High Flight: Aviators Remembered

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed and joined the tumbling mirth
of sun-split clouds, - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of-wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace,
Where never lark, or even eagle flew-
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high, untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
No. 412 Squadron
Royal Canadian Air Force
Killed 11th December 1941

For a saving grace, we didn't see our dead,
Who rarely bothered coming home to die
But simply stayed away out there
In the clean war, the war in the air.

Seldom the ghosts came back bearing their tales
Of hitting the earth, the incompressible sea,
But stayed up there in the relative wind,
Shades fading in the mind,

Who had no graves but only epitaphs
Where never so many spoke for never so few:
'Per ardua,' said the partisans of Mars,
'Per aspera,' to the stars.

That was the good war, the war we won
As if there were no death, for goodness' sake,
With the help of the losers we left out there In the air, in the empty air.

Howard Nemerov
Royal Canadian Air Force
U.S. Army Air Force

Take down his coat,
Pick up his things,
The scribbled note,
The tunic with wings;
The book, cricket pads and bat
And his beloved mis-shapen hat.

Auction his car,
Attend to his debts,
And then there are
His several pets.
The tortoise, collie dog and bird,
Whose cheerful chirp is now unheard.

No more kissing
And popsies thrilled;
He's reported 'Missing,
Believe Killed',
He had no ribbons, won no fame;
We'll toast his memory just the same.

Vernon Noble
RAF Linton-on-Ouse
1941

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

William Butler Yeats
1919

Snap back the canopy,
Pull out the oxygen tube,
Flick the harness pin
And slap out into the air,
Clear of the machine.

You knew that you must float
From the sun above the clouds
To the gloom beneath, from a world
Of rarefied splendour to one
Of cheapened dirt, close-knit
In its effort to encompass man
In death.

David Bourne
Royal Air Force
Killed September 5th 1941

The pain has stopped,
For I am dead,
My time on Earth is done,
But in a hundred years from now,
I'll still be twenty-one.

My brief sweet life is over,
My eyes no longer see,
No summer walks,
No Christmas trees,
No pretty girls for me.

I've got the chop, I've had it,
My nightly ops; are done,
Yet in another hundred years,
I'll still be twenty-one.

R. W. Gilbert

This is a damned unnatural sort of war;
The pilot sits among the clouds, quite sure
About the values he is fighting for;
He cannot hear beyond his veil of sound,
He cannot see the people on the ground;
he only knows that on the sloping map
Of sea-fringed town and country people creep
Like ants - and who cares if ants laugh or weep?

This is a damned inhuman sort of war.
I have been fighting in a dressing-gown
Most of the night; I cannot see the guns,
The sweating gun-detachments or the planes;
I sweat down here before a symbol thrown
Upon a screen, sift facts, initiate
Swift calculations and swift orders; wait
For the precise split-second to order fire.
We chant our ritual words; beyond the phones
A ghost repeats the orders to the guns:
One Fire ... Two Fire ... ghosts answer: the guns roar
Abruptly; and an aircraft waging war
Inhumanly from nearly five miles height.
Meets our bouquet of death - and turns sharp right.

R. N. Currey

In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school -
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said , 'Our casualties were low.'

Randall Jarrell
U.S. Army Air Force
1963

Almighty and all-present Power,
Short is the prayer I make to Thee,
I do not ask in battle hour
For any shield to cover me.

The vast unalterable way
From which the stars do not depart
May not be turned aside to stay
The bullet flying to my heart.

I ask no help to strike my foe,
I seek no petty victory here,
The enemy I hate, I know
To Thee is also dear.

But this I pray, be at my side
When death is drawing through the sky,
Almighty God, who also died
Teach me the way that I should die.

Hugh Brodie
Royal Australian Air Force

Whenever I see them ride on high,
Gleaming and proud in the morning sky,
Or lying awake in bed at night,
I hear them pass on their outward flight;

I feel the mass of metal and guns,
Delicate instruments, deadweight tons,
Awkward, slow, bomb racks full,
Straining away from downward pull,
Straining away from home and base

And try to see the pilot's face,
I imagine a boy who's just left school,
On whose quick-learned skill and courage cool
Depend the lives of the men in his crew,
And success of the job they have to do

And something happens to me inside
That is deeper than grief, greater than pride,
And though there is nothing I can say,
I always look up as they go their way,
And care and pray for every one,
And steel my heart to say,
"Thy will be done."

Sarah Churchill
(Daughter of Sir Winston Churchill)
1943

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not
Knows no release from little things:

Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.

How can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare

The soul's dominion?
Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the restless day,
And count it fair.

Amelia Earhart

This muster of names,
This directory of faceless, formless beings
Suffocates the mind.

Is it solely a tabulation as on
pages of Smith's in volume S to Z?
Or a company of friends
Awaiting recognition
Amidst a legion of Strangers?

In the quest, shadows emerge,
Forgotten faces relive
Brief moments of shared experience
And call upon yet others to be identified %u2026

Now what became of him? And him?
And their names too are
carved in the roster.

I dare not look for my own,
it should be there.

Our Flight Commander, Hinks,
Quiet Ronnie Frost (he joined with me),
Young Naylor who was lost in the North Sea %u2026
Was he twenty when he came into my room
and cried like a baby the night Bob Hewitt died,
leaving a pregnant wife?

Three weeks later
I helped to clear his room,
And found his Bible by his bed.

Flt Lt Rupert 'Tiny' Cooling
Wellington Bomber Pilot

Some day we will know, where pilots go
when their work on earth is through.
Where the air is clean, and the engines gleam
and the skies are always blue.
They have flown alone, with the engines moan,
as they sweat the great beyond,
And they take delight, at the awsome sight
of the world spread far and yon.

Yet not alone, for above the moan, where the earth is out of sight,
as they make there stand, He takes their hand
and guides them through the night.
How near to God are these men of sod,
who step near Deaths last door?
Oh, these are real, not made of steel,
but He knows who goes before.

And how they live, and love, and are beloved,
but their love is most for air.
And with death about, they still fly out,
and leave their troubles there.
He knows these things, of men with wings,
and He knows they are surely true.
and He will give a hand, to such a man
'cause He's a pilot too.

Anon