I was away for a few days but I just sent you an email reply this morning thanking you for sending along the scans. It’s a lot to digest, so it might be another couple of days before I can get back to you with any real feedback. From what I’ve looked at so far, I’m still interested and your account seems accurate.
Btw, the disappointing results for the Unbroken movie are a moot point as far as author like me deciding whether the story is commercially viable. Hillenbrand has sold about 5 million copies of Unbroken, and I’m certain she received a huge chunk of money for the movie rights. She doesn’t care much whether the movie performed well or not, at least not financially. When your book sells 5 million copies, I doubt you lose sleep worrying about the box office returns. She and Unbroken are a huge success no matter how the movie performs.
And it’s misguided to say that the treatment of Japanese POWs has been told already, so that’s that. It’s the story that matters, not just the facts behind it.
I’ve thought about why I’ve brought this subject now, And I believe it is because of the little German kid I met recently. He came to see the large vegetable garden I planted in my brother’s backyard in the Pocono’s. He loved it, Then started talking about bananas.
He said Americans gave him a bunch of bananas, and even though he he had never even seen one before, he ate the whole bunch. He said his stomach was in pain for a week, but he still went out every morning cause of all the American planes overhead that were dropping food and candy on the kids.
I asked Karl when he was born, he said 1942. I then asked if he lived in Berlin. He said yes.
I had only met this man two weeks before, and he’s a master craftsman. Walking through his yard and his home is like going through a Wonderland. He’s the rare kind of guy you fall in love immediately with, and who does the same to you.
I left my brother’s that afternoon, while driving home it hit me: This little kid, that came here to America, made a success of his life, is now a happy old man who spreads that happiness around, was one of those poorly dressed, hungry little kids on the Soviet side of the fence that our Airmen dropped food and candy to as they were landing.
I remember seeing the pictures of those kids. They reminded me of the painting “Guernica” , but totally the opposite.
He didn’t say the Berlin Wall, he said a fence. And Templehof Airport was enclosed by a fence (even if the fence didn’t separate it from the Soviet Zone). As your link indicates, someone born in 1942 would have been six or seven during the Berlin Airlift.
I was more confused by the term Soviet side. I was well aware of the candy droppers and I would have expected a fence around the airport. I don’t believe the Soviets cordoned off their section of Berlin until much later after the end of the war.
The Berlin airlift was probably the most humane thing that happened during the past century. Read up on it. It’s not just the little children. When those planes landed with desperately needed supplies, It was old women, young women, girls and boys who worked 24 hours a day to get those planes unloaded, to get them back up into the air as soon as possible to come back full again.
The Soviets, on the other hand, tried to put up huge poles to block our planes from landing
For what it’s worth, Flyboys, by James Bradley, was a national bestseller in the U.S. about ten years ago. It detailed torture, beheadings, and cannibalism of Navy pilots by Japanese forces on Chichi Jima. (For all I know, Dingbang is Bradley.)
West Berlin was more of a territorial and political thing for him. It was deep in East German territory, but the freedoms and relative economic recovery there were a big pimple on his ass. He had already starved the Germans under his control, had stripped them of any machinery or manufacturing capability left there after the war, and was still holding well over a million German soldiers as prisoners.
Despite the barbed wire fences, thousands were making it to the Western side weekly. His way to stop this was to blockade West Berlin.
Well, no … I was responding to Omar Little’s point about the subject matter not being commercially viable. Flyboys was a very nuanced book; it delved into the backstories of the men (boys, really) who were shot down over Chichi Jima, how Japan became a world power in the first place, the perversion of the samurai code of bushido, and why Chichi Jima (and Iwo Jima) were so important in the first place. It also detailed the results of the firebombing campaign over Japan.
Essentially, it was a treatise on the importance of naval air power in defeating Japan, but the core story was about the boys who were shot down and what happened to them. I would strongly recommend it if you’re interested in WWII non-fiction.
Dingbang, thanks , but I believe that it’s best that I pursue other avenues to get this story told. It appears that you don’t have the time nor the interest for this project.
I was at least looking for some feedback.
However, I had a bad day yesterday. I think I may have taken out my frustrations in the wrong direction. Dingbang, please ignore that post. I look forward to further communications.
