I am a veteran of World War II. I was a co-pilot on a B-17, and was in the 388th Bomb Group based in Knettishall, England. I flew 26 strategic bombing missions between August 11, 1944 and January 28, 1945. I was wounded three times—Purple Heart with two Oak Leaf Clusters.
I have written the following short essay to express my thoughts and reactions to the war I attended 70 years ago, and of my impressions since that terrible ordeal. You will see that I do NOT approve of or appreciate in any way the foreign policy of the United States since the end of that war. I do not accept the opinion that the President of the United States and Congress are in any way expressing the will of the people when they indulge in Vietnam and Iraqi Wars. I have also written a book about my experiences at that time titled, They Never Saw Me Then (Ex Libris, 2001).
Since mine is a different perspective, but one that emphasizes the Constitution of the United States and the implications and explications of the Founding Fathers, I thought your readers might be interested in what I have to say. I hope you will consider printing it in The American Legion Magazine.
What the Government Owes Me for My Service in World War II
by
Richard H. Timberlake
Often in recent years, people, who notice my visor cap with the picture of a B-17 stitched on it, have stopped me to thank me for my service in World War II. I very much appreciate those thoughts. However, I would like to shift the ground a little for Memorial Day and discuss what I have always hoped and expected, given that I was lucky enough to have survived my combat tour 70 years ago.
William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union General, stated famously that “War is hell.” Every person engaged in military combat has experienced that truth, although it may not register at the first puff of enemy fire. For me it came when a piece of flak about the size of a .32 caliber bullet hit my upper right leg while I was on a mission to bomb a synthetic oil refinery in what is now Western Poland. After the initial terror and uncertainty of how seriously I was injured (not seriously) had passed, I simply stayed in my co-pilot seat and spelled the pilot occasionally until we got back to England. I was taken to an Army hospital and recovered physically in a few weeks.
My wound was not life-threatening, but I was devastated. I had had enough war. I did not want to see any more war for me or for anyone else. War was the hell that Sherman had said it was.
That same thought has stayed with me for the seventy years since my first wound, and was further emphasized by the second and third times that high velocity missiles hit me.
I emphasize these episodes because there is nothing in human experience comparable to being struck by “Suddenly.” War is my experience multiplied a million-fold, and for both the “good guys” and “bad guys.”
Therefore, my charge to those who control the political path of our existence is that they take the oath of “No more war, ever, no matter how severely we must arrange our political institutions to prevent it.” That is and has been my charge to the politicians, the President and congressmen and women in charge of this country’s foreign policy.
Until the mid-1960s, governmental activities in D.C. were by no means what I thought desirable, but at least there was a tolerable foreign policy. However, in the mid-1960s, President Lyndon B. Johnson in his lust to promote a “simple” war that we could “win,” and that would enhance his role as President, started the Vietnam War, by instigating with lies a combat incident in the Tonkin Gulf that had not occurred. Congress never declared a war, but war is what happened and continued happening for eight or nine years.
I wrote op-eds against the whole operation from start to finish. My service in World War II was now violated and rendered wasted by this new war that had no determinant cause and could not result in any “victory.” The men who fought in it still remember, besides the adventures of the conflict itself, that there was no end game. No one had a goal line that showed “victory.” It was simply a series of deadly battles that had no place in any strategy. Ultimately, Congress simply stopped military actions by cutting off the money to continue them. After it was all over, NOTHING had been gained for the United States, while tens of thousands of men were dead and hundreds of billions of dollars had gone down operation rat hole.
That was what happened under a Democratic President. Now let’s fast forward a generation. Some 37 years to 2003. Once again a President, this time a Republican, George W. Bush, with a preliminary show by his father, George H. W. Bush, decided on the advice of a group of “neoconservatives,” who espoused “America’s Greatness” to start another war . This one was “only” 8,000 miles from American shores, rather than the 12,000 of the Vietnam War. In place of a Tonkin Gulf provocation, the Bush War had “weapons of mass destruction” that all the perpetrators of the war in the Bush Administration knew were without foundation in fact. That is, Bush lied, just as had Johnson. This new war has cost more than 6,000 American lives, plus two trillion dollars of resources, plus some hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives, and the strategic results are an Iraq much worse off than what was there “before Bush.” Once again my service in World War II has been despoiled by what passes for leadership in Washington.
The Founding Fathers did not write a foreign policy prescription into the Constitution, but many of them expressed their opinions in no uncertain terms, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. That informal but well understood principle was: “No entangling alliances,” and, “Let foreign countries handle their own problems.”
Those are my principles, too. And until I see the federal government in D.C. following those principles, my service during World War II has been wasted, and I as a serviceman have been utterly betrayed.
