CHAPTER 48

LAST FOLDED WINGS

Two of the eight, the bomber pilots Morgan and Rosenthal, lived into the twenty-first century, and both saw the sixtieth anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack that had changed the course of their lives.

Bob Morgan’s postwar world began to unravel in 1945 on the same day that he stepped off a C-54 in San Francisco on his way back from the Pacific and phoned his wife.

“Why couldn’t it have been you instead of my brother?” were the first words that he had heard her say in six months.

“What?”

Dorothy’s brother, Harry, her only sibling, had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge, and this had devastated Dotty. For reasons that could be better analyzed theoretically than truly understood, she blamed her husband for Fate’s reaper having taken Harry rather than Bob.

“I hung up the telephone feeling as though a flak burst had engulfed me,” he recalled.

A week later, coincidentally the same day that the war ended in Europe, Morgan returned to his wife and young daughter in Asheville. They chose not to address the issue of Harry, though the incident permanently shadowed their marriage.

At seeing Sandra Lea for the first time, Morgan overflowed with all the joy that he had imagined, and that was good, but he was still in the USAAF, and after 21 days he was reporting for a series of reassignments. The first took him and his family back to MacDill Field near Tampa, where he had lived with his third wife, Martha Stone. This lasted for only a few weeks, and he spent the next several months bouncing around to various locations up and down the East Coast. It seemed to him that the USAAF didn’t know what to do with a Superfortress pilot who had completed his overseas tour.

Morgan mustered out of the service in September 1945, about a week after the Japanese surrendered on Tokyo Bay. He then took Dotty and Sandra back to Asheville with every intention of putting down roots for the rest of his life and joining the family business, which his father assumed he would do. He hesitated, however, harboring resentment toward his brother, who managed the company, and who had never been in uniform. As he put it, “Dave had gained control of the company while I was off fighting the war.”

Vince Evans, who had flown with Morgan in both Europe and the Pacific, urged him to consider a job flying for TWA, but Morgan imagined a life for himself that did not include being away from home. Finally, at his father’s urging, he joined the company and settled down amid the realities of the 1950s, when the United States was prosperous and “the American Dream” was coming true. He and Dotty bought a house and a four-door Pontiac, built a bigger house, watched Sandra grow and be joined by her siblings, Robert and Harry—and ignored the darkness gathering in the room.

Under David’s guidance, Morgan Manufacturing and its furniture subsidiary expanded to meet the demands of a boom that seemed endless. Perhaps inevitably, the company became overextended and quality began to ebb.

Bob Morgan, like many veterans, was nagged by bad memories and bad dreams of his wartime experiences—which he repressed as best he could. They had yet to invent the phrase “post-traumatic stress,” but he had it. He drank more than he should have. He and Dotty argued about the drinking and about which church to attend, and went through frequent separations. They avoided serious talk of divorce—because of the kids. Then she became pregnant again. Their youngest was born in 1958, a decade after their next oldest. She was named Peggy after Bob’s sister, who had died of polio shortly after the war ended.

As the separations grew longer, Morgan began having brief affairs with other women. On a business trip to Memphis, he reconnected with Margaret Polk, the original Memphis Belle. She was coming off a failed marriage of her own, and even Bob Morgan thought she was drinking too much. Nevertheless, they had a fling, stayed in touch, fought, and eventually called it quits a second time.

In the meantime, the Memphis Belle, that most famous of the Eighth Air Force warplanes, had survived the wrecker’s ball. When the USAAF was through with her, she was sold to the City of Memphis for $350, flown a few times, abandoned at the Memphis airport, and rescued for display by the American Legion, who put her on a pedestal near the National Guard Armory in 1950.

Along about 1964, Bob Morgan became romantically involved with a young woman at Morgan Manufacturing, and his own brother fired him. In his memoirs, he recalls reaching out to the great televangelist Reverend Billy Graham, whom he had first met a number of years before. As he put it, Graham convinced him that “God still loved me even when I was as awash in guilt and remorse as a man could be.”

Graham also put Morgan in touch with a man who knew a man who eventually hired him at a Volkswagen dealership in Virginia. During a tour for dealers of the company’s headquarters in Germany, he found himself talking with a German dealer who had flown with the Luftwaffe during the war. “We started comparing notes on our war histories,” Morgan recalled. “I told him what bombing missions I had flown, and the dates, and he, through an interpreter, told me what his fighter assignments had been. Finally we came across one engagement—it was over the submarine pens at Saint-Nazaire—that he and I had shared, and perhaps tried to kill one another. Had his Focke-Wulf been one of those blurs past my cockpit window?”

Bob’s marriage to Dotty finally ended in divorce in May 1979 after 35 years. A month later, he made Realtor Elizabeth Thrash his fifth wife. During the dozen years before she succumbed to lung cancer, Elizabeth was at Bob’s side as his career path took him back to the side of the Memphis Belle.

Long after the death of William Wyler, the director of the Memphis Belle documentary, his daughter Catherine Wyler teamed up with David Puttnam to produce a dramatic film, titled simply Memphis Belle, based on the story of the bomber. The Morgans, along with all of the other surviving crew members, were invited to England to watch the filming and to attend the 1990 premiere. Bob Morgan was disappointed that the film’s director, Michael Caton-Jones, had ignored their suggestions and he felt the result was a film that was “historically inaccurate.”

Morgan also found himself entwined with the fate of the real Memphis Belle. Though the aircraft had been donated to the US Air Force Museum in the 1970s, she remained in Memphis, gradually deteriorating and being stripped by vandals. A decade later, Morgan became involved with the local Memphis Belle Memorial Association as they raised money to move her to a pavilion on Mud Island in the Mississippi River in 1987.

After Elizabeth’s death from lung cancer in 1992, Morgan married his sixth wife, Linda Dickerson, beneath the nose of his old airplane. They had met during the filming of Memphis Belle while she was working as a publicity assistant to aircraft collector Dave Tallichet, who supplied the original Flying Fortress that stood in as the Memphis Belle.

During his final years, Bob Morgan finally discovered his niche, that being a reprise of his moment of glory. He traveled the country—and the world—making public appearances, signing prints, and pressing the flesh as the man who had once commanded the legendary Memphis Belle. It was at the airport in Asheville in 2004, as he returned from a round of air show appearances, that he suffered the fall that led to his death on May 15 at the age of 85.

The postscript to the Memphis Belle’s story is that she continued to deteriorate at Mud Island until 2005, when the Memorial Association relinquished her to the National Museum of the US Air Force, which brought her to its facility at Wright Patterson AFB in Ohio for restoration.

—

After the surrender of Germany, Rosie Rosenthal was the last of the eight to muster out of the wartime Eighth Air Force. He went home to a new job as the operations officer for the USAAF Air Transport Command, but just as he had served a second tour of duty on the flight deck of a Flying Fortress and had begun a third, he was not ready to quit. It was the summer of 1945, and the war in the Pacific was still raging, with no end in sight.

“With my background in combat, I could do more good flying combat against the Japanese until the war ended,” he reasoned.

He decided to go to the Pentagon and to present himself to General Fred Anderson, the onetime VIII Bomber Command leader who had been Tooey Spaatz’s right-hand man during the last phase of the air war. He was now part of the planning staff for the strategic campaign against Japan. Anderson agreed with Rosenthal and cut orders for him to report to MacDill Field to learn to fly a B-29.

However, the war ended before Rosenthal concluded his flight training, so he finally went home to Brooklyn. He was welcomed back to the Madison Avenue law firm where he had been before the war. As the principals made their way back from wartime service, and new faces were added, the firm had become Poletti, Diamond, Rabin, Freidin and Mackay, and had recruited Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jr., to its team. The son of the late president had recently returned from the US Navy and had been shopping for a firm at which to hang his hat.

On the face of it, Rosenthal had landed on his feet in a big way and could easily have settled down to a distinguished career in a high-profile firm. However, by his own admission, he was “more tired than I thought. . . . I didn’t realize how fatigued I was.”

A couple of months after he returned to Madison Avenue, Rosenthal learned of opportunities for attorneys with the International Military Tribunal that was about to convene in Nuremberg. The Allied Powers had agreed to take the unprecedented step of putting high-ranking members of Germany’s Nazi leadership on trial for violations of international law and for crimes against humanity.

The format of the trial called for two judges each from the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. In turn, each of those countries assigned a lead prosecutor, who would employ a team of prosecuting attorneys. As the American lead prosecutor, President Truman picked Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, who had served as United States Attorney General for a year under Roosevelt, and who had come to Europe in the summer of 1945 as leader of the American delegation that helped form the tribunal. Rosenthal applied for a slot on Jackson’s prosecution team and was hired to return to a German city that he seen only from three miles in the sky.

Foremost in his recollections of the formation of the prosecution team and their journey to Nuremberg was not the job at hand, nor the Nazis whose doctrines and practices had so angered him, but a particular very attractive woman.

When he was first introduced to Phillis Heller at an initial orientation meeting before embarking overseas, she gave him a cold shoulder the likes of which he had never experienced. His second memory was of her arriving at the pier in Brooklyn three hours after the ship to Bremerhaven was supposed to have sailed. Fortunately for her, the ship was three hours late in embarking, but she nevertheless cut it so close that her luggage was literally thrown on board the ship.

At a cocktail party held that evening for the prosecutors, she discovered who he was and explained that a Columbia Law School classmate of hers had worked at Rosenthal’s firm and had told her all about this man named Bob Rosenthal. Ten days later, when the ship docked, Bob and Phillis were engaged. Their efforts to get married were initially complicated by the fact that the anti-fraternization regulations of the American occupation government in Germany severely restricted civilian as well as military marriages. They finally received permission, and were married in Nuremberg in September 1946. They lived to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary.

The Nuremberg Tribunal, meanwhile, tried the two dozen highest-ranking Nazis between November 1945 and October 1946 and sentenced half of them to death. During the course of those trials, the Jewish kid who had enlisted to fight the Nazis found himself across the table from them as their prosecutor. Hermann Göring, who had long been Adolf Hitler’s second in command, and who was the highest-ranking Nazi Party man to survive the war, was among those whom Rosenthal faced down at Nuremberg.

As the New York Times recalled in its obituary of him after he died on April 20, 2007—four years ahead of Phillis—Rosenthal had said that “seeing these strutting conquerors after they were sentenced, powerless, pathetic and preparing for the hangman, was the closure I needed. Justice had overtaken evil. My war was over.”