Joseph Heller had a pre-war life. He was a son of Brooklyn. He was also the son of two first-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, Lena and Isaac Heller. When young Joey was a malleable and impressionable five years old, his father, a wholesale bakery truck driver, died after a bungled surgical operation. Joey, his mother, and his two devoted older siblings, who he discovered as an adult were half siblings from a first marriage of his father, were left to survive as best as they could in the carnival-like atmosphere of Coney Island. This included his mother accepting boarders into their four-room apartment. Such an unusual environment, besides giving him a pure, unreconstructed, streets-of-New York accent — a kind of high nasal blat — is credited with encouraging his ironic, smart aleck nature and wry humor, the supporting structure of his literary style. His sometimes-perplexed mother was known to say, “Joey, you got a twisted brain.”
In 1941 he graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School, working lightly delivering telegrams. A life turning, “ah-ha” moment had occurred after reading a child's version of Homer's Iliad that convinced him, if he ever grew up, that he wanted to be a writer. His first job, however, that of becoming a blacksmith's helper, was not exactly the first step.
After the United States entered World War II, sharp-witted Joe and a few Brooklyn buddies, full of life and bursting with patriotism, enlisted in the Army Air Corps and, with much grandstanding, boldly took the oath of enlistment in Grand Central Terminal. He remembered his mother weeping as the trolley car pulled away with him in it. He couldn't figure out why she was so unhappy. He felt like he was going to Hollywood.
War seemed quite exotic for Joe; the standard of living was higher in the Army than in Coney Island, he ate better, and he had more money in his pocket than ever before. And the Army offered travel.
So he traveled to armorer's school. He would have been quite content to remain there; people who made armor and affixed it to war machines did not usually go into combat. He heard, however, an erroneous rumor that armorers were being turned into gunners and gunners’ lives were “worth no more than three days.” Off he went to cadet school and became a bombardier. He was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and traveled some more.
After crossing the Atlantic Ocean, Joe stepped onto Corsican soil and his life began a very slow creep from the levity of a youth on a glamorous Jimmy Stewart/Clark Gable type of adventure to, eventually, that of a trained and skilled warrior whose life was up for grabs on each mission.
The war eventually ended, many years passed, and one evening, while lying in bed thinking other thoughts, Joe surprised himself with the opening lines of the yet unconsidered Catch-22. The next morning he wrote the entire first chapter and sent it to his agent, who sold it to New World Writing. He recalls how “I was so excited I couldn't wait to begin chapter two. One year later, I did.”
Fast forward further to 1961. Judgment Day surfaced. With the eventual publication of his first novel, Catch-22, sides were chosen. The readers divided.
As the book gained in popularity there was one side that hailed 39-year-old Heller as their tongue-in-cheek voice to deride and protest. The Vietnam War fanned these flames. On the other side were those who railed against the author's use of sarcasm, black humor, and ridicule against authority, the military, and his war mates. The temptation was to question Heller's wartime abilities and loyalty
But take another look. Heller was a bombardier. Consider the bombardier.
To reach the bombardier's station, that “greenhouse” in the nose of the B-25, the bombardier, as opposed to every other crewmember, had to leave his parachute at the entrance of the short, claustrophobic tunnel through which he must crawl. The farther away from the pilot that a crewmember was, especially the isolated bombardier and the backward-facing tail gunner, the more fortitude it took to overcome apprehension from lack of instant information as to what was happening in the rest of the plane, not knowing how drastic the situation was, and the awful feeling of being alone in critical circumstances.
The bombardier sat out in front with his Plexiglas panoramic view of the approach to the target and its defenses. Once the battle began, he was put right in the middle of it. Under certain conditions from this remote position it was impossible for the bombardier to bail out if it became necessary. It took an exceptionally brave man to ignore the battle and concentrate to the degree needed to take out a pinpoint target such as a twenty-foot bridge from over two miles away. Some could do it; others could not.
Joseph Heller flew 60 missions.
The crawlway was Yossarian's lifeline to outside from a plane about to fall, but Yossarian swore at it with seething antagonism, reviled it as an obstacle put there by providence as part of the plot that would destroy him. There was room for an additional escape hatch right there in the nose of a B-25 but there was no escape hatch. Instead there was the crawlway, and since the mess on the mission over Avignon he had learned to detest every mammoth inch of it, for it slung him seconds and seconds away from his parachute, which was too bulky to be taken up front with him, and seconds and seconds more after that away from the escape hatch on the floor between the rear of the elevated flight deck and the feet of the faceless top turret gunner mounted high above. (p. 48)
With a stew-pot of war-determined circumstances and a sea of both military and civilian personalities surrounding him, Joseph Heller had little need to look farther than arm's length for literary material. Scenarios such as the following filter through Catch-22, providing solid confirmation and example of how his facts transitioned into fiction. Couple these personal experiences with his fertile imagination and out pops — Luciana!
Luciana fled mirthfully along the sidewalk in her high white wedgies, pulling Yossarian along in tow with the same lusty and ingenuous zeal she had displayed in the dance hall the night before and at every moment since. Yossarian caught up and walked with his arm around her waist until they came to the corner and she stepped away from him. She straightened her hair in a mirror from her pocketbook and put lipstick on.
“Why don't you ask me to let you write my name and address on a piece of paper so that you will be able to find me again when you come to Rome?” she suggested.
“Why don't you let me write your name and address down on a piece of paper?” he agreed.
“Why?” she demanded belligerently, her mouth curling suddenly into a vehement sneer and her eyes flashing with anger. “So you can tear it up into little pieces as soon as I leave?”
“Who's going to tear it up?” Yossarian protested in confusion. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“You will,” she insisted. “You'll tear it up into little pieces the minute I'm gone and go walking away like a big shot because a tall, young, beautiful girl like me, Luciana, let you sleep with her and did not ask you for money.”
“Stupido!” she shouted with emotion. “I am not asking you for any money!” She stamped her foot and raised her arm in a turbulent gesture that made Yossarian fear she was going to crack him in the face again with her great pocketbook. Instead, she scribbled her name and address on a slip of paper and thrust it at him. “Here,” she taunted him sardonically, biting on her lip to still a delicate tremor. “Don't forget. Don't forget to tear it into tiny pieces as soon as I am gone.”
Then she smiled at him serenely, squeezed his hand and, with a whispered regretful “Addio,” pressed herself against him for a moment and then straightened and walked away with unconscious dignity and grace.
The minute she was gone, Yossarian tore the slip of paper up and walked away in the other direction, feeling very much like a big shot because a beautiful young girl like Luciana had slept with him and did not ask for money.
[Later at the dining table] Yossarian choked on his toast and eggs at the enormity of his error in tearing her long, lithe, nude, young vibrant limbs into tiny pieces of paper so impudently and dumping her down so smugly into the gutter from the curb. He missed her terribly already. (pp. 161-162)
About this account, Heller confesses:
His [Yossarian, Catch-22's bombardier hero] encounter with Luciana, the Roman whore, corresponds exactly with an experience I had. He sleeps with her; she refuses money and suggests that he keep her address on a slip of paper. When he agrees, she sneers, “Why? So you can tear it up?” He says of course he won't and tears it up the minute she's gone — then regrets it bitterly. That's just what happened to me in Rome. Luciana was Yossarian's vision of a perfect relationship. That's why he saw her only once, and perhaps that's why I saw her only once. If he examined perfection too closely, imperfections would show up.”1
The imagination is only mildly stretched by watching Joe slip into Yossarian. As surely as mild-mannered Major Joe Ruebel evolved into equally affable Maj. Danby or the more mature Major Jerre Cover stepped into greyhaired Major_de Coverly, so did Yossarian develop from the Essence-of-Joe. Like a sculptor, Joe manipulated his media — add here, remove there, enhance, exaggerate — but the supporting structure remained, yes, Joe. Yossarian safely allowed Joe Heller to be Joe Heller.
With the keen anticipation of the inexperienced, Joe was introduced to his first mission four days after his arrival in Corsica.
The first time I came to Corsica was in May, 1944, when I joined the bomb group as a combat replacement. After four days I was assigned to my first mission as a wing bombardier. The target was the railroad bridge at Poggibonsi.
Poor little Poggibonsi. Its only crime was that it happened to lie outside Florence along one of the few passageways running south through the Apennine Mountains to Rome, which was still held by the Germans. And because of this small circumstance, I had been brought all the way across the ocean to help kill its railroad bridge.
The mission to Poggibonsi was described to us in the briefing room as a milk run — that is, a mission on which we were not likely to encounter flak or enemy planes. I was not pleased to hear this. I wanted action, not security. I wanted a sky full of dogfights, daredevils and billowing parachutes. I was twenty-one years old. I was dumb. I tried to console myself with the hope that someone, somewhere along the way, would have the good grace to open fire at us. No one did.
As a wing bombardier, my job was to keep my eyes on the first plane in our formation, which contained the lead bombardier. When I saw his bomb-bay doors open, I was to open mine. The instant I saw his bombs begin to fall, I would press a button to release my own. It was as simple as that — or should have been.
I guess I got bored. Since there was no flak at Poggibonsi, the lead bombardier opened his bomb-bay doors early and took a long, steady approach. A lot of time seemed to pass. I looked down to see how far we were from the target. When I looked back up, the bombs from the other planes were already falling. I froze with alarm for another second or two. Then I squeezed my button. I closed the bomb-bay doors and bent forward to see where the bombs would strike, pleading silently for the laws of gravitational acceleration to relax just enough to allow my bombs to catch up with the others.
The bombs from the other planes fell in an accurate, concentrated pattern that blasted a wide hole in the bridge. The bombs from my plane blasted a hole in the mountains several miles beyond.
It was my naïve hope that no one would notice my misdemeanor; but in the truck taking us from the planes a guy in a parachute harness demanded, “Who was the bombardier in the number two plane?”
“I was,” I answered sheepishly.
“You dropped late,” he told me, as though it could have escaped my attention. “But we hit the bridge.”
Yeah, I thought, but I hit the mountain.
As noted, in aircraft 8A flew Joseph Heller as bombardier and Lt. Joseph Chrenko as pilot (Chrenko was Yohannon's tent mate and the basis for the character Hungry Joe in Catch-22). In aircraft 8F flew George Wells as lead pilot.
Twenty-plus years later, Heller revisited Corsica and Italy and noted:
A few days after I returned to Italy from Corsica with my family, we rode through Poggibonsi on our way south to Siena to see an event there called the Palio. The railroad bridge at Poggibonsi had been repaired and is now better than ever. The hole in the mountains is still there.
Poor Poggibonsi. During those first few weeks we flew missions to rail and highway bridges at Perugia, Arezzo, Orvieto, Cortona, Tivoli and Ferrara. Most of us had never heard of any of these places. We were very young, and few of us had been to college.
Flight schedule for May 24, 1944. In 8F flew pilot Capt. George Wells (Capt. Wren). In 8A flew bombardier 2nd Lt. Joseph Heller and pilot Lt. Joseph Chrenko (Hungry Joe).
When we weren't flying missions, we went swimming or played baseball or basketball. The food was good — better, in fact, than most of us had ever eaten before — and we were getting a lot of money for a bunch of kids twenty-one years old. Like good soldiers everywhere, we did as we were told. Had we been given an orphanage to destroy (we weren't), our only question would have been “How much flak?” In vehicles borrowed from the motor pool we would drive to Cervione for a glass of wine or to Basitia to kill an afternoon or evening. It was, for a while, a pretty good life. We had rest camps at Capri and Ile Rousse. And soon we had Rome.
Within less than a week, friends were returning with fantastic tales of pleasure in a big, exciting city that had girls, cabarets, food, drinking, entertainment, and dancing. When my turn came to go, I found that every delicious story was true. I don't think the Coliseum was there then, because no one ever mentioned it.
For the most part, the missions were short — about three hours — and relatively safe. It was not until June 3, for example, that our squadron lost a plane, on a mission to Ferrara. It was not until August 3, over Avignon, in France, that I finally saw a plane shot down in flames, and it was not until August 15, again over Avignon, that a gunner in my plane was wounded and a copilot went a little berserk at the controls and I came to the startling realization — Good God! They're trying to kill me, too! And after that it wasn't much fun.
Joe knew no fear until his 37 th mission. “Until then, it was all play. I was so brainwashed by Hollywood's image of heroism that I was disappointed when nobody shot back at us.” But after that traumatic mission, “all I wanted was out.”
“I'm afraid.”
“That's nothing to be ashamed of,” Major Major Major Major counseled him kindly. “We're all afraid.”
“I'm not ashamed,” Yossarian said. “I'm just afraid.” (p. 101)
. . . most of us in Corsica had never heard of Avignon before the day we were sent there to bomb the bridge spanning the River Rhone. One exception was a lead navigator from New England who had been a history teacher before the war and was overjoyed in combat whenever he found himself in proximity to places that had figured importantly in his studies. As our planes drew abreast of Orange and started to turn south to the target, he announced on the intercom, “On our right is the city of Orange, ancestral home of the kings of Holland and of William III, who ruled England from 1688 to 1702.”
“And on our left,” came back the disgusted voice of a worried radio gunner from Chicago, “is flak.”
Mark Twain may have nailed it when he espoused, “God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
We had known from the beginning that the mission on Aug. 3 was likely to be dangerous, for three planes had been assigned to precede the main formations over the target, spilling out scraps of metallic paper through a back window in order to cloud the radar of the anti-aircraft guns. As a bombardier in one of these planes, I had nothing to do but hide under my flak helmet until the flak stopped coming at us and then look back at the other planes to see what was happening. One of them was on fire, heading downward in a gliding spiral that soon tightened into an uncontrolled spin. I finally saw some billowing parachutes. Three men got out. Three others didn't and were killed. One of those who parachuted was found and hidden by some people in Avignon and was eventually brought safely back through the lines by the French underground.
Southern France had finally been softened by operations like the highly effective Operation Strangle, a campaign that had throttled German communications in central and northern Italy. The Germans were choked into abandoning Rome and retreating northwards toward a new network of fortifications in the Apennines. Meanwhile, the Group's operations in the Battle of the Brenner were almost a carbon-copy campaign. Again the object was to pinch off supplies from the Germans in their near-impregnable Gothic Line. Besides chopping up this passionately defended railroad artery from the Reich to the Po valley, the campaign also immobilized the enemy in Italy where in April, 1945, he was forced to either surrender or die.
MISSION #78: AUG. 14, 1944
Flew with 489th as formation commander on coastal at Cap Camerat, France. Things really look as though the big invasion will come tomorrow.
The day was a Tuesday. It was August 15, 1944. While the day started in a routine manner, George was aware of coming change.
On this day of the invasion of Southern France both George and Joe were in the air. The two barely knew each other yet here they were, lock step. Both had arisen early to perform the cold water shave and bathe, to attend the mandatory briefing, to bump and lurch along on the trucks headed for the waiting planes, to attend to the details, to lumber into the air and then — what kind of day was this to be?
For Joe it turned into his worst nightmare, a life-defining experience. At dawn they were part of those first bombers, of ultimately 2,000, over the invasion coast. While Joe was enduring his 37th terrifying mission, this one again over Avignon, George was also in the air. It was George's 79th mission and his mission book entry reads:
MISSION #79: AUG. 15
Today was “D” Day for Southern France. I led the 1st box from our Group (487) which was the first bombers over the invasion coast. All together there were 2,000 over the beachhead between 6:50 A.M. and 7:20 A.M. not counting the fighters and the troop carriers. There was plenty of action downstairs. Seven aircraft carriers, four battleships etc. The Air Force had a corridor to fly and the Navy had a corridor for ships. The target for my box was gun positions at Cap Drammont, France. The Army was going ashom at 8:00 H. In the afternoon we had a rough mission. Lost three ships and lots of wounded. We flew 132 ships today.
Joe continues on that same day:
On Aug. 15, the day of the invasion of southern France, we flew to Avignon again. This time three planes went down, and no men got out. A gunner in my plane got a big wound in his thigh. I took care of him. I went to visit him in the hospital the next day. He looked fine. They had given him blood, and he was going to be all right. But I was in terrible shape, and I had twenty-three more missions to fly.2
Joe could have authored the quote, again from Mark Twain, “I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
Both men, almost miraculously, touched down safely on their airstrip. A week later Avignon raised its ugly head and starred, once more, in George's book:
Flew as formation commander with 487th on R/R Bridge at Avignon, France. This is considered the roughest targetfor anyone in the theater. We had an element of chaff and frags and 4 elements of frags which we dropped on the gun positions. It must have had the Jrnies in their slit trenches because we didn't get a shot.
In June of 1975, Playboy Magazine interviewed Heller, and the key Avignon mission was brought up again. This was a milestone moment for young Joe. Consequently, it became a milestone in Catch-22 as well.
Heller: At first, I was sorry when nobody shot at us. I wanted to see a sky full of flak and dogfights and billowing parachutes. Was like a movie to me until on my 37 th mission, we bombed Avignon and a guy in my plane was wounded. I suddenly realized, “Good God! They're trying to kill me, too!” Wasn't much fun after that.
PB: That sounds like the Avignon mission in Catch-22, when Snowden, the gunner, is killed.
Heller: It is, and it's described pretty accurately in the book. Our copilot went berserk at the controls and threw us into a dive. Then one of our gunners was hit by flak and the pilot kept yelling into the intercom, “Help him. Help the bombardier.” And I was yelling back, “I'm the bombardier. I'm OK.” The gunner's leg was blown open and I took care of him. After Avignon, all I wanted to do was go home.3
. . . except for the pitiful time of the mess on the mission to Avignon when Dobbs went crazy in mid-air and began weeping pathetically for help.
“Help him, help him,” Dobbs sobbed. “Help him, help him.”
“Help who? Help who?” called back Yossarian, once he plugged his headset back into the intercom system, after it had been jerked out when Dobbs wrested the controls away from Huple and hurled them all down suddenly into the deafening, paralyzing, horrifying dive which had plastered Yossarian helplessly to the ceiling of the plane by the top of his head and from which Huple had rescued them just in time by seizing the controls back from Dobbs and leveling the ship out almost as suddenly right back in the middle of the buffeting layer of cacophonous flak from which they had escaped successfully only a moment before.
Oh, God! Oh, God, Oh, God, Yossarian had been pleading wordlessly as he dangled from the ceiling of the nose of the ship by the top of his head, unable to move.
“The bombardier, the bombardier,” Dobbs answered in a cry when Yossarian spoke. “He doesn't answer, he doesn't answer. Help the bombardier, help the bombardier.”
“I'm the bombardier,” Yossarian cried back at him. “I'm the bombardier. I'm all right. I'm all right.”
“Then help him, help him,” Dobbs begged. “Help him, help him.”
And Snowden lay dying in back. (p. 50)
“On another mission to Ferrara,” Heller writes, “one I don't think I was on, a radio gunner I didn't know was pierced through the middle by a wallop of flak . . . and he died moaning, I was told, that he was cold. For my episodes of Snowden in the novel, I fused the knowledge of that tragedy with the panicked copilot and the thigh wound to the top turret gunner in my own plane on our second mission to Avignon.”4
When his gunner was injured, Heller called on his Boy Scout training to bandage the injury, but his fear and the closeness of death infused one of the great scenes in Catch-22.
He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden's secret. Drop him out of a window, and he'll fall. Set fire to him, and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden's secret. (pp. 429-430)
This mission was a milestone for Joe, who later said:
I might have seemed a hero and been treated as something of a small hero for a short while, but I didn't feel like one. They were trying to kill me, and I wanted to go home. That they were trying to kill all of us each time we went up was no consolation. They were trying to kill me.
I was frightened on every mission after that one, even the certified milk runs. It could have been about then that I began crossing my fingers each time we took off and saying in silence a little prayer. It was my sneaky ritual.” (Now and Then, p. 181)
Joe's 37th mission fell on August 15, 1944. Exactly six months minus one day earlier, George flew his 37th mission. Was the 37th mission the black cat? Here is what was recorded in George's small black book following his 37 th:
MISSION #37: FEB. 16TH
Mission — Campoleone, beachhead. Flight leader 2nd flight. Worst mission I've ever been on. Had direct hit right through tail and cut my rudder cables. Was undecided whetha to bail out or not. We salvoed our hatch and were all ready to jump, but Ifinally decided to bring it in. We made it all right and I was never so thankful to hit the ground. The enlisted men wanted to jump but I talked them out of it. We lost one of our planes, Red Reichard and Dean went down with it. Also Lt. Dunaway who came over with us. Seven men in the ship and only 3 chutes were seen to open. The plane was hit in the right engine and blew it all apart. All the fellows think I'm lucky because today was the third time I've brought back a shot-up plane.
Once Joe had completed the required sixty missions, he had zero interest in volunteering for more. He had done his duty well. Sixty times he had gone up in his confining glass cage and sixty times he had returned intact but in varying degrees of distress. He had survived. He just wanted to go home. Home. He elected to return to that home slowly and, in relative safety, by a water-hugging ship rather than to step inside a plane again. For many years following the war he flatly refused to fly in any type of an aircraft at all. Not surprisingly, and so understandingly, he harbored a very real terror of flying, as did many of the scarred combat veterans.
Using his GI benefits, Joe went back to school earning collegiate advanced degrees. He wrote, was published, lectured, and taught. In 1982-1983, while working through a divorce from his first wife, he developed Guillian-Barre Syndrome, a life-threatening neurological disease involving partial paralysis, which convinced him he was near death. Joe recovered and remarried. This handsome man with his feral, curly, white mane enjoyed bascuisine with friends who were used to his crotchety and caustic manner.
At the conclusion of an interview with Playboy Magazine in 1975, Joe was asked, “Is there any special way you’d like to be . . . remembered?”
Heller: “Remembered? In order to understand that question, am I to assume you have euphemistically deleted the word death?”
PB: “We were hoping you wouldn't notice.”
Heller: “It is impossible to predict or control how you will be remembered after your death. In that way death is like having children. You never know what will come out. In Beckett's Endgame, he asks his parents, in effect, “Why did you have me?” and his father replies, “We didn't know it would be you.”
To the pointed question, Joe responded, “I fear death, nursing homes, and vaccinations.” Eventually he dealt, saying, “Everyone else seems to get through it alright so it couldn't be too difficult for me.”
At age 76, Joseph Heller died of a heart attack.
“Joe Heller is dead but Catch-22 will live forever. He would have preferred the opposite, but what can you do? Death is the ultimate Catch-22.” (Peter Carlson, Washington Post Staff Writer, 12/14/99)