered that my father was a Jew. Which is true. He was also a ranked middleweight boxer before he enlisted. He called the man out of formation and hit him hard enough to lay him out cold in front of the other officers.

Dad then sent his guards into the barracks for and inspection that led to confiscating hundreds of Hershey bars the prisoners had bought with the money they earned in work on local farms.  These candy bars became my mother's engagement present from Dad.  That story is here.

My Dad never went overseas in World War II. He enlisted before the war started at 34 years old. As a rule, the Army did not send soldiers that old into combat during World War II.

After the initial drama, Dad had no more trouble and got along well with the prisoners.  The prisoners were repatriated several months after the war ended, and few applied to stay in America and pursue citizenship.

The painting reminds of the ironies of war--that soldiers from the country that killed millions of Jews would be prisoners in a POW camp run by the son of Jewish immigrants.  I keep that token of respect and affection on my wall. It hung on the wall of the home I grew up in. I will pass it to the next generation.

The prisoners my father was in charge of were captured far from home in a war that was already going against Germany. Prisoners of War in any Army are brave men who faced the enemy and death and survived.

Reality Catches Up With Fiction 70 Years After World War II

B-25 Bomber Pilot 1st. Lt. Bernard "Bernie" Steed Receiving 

the Distinguished Flying Cross for Bravery 

on a Mission over Avignon, France.

Last month a friend started a Facebook discussion about the worst book we ever read. One of the books that came up was Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Published in 1961, the novel was based on life in an Army Air Corps bomber squadron flying B-25 "Mitchell" medium bombers over Italy, Southern France and across the Mediterranean Sea.

B-25 "Mitchell" Medium Bombers

I jumped into the discussion saying Catch-22 was one of my favorite books. I put the comment on my own page and one of the responses was from a guy I worked with almost 20 years ago.  Joseph Steed’s comment:

“My Dad literally lived Catch 22. He was assigned as a pilot to his bomber squadron in Europe within a month of the arrival of a young bombardier from New York City named Joseph Heller. Heller flew as Dad's bombardier on several missions. In the Avignon mission which was a significant scene in the book, like the author, Dad saw one of his friends shot down for the first time. On the same mission, Dad's plane lost an engine and he had to ditch it in the Mediterranean. Dad had told me about the ever-increasing number of missions required before being allowed to leave (he flew 66), and about the one guy in their unit who refused to fly again after reaching 40, the latter becoming the model for the guy who claimed he was crazy to avoid flying but whose sanity was proved by his not wanting to fly -- the original catch 22. When I discovered the Heller connection, Dad was in his 80s. He had heard of the book, but was not aware it was written by one of his bombardiers about their shared time in Europe. We looked up an old picture of Heller, and Dad remembered him as a little guy always running around with a notebook in his hand and writing things down. I got a copy of the book for him, but he made it only a couple of chapters in. He couldn't deal with being satirical about the experience.”

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Joe’s Dad, Bernard “Bernie” Steed was drafted in 1942 at 19-years-old. He qualified for flight training and within a year was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and training to fly B-25 “Mitchell” twin-engine bombers. These planes were made famous in the “Doolittle Raid” in which the big planes flew from aircraft carriers and bombed Tokyo in 1942. Bernie Steed’s life included the terror and humor of war. While still in pilot training in Georgia, shortly after landing in his trainer plane from a routine flight, a second plane’s propeller began chewing through their plane’s tail section, destroying it most of the way to the cockpit. The guy never saw them until he hit them. “Pilot inattention."

Bernie Steed in pilot training

By May 1944, Bernie Steed was 21-year-old pilot flying bombing missions from a base in Corsica across the Mediterranean theater of operations. On one mission Steed lost an engine, but managed to land the plane safely in the sea and get all of his crew into the life raft. They were rescued by a seaplane just a few hours later.  Bernie Steed earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for that mission and earned many other awards and decorations for flying 66 combat missions.

Joseph Heller was from Brooklyn and was a year younger than Bernie when he was assigned as bombardier in the 488th Bombardment Squadron in May 1944. He flew a couple of missions as part of Bernie’s six-man crew.

Joseph Heller in the Bombardier Compartment of a B-25 Medium Bomber

The characters in Catch-22 were composites of more than one person, Heller said. But about the action described, he said, “All the physical details, and almost all of what might be called the realistic details do come out of my own experiences as a bombardier in World War II. The organization of a mission, the targets—most of the missions that are in the book were missions that I did fly on.”

Thanksgiving Dinner, 1944, on the 488th Bomber Squadron Base, Corsica

A month before I learned about Bernie Steed, I saw a copy of Catch-22 at a book sale and bought it, thinking I would like to re-read it. Now that I know more about the author and one of the heroes in the squadron the novel is based on, I will definitely be re-reading the book.

Draft Dodgers Let Another Man Serve in Their Place

When President Bill Clinton visited the Vietnam War Memorial Wall in 1993, veterans of that war considered his presence an insult. They believed their service and the service of their dead comrades on the Wall a matter of honor. So dodging the draft was a matter of dishonor, and the assembled veterans let Clinton know how they felt.

From the Washington Post, 1 June 1993:

They waited for hours, some of them, to make a simple but emphatic gesture. And when President Clinton was introduced at the Wall yesterday, they did it, in unison, on cue.

They turned their backs.

"He's not my commander in chief," said Tom Stephanos, a Manassas resident who was wounded five times during the Vietnam War and wore 15 medals on his denim shirt yesterday. "It's a slap in the face to all of us that he had the gumption to show up here today."

------

Today veterans of the Vietnam War cheer and embrace President Donald Trump. Trump has publicly sneered about those who served. He had five deferments to avoid serving his country.

So why are Vietnam War veterans now supporting a draft dodger who sneered at Vietnam War service?

If service was a matter of honor in 1993 and is suddenly not an issue in 2016, that means honor got sold out.

If one draft dodger dishonors those who served in his place, the other does too. A recent Pew poll said Trump's job approval rating is 98% among veterans who are Republicans. That number includes all veterans, but 98% means everybody.
Draft dodging means letting another man serve and possibly die while you stay home. Clinton did that. Trump did that. Any veteran who attacked Clinton and embraces Trump cannot make any claim to honor.