David Sears is a New Jersey-based business consultant and author.
David's business consulting expertise encompasses executive and professional staffing, compensation and incentives, organizational change consulting, executive coaching and human resources process engineering. His book Successful Talent Strategies has been published by AMACOM. A forthcoming book Best Sellers , also to be published by AMACOM, profiles best human capital practices in solution selling across multiple industries.
David's early career included service as a United States Navy officer with extensive sea duty aboard a destroyer and a tour of duty as an advisor to the Vietnamese Navy during the Vietnam conflict. His book The Last Epic Naval Battle: Voices of Leyte Gulf chronicles the exploits of 60 sailors and aviators in the last and most decisive sea battle of World War II.
David has a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MS in Industrial Relations from Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
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August 8, 2005
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I've just received something in the mail that reminds me of the strange but frequent connection between terrible events and redemptive outcomes. This latest evidence came in the form of a newsletter from AFEES. AFEES -- shorthand for the Air Forces Escape and Evasion Society -- is a veteran's organization whose eligibility requirements can only be described as daunting. AFEES is an American offshoot of the Royal Air Forces Escaping Society. Membership is reserved for fliers and air crew of any service forced down behind enemy lines who either avoided or escaped captivity to return to allied control. Concisely put, AFEES is a society of escapers and evaders -- truly a band on the run!
AFEES is one of those organizations you'd never imagined existed (my apologies here to readers who know the Society well and may even be members). Yet, once you hear about it, AFEES doings make perfect sense. I've learned that among military veterans, there is no firmer bond than that of shared adversity, danger, and even tragedy. This was certainly the case for the sailors and air crews that I profiled in my book The Last Epic Naval Battle: Voices from Leyte Gulf . Surmounting the loss of buddies cemented these ship and squadron mates (and often their spouses and extended families as well) into lifelong kindred relationships.
The difference for AFEES members is that their shared adversity -- being shot down, being hunted (often, literally, like animals) and making it back to friendly lines -- was separately experienced. AFEES members were often lone pilots, or at most, small crews who dropped from thousands of separate patches of sky into thousands of remote, strange and often enemy-infested pieces of geography. Think of it: the prospect of capture or death faced in shivering or sweltering isolation, in jungles or deserts or mountains or oceans.
Articles in the AFEES' Summer newsletter (sent to me by AFEES Communication Editor Larry Grauerholz) give a flavor of the types of "terrible events" that its members fell victim to: an AAF P-38 photo reconnaissance pilot who jumped into the jungle wilds of Papua New Guinea (New Britain then) where he survived for five months before rescue; the crew of a B-17 flying back from a daylight raid over Berlin who bailed out over Belgium (one crew member remembered the distinct mothball smell of his blossoming parachute); a B-24 bomber crew downed and stranded among the towering mountain peaks of Tibet; another B-24 crew jumping over Northern Italy's Po River Valley; a P-51 fighter pilot downed two days after D-Day who was soon captured but connived to escape a German prison camp.
The redemptive outcomes in all these remarkably harrowing tales? Well for one thing, of course, these are stories of men who survived and got back to safety -- eventually to find their ways years later to the camaraderie of fellow evaders and escapers. Quite literally they found company and common cause because of their moments (and sometimes months) of utter isolation.
But many also savor quite another human blessing -- they experienced in a very real way the "kindness of strangers." Another part of AFEES' charter reads like this: “The Society's purpose is to encourage members helped by the resistance organizations or patriotic nationals to continue existing friendships or renew relationships with those who helped them during their escape or evasion.”
Those who once helped AFEES members were friends indeed! While many of those friendships were anonymous and fleeting (though many others have endured well beyond the half-century mark), they are seldom forgotten. Excerpts from the AFEES newsletter also give glimpses of these unexpected miracles:
- John Hargesheimer, the P-38 pilot who bailed out over New Britain, had his days of furtive isolation end with the arrival of native outrigger canoe. A note carried by one of the natives certified the men's loyalty and their help in rescuing other downed Airmen. Hargesheimer's long ordeal was not over (his rescuers, Meramera tribesmen, sheltered him for several months before delivering him safely to a Coastwatchers camp), but “my prayers had been answered.”
- Richard Smith, a B-17 pilot downed north of Paris was pointed to safety by a French plowman. “He pointed one way and said ‘komarad' and he pointed the other way and said 'Allemandes.'” When Smith arrived at the ‘komarad' destination, “three young Frenchmen came up, and each had a handgun and a sack of clothes. And I became a civilian right there.”
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The humanity of rescues such as these has a way of sustaining itself -- in ways both big and small. For example, John Hargesheimer returned his gratitude in substantive form -- first in the form of a scholarship to fund the Australian education of a Meramera child, and eventually in the founding of a full-fledged school. Begun in 1964, the Airmen's Memorial School, Papua New Guinea grew to an enrollment of 500 Meramera children.
For many others the paybacks are in webs of lasting, transoceanic friendships. Tom Yankus, a member of the B-17 that went down in Belgium recently traveled to France and Belgium, a trip highlighted by a reunion with two veterans of the French Resistance who helped shelter him for months. The seed of this reunion was sown by the Internet sleuthing of two Belgian teenagers tracking down the origins of a legendary crewless "ghost airplane" that had crashed into the countryside near where they lived.
AFEES members are mostly World War II veterans. Larry Grauerholz (himself a B-17 navigator shot down over France who made his way over the Pyrenees to Spain and eventually to Gibraltar) indicated AFEES has had only an occasional member from the Korean and Vietnam conflicts. This may be a simple failure to connect with subsequent generations of veteran aircrews who have their own stories of downing, escape and evasion.
But it may also be that circumstances have changed. The bombing armadas of
B-17s, B-24s, B-25s and B-29s that (along with their fighter escorts) once
crowded the skies above occupied Europe and the Japanese empire were unique
to World War II: air superiority was still sharply contested. In today's
conflicts, America's most exposed aircraft are helicopters and low-speed
close support aircraft. Just as important, downed U.S. air crews of
the Korean, Vietnam, Gulf and Baltic eras most often found themselves in
unremittingly hostile environments. Survival has become a matter of evading
enemy combatants and civilians alike.
Still, there is some cause to look for silver linings. Episodes of unexpected humanity (and openhearted payback) may yet flare from the ashes of wartime disaster for more recent "bands on the run."
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© 2005 D.L.Sears & Associates, Inc. All opinions expressed
in this article are the author's and do not necessarily reflect those
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