Let the Kicking Mule Kick - Keith A. Horn, Ladd L. Horn

Let the Kicking Mule Kick (eBook)

Personal Stories from a WWII B-26 Bomber Pilot to His Family

Keith A. Horn, Ladd L. Horn (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
700 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-8908-5 (ISBN)

'Let The Kicking Mule Kick' is a unique, two-perspective, historical memoir. The words of First Lieutenant Ladd L. Horn will draw you into his world and his experiences as a WWII, B-26 bomber pilot. Through his fascinating oral stories, his letters and more than three hundred of his personal pictures taken during the war, your mind will be transported to the people, animals, places and machines of war in North Africa, Sardinia, Corsica and France. May they come to life for you as they did for me.

"e;Let The Kicking Mule Kick"e; is a unique, two-perspective, historical memoir. The words of First Lieutenant Ladd L. Horn will draw you into his world and his experiences as a WWII, B-26 bomber pilot. Through his fascinating stories, letters and more than three hundred of his original pictures your mind will be directed to the people, animals, places and machines of war in North Africa, Sardinia, Corsica and France. This is no "e;boring"e; history book filled with facts about generals, divisions and politics. Instead, it is real, funny and sad. In "e;Part 1 The War As I Heard It"e; the verbatim oral stories he told our family when he was in his nineties, incorporate the seasoned perspective that comes from remembering events after seventy-plus years. Then the hundreds of stories excerpted from his letters in "e;Part II The War Through The Lens of Love,"e; explode with the raw emotions and insights of a twenty-one to twenty-three-year-old caught up in training and war. You will hear funny stories of crew members, dogs and kids, and even of pilots who forgot to buckle their seatbelts during training, "e;flew backwards,"e; landed in farmer's fields or went off the runway and hit a horse. But you will also learn something of what it was like to buckle up in a 38,000 pound machine filled with bombs and six to eight crew members with the roar of two 2,000 hp engines outside the uninsulated cockpit and fly for hours at 10,000 to 18,000 feet in temperatures below zero with flak and 88 mm shells bursting around you while accompanied by the twin, very-real fears of being shot down or running out of fuel. And, you will hear first-person stories of what it was like to lose planes and friends. But what is so fascinating in this memoir is that the stories are all illustrated with pictures that 1st Lieutenant Ladd Horn took and developed, sometimes under a blanket, in a mess kit and helmet in his tent. The pictures are often combined with military documents that complete the picture of the reality of life during war. Sometimes as you read, you will likely forget that these stories are real. I wrote this book for his great-grandchildren and to my surprise, I have had them "e;fighting"e; over who gets to read next!

PREFACE: The Origin of Let the Kicking Mule Kick

My father, 1st Lieutenant Ladd L. Horn, B-26 pilot, experienced things I only glimpsed through his stories. He was a good storyteller, but the activities of life, my mom’s reticence to have him talk about WWII (she would say something like, Ladd, don’t talk about the war. Nobody wants to hear that old stuff.) and perhaps the magnitude and gravity of what he did, and saw, kept him from telling us more for many years. When I was young and still at home, he would sometimes tell bits and pieces of funny stories, or crazy “shenanigans,” as he would say, from his time as a B-26 pilot. He would tell about guys putting .45 caliber rounds in the holes in their tent posts and hitting them until they went off and shot through the tent, or about the time he chased a farmer on his tractor across his newly-plowed field as he brought his plane in for an emergency landing during a cross-country training exercise. But the difficult things he saw and the really tough stories were held back for nearly seventy-five years except for three short pieces he wrote; “Condensed Record of Military Service,” “Let the Kicking Mule Kick,” which is the origin of the title of this book, and another written sometime between 1988 and 1995 entitled, “Recollections of 95th Squadron Activities: Sardinia, Corsica and Dijon; 50 Years After the Fact.”

When my father and mother were in their nineties (for a brief life history see Appendix 1), and they needed more help around the house and with medical appointments, I began spending a few days a week with them. Perhaps the sense my dad had that he would only live a few more years coupled with my more extended times with him (something that had not been possible for over forty years since my family and I had lived out of state for most of that time) changed the picture. He seemed to feel that he needed to tell the stories—even the sad and difficult ones. I sensed that in a way he felt it was his “duty” to tell the next generation what he had done and to give them a sense of the lives of the flight crews who had fought in WWII. Dad knew that most of the WWII veterans were gone and only a few remained to actively transmit a picture of that great global war. So many pilots and flight crew members had died during the war, and now, most of the remaining ones were approaching one hundred years old. In 2014, only one of his many crew members and tentmates was still alive, Robert Ringo, a bombardier. So, at some point, never really planned, and without too much of a decision, we both agreed that he would tell stories and I would type.

Whenever our day’s work was at a lull or we were between appointments and errands, we would sit on the couch in the living room and he would start a story and I would type on my laptop. He always complained that I was not going fast enough (I am a reasonably fast typist but a stenographer would have been better because it is just about impossible to keep up with oral storytelling!). We would never spend a long time at one sitting, but we did sit down quite often. When I would go back to my home in Rochester, NY, I would often “Google” something from the story or stories we had just recorded—a plane, a pilot, an engineer or bombardier, a location in Africa or Europe—and the story would continue to take shape and color. I would either mail that information or take it to him on my next visit and he would pick up on it and tell me more of the last story or start a new one.

Most of the stories were told in 2015 and 2016. His memory was great even at age 95, and he had always had an intense interest in how things work. He could remember details about flight speeds, fuel consumption rates, how air bases were laid out, which men were tentmates, which crew members were flying with him on specific missions (even though flight crews were often changed on a mission by mission basis) where planes were damaged, which ones went down, what happened to men who were captured, and events, locations and even some of the people from villages around their bases. His stories are filled with detail. However, as for anyone trying to remember events from seventy-plus years earlier, some details are lost. That is part of oral storytelling.

As time went on, we started through his picture album from the war. During high school, he had learned to develop film and when he entered the military, he would buy or bargain for cameras and film, take pictures of the war—people and planes and places—and then develop them. He was able to make prints of the negatives in his improvised darkrooms built on the side of his tents in Sardinia and Corsica. The negatives or prints were then sent home to his parents or my mom (his girlfriend at the time). Once other soldiers discovered that he could develop film, they would request that he develop their film as well. He would then trade development of their film for prints of their pictures. Thus, his album is rich with pictures from the 95th Bombardment Squadron of the 17th Bombardment Group. As we began to record each picture with the details of personnel and locations in them, Dad would tell new stories and I would capture those as well.

The number of stories grew and I began to think that I should pull together all of the isolated stories and the history of his military service for his grandchildren and great-grandchildren so they would know something of the man he was and his experiences. But the more stories I recorded, the more I realized that these stories were different than many other military stories I had heard and that they might be of interest to other people. Most military books fall into a small number of categories: (1) global or regional conflict mostly consisting of information about countries, alliances, strategies, generals, and groups of soldiers; (2) equipment—planes, tanks, artillery and etc.; and, (3) stories of heroic events of capture and survival. I realized that the stories Dad was telling didn’t fit any of these categories. His stories were about people, events, places, friends and animals caught up in the middle of war. They were alive and interesting—not a set of facts that some poor high school kid would have to write an essay about or memorize to pass the next exam. I also realized that what he had experienced was as intense and riveting as the action in some of the recent books and war films I had read or seen. And yet, they were told in a low-key way. I would often “miss” the intensity and emotion while I was typing but they would hit me later as I drove home or when I read the story to someone else. Once in the middle of a story I stopped typing and told him, “If I had read these stories in my high school history class, WWII would have come alive to me.” More than once since I have “choked up” reading them to others. And so, I began thinking about putting his stories in a book.

This storytelling process went on for about a year and a half or perhaps a little longer (2015–2016). Dad always complained that we weren’t moving fast enough. I know he felt he was steadily getting weaker and that at the pace we were going we would not get through all he wanted to tell. He was right. On October 16, 2016, he died and we had not finished.

The storytelling came to an end.

However, Dad was also something of a family record-keeper or “historian,” and he kept pictures, antiques and keepsakes from multiple generations. Over the years, I learned that in the same fashion, he had kept many military records and mementos. When I bought my first car, a 1965 Ford Custom 500 in 1972, he gave me one of his Army blankets (see the story, “Stolen Army Blankets”) to keep in the car in case I was ever stranded on a cold winter day in Buffalo. I still have that blanket in my 2019 Ford F150 in 2022. Before we started working on his stories he had also already passed his military awards on to my sister and me, each with exactly half of his insignia and medals. But, as he told me stories, I continued to get a better picture of which records and things he had saved. Some he gave to me while we were recording the stories. He had the common things people keep, such as medals, pictures and uniforms. Then there was his mess kit and his flying boots (purchased for a dollar in Natal, Brazil). There was his flight bag which contained orders (you weren’t really supposed to keep orders, but my dad had a penchant for keeping things pertaining to him) and training manuals, exams and notebooks, lists of men in his squadron, his engineer’s (Bernard Fineman’s) flight log and so much more. After his death, I put all of his military records together and soon began to search for more information about him through Army records, museum archives and the Internet. The idea of a book of his stories with his pictures kept growing.

This book is the realization of that idea.

The stories have been left for the most part as they were captured, much as if you were sitting on the couch with us, hearing the story together with all of its interruptions, natural glitches, uncorrected phrasing, grammar and flow. While I have edited them to remove typographic errors, I have not edited them to remove all mistakes, or even to make them read smoothly. I felt that editing them would potentially take away my dad’s character or insert my own personality and thus would put you one step farther away from the personal feeling in the stories. In a few places, I have added a few words or a phrase where it was necessary for a reader’s...

Erscheint lt. Verlag	28.2.2023
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► 1918 bis 1945
ISBN-10	1-6678-8908-7 / 1667889087
ISBN-13	978-1-6678-8908-5 / 9781667889085

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