BY TRAUMA

Chuck Yeager said that he never thought of the war as being that personal, in that, it wasn't the German he was trying to kill. He just wanted to blow up his airplane.

Yeager said that there were few things more fun than positioning your fighter behind another and then just blow pieces off it left and right until it falls apart in the sky.

This means, to him, the fighter was the vehicle carrying the fire power and it was the fire power that was paramount. I have read of others who said similar things.

Robert Johnson, another fighter pilot, who once thought like this did accept the individual in the opposing plane on a few occasions; seeing him bail-out, or on one occasion, looking a Luftwaffe pilot straight in the eyes as he flew beside Johnson's crippled fighter.  Johnson could not bail out. The canopy was jammed half-open leaving him too little room to exit.

The German pilot would drop back behind him, try to shoot him down, and then fly beside him to look through his canopy slot to see if he was still alive. This shoot-and-peek was necessary because the inside of Johnson's canopy was covered with the hydraulic oil from a shot-up landing gear emergency hand pump in his cockpit. Neither he nor the German could see except through this partially-opened canopy.

This happened, I believe, three times.

But still, a lot of pilots said it was a semi-personal war of machine-against-machine.

However, another fighter pilot, Quentin Aanenson, tells it differently. As he said in the best documentary ever done on the fighter pilot's role in WWII (and he personally made that documentary) that when he shot down a fighter or bomber, he was shooting down a machine, but when he strafed, he saw the killing force of his fighter against individual German soldiers having no place to hide.

On one occasion, his wing man had expended his ammunition, and on the way back to their base, they saw a column of Germans on a road. His wing man stayed as top cover to warn Aanenson if German fighters approached. In the mean time, Aanenson strafed the column of German soldiers.

He said that as he made pass after pass, he saw their fear, and he saw the dead piling up. In some cases, they merely stood in the open watching him. They had no place to hide.   They just waited for him to come back and kill them.

He didn't have the comfort of thinking that some other fighter had done all that killing and that he had just contributed a small amount to the carnage. He knew that the killing was by his own hand -- his hand alone.

He felt so bad, he broke off the attack and on the way back to his base he was sick, and then he discovered that he couldn't move his right arm. He had to remove it from the stick with his left hand and land with the left hand -- his right arm was limp in his lap.

For decades afterward, he would have the same dream and see those dead and dying men, and when he awoke, he could not move his right arm. When he sat down for breakfast, his wife would see that he was holding his coffee in his left hand and the right was in his lap -- and she knew he had had "that" dream again.

As an old man, Aanenson told of his wartime experiences onto video tape for his children who kept asking him about what he did in the war.  This was very difficult for him to do and his strafing mission was especially hard to tell. But once he had told it all, the first time ever in full detail, he never again had "that" dream.

He said that he knew how the Luftwaffe pilots died. They died just like his friends died.

By extreme trauma.

He said there was no nice way to die in an airplane. Even if dying from wounds, they go into shock from loss of blood and the cold is felt through the entire body.  One dying bomber crewman told a crew mate that his blood had turned to ice and he wanted it all to run out so he could be warm.

"Trauma," Aanenson had said.

They die -- blown apart, pulled apart, cut, ripped, impaled, burned, compressed, all the things that can be done to a body occurs in an aircraft failure.  This occurring by accident is too horrible to contemplate.  But for it to be done over and over, methodically, clinically, is the purest definition of inhumanity.

Viewing today's image, we see the trauma of war.

We can ask so many questions -- and know so little.

In his pockets were two pencils, each sharpened with a knife, a few crackers, a small bar of soap, some papers, a pack of cigarette paper -- little else is seen.

From his layered clothes, we know that it was still quite cool. He was splattered with mud, but it appears this was after he went down.

The Germans were very thorough with multi-colored braids, epaulets, and the like. Both this German and the one shown yesterday, had bordered epaulets and bordered collars with bars on the collar; two in this man's case but unknown in the previous image.

The majority of his skull has been blown away. His face is burned black from an explosive flash. The palm of his right hand was as exposed to the blast of the super-hot gas as was his face.

And what of the white rolls or tubes?

I haven't a clue.

He, too, had been covered. In this case with a top coat and wool blanket. His location relative to the previous corpse is unknown.

Beside him is the end of a submachine gun magazine. About five inches to the right of the magazine appears to be the end of a bullet.  We do not know if the magazine was attached to a gun or not. Since the corner of the magazine is over the coat that had covered him, the magazine/gun had been moved.

The magazine looks like that of the German MP43/44, designed in 1943 and modified in 1944. This was a weapon Hitler did not want at first because it did not have a 2000-yard range. But he later saw its merits because the infantryman's targets were now much closer. After Hitler fired an MP44 on a test range, he called it his "Sturmgewehr." This means "Assault Rifle" -- the first weapon to be so named anywhere. It became the standard issue submachine gun.

But we will know nothing of this German soldier, now having no use of either magazine or gun.

His location relative to things in the other photos is not known.

The top right border of the image (the black area) defines the torn end of this roll of film.

We have one more image of this series.

"By trauma," Quentin Aanenson said.