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Russ Vaughn, John Werntz: Memories of Two Wars
I'm honored to have been included in an email exchange between two gentlemen for whom I have a great deal of respect, and to have been given permission to reproduce part of it here. Even better, I've been given cause for hope that this will be the first of many posts based on input from a new acquaintance. It started a couple of days ago when I received this email:
Bill Faith:
I have a lot of nerve for a total stranger, but could I possibly persuade you to let me know how to email Russ Vaughn? I've been wading through innumerable Google hits to try to locate him without success.
I'm an old crock who put in 21 months in the ETO in the 9th USAAF Troop Carrier Command, and this "Poet Laureate" of the 101st really gets to me. I'd love to be able to express my admiration.
Yes or No, either way, you have my thanks.
Best regards,
John Werntz
I'm embarrassed to admit "ETO" and "9th USAAF" went right over my head. I sent John the standard message I send every few days to people who contact me to ask how to contact Russ:
John,
I don't give out anyone's contact information without permission but I'm blind-copying Russ on this email so he can contact you if he wants to. Since you only mentioned the one piece of his I'll also make sure you know I have a substantial collection [here].
Regards,
-- Bill
Bill Faith:
A thousand thanks. Yes, this evening was the first time I had heard of him. I am amazed by the number of people who archive his work: you, Bittersweet, American Thinker, et. al. I'll save your link, and add it to my faves.
OK, the ball is in his court, where it belongs. I'm hoping he will respond favorably. On second thought, I ought not to have mentioned the Troop Carriers -- not the Airborne's favorite people!
Best,
John Werntz
Still not realizing who I was dealing with I wrote back:
I don't think he'll hold the troop carrier thing against you. You served -- Thank you for your service and I know Russ will feel the same way. ... As of a few hours ago he was enroute home from a business trip to DC so he may be behind on his email and not write you right away.
That's basically where things stood till Russ sent John this email and copied me:
John, I just got back from a Navy medical conference on the East Coast and found Bill Faith's email forwarding your request.
I am honored every time one of you WWII guys tells me you like my writing. My dad was in the Pacific theater and I grew up in the shadow of that conflict and in awe of the men who fought in it. My bedroom walls were covered with WWII photos and largely due to that influence, I enlisted at the young age of seventeen.
I sometimes look upon the opening years of my own war as the end of WWII; we were fighting an enemy that had been continuously engaged since being invaded by the Japanese, so for them it was definitely a continuation of that war.
We often fought in the early days with weapons, ammo and supplies left over from your war. Our C Rations were packaged in the 40's as evidenced by the old Lucky Strike "Greens" they contained. Most importantly, many of our senior officers and NCO's were hardcore WWII vets.
Did you ever drop paratroopers? If so, do you remember from what units?
Regards,
Russ Vaughn
Fortunately, Russ had picked up on the things I missed and asked the right questions.
Russ:
C-rations in the 60's? Holy logistics! Way back in '44, we were mostly dropping 10-in-1's to the poor bleeding infantry. Much better chow.
Thank you for taking the time to get back to me so quickly. Did I ever...? Jeez, you asked for it. Don't you know how garrulous us octogenarians are? Especially those who, like me, were participant observers rather than combatants. I was a lowly 1LT navigator in the 434th Troop Carrier Group, stationed at Aldermaston, near Reading, and later at the Camp de Mourmelon, near Reims, where we shared bivouac with the entire 101st Division, plus a huge concentration of DP's from Eastern Europe.
My huge contribution to the war effort consisted of helping jumpmasters shove sticks of troopers out the the door, or standing in the plastic bubble on top of a C-47, flashing an Aldous lamp at some poor devil of a glider pilot to tell him it was time to cut loose from the tow rope. C-47 was one thing, your watermark is something else!
Yes, we dropped paratroops at Carentan at midnight of D-day, towed US gliders at dawn and Brit Horsa gliders the afternoon of June 6. I was about as nonmilitary as anyone in pink trousers could be in those days, so I really don't remember the units. Between D-Day and Operation Market Garden in Holland, we dropped or towed people from both the 101st and the 82nd. You may have heard the sad tale of a Brigadier who was killed on D-Day by an improperly lashed jeep that broke loose and ran over him when his glider made a rough landing. I regret to say it was my group -- not my squadron, that towed the unlucky general. That would pinpoint the regiment--506, 507, something like that?
What with D-Day, Market Garden, re-supply of the 101st at Bastogne, and a jump across the Rhine in early '45, I got to watch a lot of other people do their stuff. Met some brass, like Maxwell Taylor, whom we flew to Brussels just before Market Garden. He wore only two stars in those days, but I was pretty damn' awed. Also awed by President Benes and Jan Masaryk whom we flew to Czechoslovakia in the Spring of '45. That gave me some idea of how lucky I was to have been assigned to transport duty. The whole countryside of Bavaria was carpeted with the corpses of B-17's and B-24's from the Schweinfurt and Regensburg raids, glittering in the sunlight. I was also pissed off that our great Russ allies made us land in Pilsen, which was then occupied -- I believe -- by the 101st. They would not permit us to land near Prague, which they controlled. Finally, immensely awed and humbled by the sacrifice of the infantry. We transported hundreds of guys too severely wounded to be treated at field hospitals, bringing them back to base hospitals in England. The nurses who cared for those men were the only heroes in my outfit.
OK, now you know all. Saw a lot--including the invasion fleet lying doggo in the pre-dawn twilight of June 6 -- did next to nothing. Witness to History, that's me. Your dad would have had a lot more in common with my brother Howard, a tank-driver in the 1st Marines, who survived Guadalcanal and a bout of malaria only to take a direct hit from a Jap mortar at Cape Gloucester in New Britain in December of '43. I shudder to think of what my mother, who had 4 sons in action, would have thought of today's exemplar of "moral authority" Cindy Sheehan.
I'm immensely pleased that people like Bill Faith and American Thinker are archiving your poems. Some day, when the history of this sorry era of appeasers and collaborators is written, your work will do much to round out the picture.
Best regards,
John
Russ wrote back to John:
John, what an account! You are far too self-deprecating about your role; when you consider the number of those C-47's that went down during operations, it took brave men to crew them.
I have a favor to ask. I have several Airborne buddies who would love to read this. May I share it with them? Also, I subscribe to an Airborne newspaper called "Static Line" which is extremely popular with WWII Airborne vets. I would like to send your email to Don Lassen the publisher, himself a WWII paratrooper, and see if he'll print it.
Lastly, I'd like to see if some of the milblogs might be interested. I can tell you for sure that there aren't too many octogenarian WWII vets with your nack as a wordsmith.
What say you, Sir?
Airborne!
Russ
After sending that to John, Russ wrote me:
Bill, you know what is truly great about these old guys? They don't brag about their contribution to the war effort. Here this old warrior is saying he did nothing but fly around in troop carriers towing gliders and dropping paratroopers. Trust me, that is one hell of a dangerous thing to be doing.
Remember what I wrote about Kerry before the 2004 election? I knew the bastard was a phony simply because he talked about his exploits under fire. The genuine heroes don't unless it's among themselves and then it's almost always in a self-critical, humorous way, playing down their own importance while emphasizing that of their comrades.
Question: did you ever hear John Kerry building up anyone but John Kerry?
Nuff said.
Hey, I hope we can get Mr. Werntz to open up and write some more accounts for us. This gentleman is a walking history book. You know, you might want to contact him and let him know you've read his response to me and found it worthy of publication. He hears that from both of us, maybe he'll agree.
Regards,
Russ
I wrote John at that point to reinforce what Russ had said and was pleased to receive permission to pass on their exchange to my readers. At that point Russ wrote Mr. Werntz again:
John, Bill Faith and I would be ever so grateful if you would just start writing to us whenever the Muse strikes. Anything that comes across your mind; it doesn't matter how trivial it may seem to you; it seems you have a wonderful recall of war's detail, something that I sadly lack of my time in combat.
No matter how frivolous some anecdotes might seem, your unique perspective on times of momentous events may provide valuable insights to those of us who want to know how it really was.
Thanks, John, for what you did then and what you have the ability to do now. You, Sir, are truly a window to our past as well as a beacon to our future.
Regards,
Russ
I again wrote to say I was in complete agreement with Russ. After a few more emails we don't have any firm commitment from John for anything in particular but we do have an agreement in principal that he'll keep us in mind when he gets in a writing mood, which I hope will be often. I'm also trying to use John as an opening to pry some untold stories out of Russ, but so far I haven't had much luck with that -- an email I know a bunch of people would find interesting but which I've been forbidden to pass on. We'll have to wait and see if his mood changes about that. Developing ... (I hope.)
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When aviation history author George Mellinger saw this post he immediately emailed:
Bill,
In the most respectful sort of way, John Werntz is full of it when he says he didn't do anything, and contrasts himself negatively to all those B-17 & B-24 bombers he saw. Those guys had ten to thirteen machine guns on each aircraft, and even if we know now that they overclaimed their air-to-air kills, at least they were able to shoot back, sometimes successfully. The C-47s had to just sit there and take it, flying straight and level in formation to complete the mission. And then the bombers got to see bombs exploding on the enemy targets below. John's motto might have been, "all the FLAK and half the satisfaction". John did get one compensation, a lot of hours flying in one of history's greatest aircraft, a legend in its own day, and an even greater legend in retrospect. One of my private thrills of my brief tour came during my first days in RVN. On one of the flights working my way to my new temporary home, I was carted in a C-117 Super-Gooney, a C-47 re-engined with turboprops. I suspect that most of the other cargo didn't know, care, or appreciate what they were riding in, but as an airplane nut, I was thrilled. Later I rode in C-130 Hercules, and once in the C-123, but I still preferred the C-117.
- Rurik, aka George
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Welcome Mudville fans! Won't you please take time to leave a comment and help Russ and me convince John he should keep writing? (Comments are moderated but I'll try not to go too long at a time between checking for new ones.) If there's time after that maybe you'll click here to check out the rest of my site.
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