London during the Blitz
National Archives and Records Administration
AFTER LEARNING ON APRIL 4, 1941, THAT HE WAS GOING ON A SPECIAL mission, Second Lieutenant John Mitchell mostly sat around Hamilton Field waiting. He and the other three pilots were not told anything more—neither the destination nor the mission’s purpose—just that they had to remain grounded, ready to leave at a moment’s notice. The assignment had ruined his plan to surprise Annie Lee at Easter—although he wasn’t complaining about being among the chosen—and he spent Easter Sunday, April 13, feeling “exceptionally lonesome.”
Then, as expected, orders came on short notice. Two days after Easter, Mitch hustled aboard a train bound for Washington, DC. In the six months he had been at Hamilton Field, it had become clear that he’d moved to the front of the line, from being just another enlisted man who wanted to put in his time and go home to becoming a skilled pilot hungry for more. He’d scored second highest in gunnery exercises at Muroc Lake, coached the base’s basketball team, trained rookie pilots as they came in waves, served as best man in back-to-back weddings, and, biggest of all, been chosen as one of four pilots to go overseas. Second Lieutenant John Mitchell was proving to be someone who could be counted on.
None of that maturity was particularly evident, though, during the train trip from San Francisco to Washington, DC, the second week of April. Bored out of their minds during the four nights and three days spent on the train, Mitch and his three companions livened up the ride across America by letting the booze flow. Mitch noted, “I can honestly say we didn’t draw a sober breath from the night we left.” With him was “Monty” Montgomery, a pal from his days as a cadet at Kelly Field, and two pilots he was just getting to know, one named Booth and the other named Ellery Gross. They had still not been told anything more about the mission, and it was only after they’d arrived in the nation’s capital and had settled in for the weekend at the Officers’ Club at Bolling Field that they were briefed. They were going to England to fly with Royal Air Force fighter pilots to learn as much as they could from the RAF. “Our job is to find out just exactly what methods they are using in combat,” Mitch said in a letter he fired off to Annie Lee the night of the briefing. Unable to contain his eagerness, he continued, “This is a detail envied by everyone who is not able to go, and I wouldn’t take a thousand, not even five thousand dollars for my part in it.”
To avoid what British prime minister Winston Churchill had in February begun calling the “Battle of the Atlantic,” with German U-boats and warships blockading Great Britain, Mitch would travel a roundabout route, sailing from New York City to Bermuda, then to Portugal, and, for the last leg, flying to England. The US pilots would be in England between four and six weeks.
Though it was good to know, the news unsettled Annie Lee. England, ever since the fall, had been the target of deadly Nazi bombing raids, which the British press branded the “Blitz,” the German word for “lightning.” She wrote to Aunt Ludma with her concerns. “He says he’s ‘tickled to death’ over the chance to go,” she said. “And he doesn’t want my worrying about him.” But that was hard not to do. “It makes my heart stand still to think of them flying anywhere around England.” Her fretting reached Mitch’s father, Noah, who, overcoming his initial bias against Annie Lee’s German and Czech heritage, had begun corresponding with her. “I want you to call me Dad—and mean it!” he’d written to her affectionately. He told her he’d tried looking for Annie Lee’s hometown of El Campo but could not find it on a Texas map. “You will have equally as hard a time finding Enid.” In that way, they shared the same small-town state of mind, and he encouraged Annie Lee to visit Enid. “We have a large, old-timey house—nobody here but Eunice and me—plenty of rooms. You can always dress as you please—go as you please—eat and sleep and read and walk or ride or hunt or fish as you please. No style—no ceremony—just whatever you care to do.” And finally, as for their shared concern for Johnnie, Noah insisted that she not worry. “There are just dozens of things I could think of, but just to sum it all up in very few words—Just Be Happy!”
John William Mitchell will come home, he assured her.
TWO DAYS AFTER ARRIVING AT BOLLING FIELD ON THE POTOMAC River, Mitch and the others again boarded a night train—not for New York City, their eventual port of departure, but for Wright Field in Ohio for several more days of briefings. The overnight trip featured the first of a handful of occurrences that were unanticipated and forever reminders to Mitch that he was a long way from Enid. Just before dawn, around 5:30 a.m., a porter awakened the four pilots. The train’s crew had detected a problem: their sleeping car had a “hot box,” a term for when the bearings in a wheel axle overheated due to an oil leak. It had created a fire hazard. The car was going to have to be removed from service and the pilots relocated. To wait out the delay Mitch, Monty, Booth, and Gross went to the club car. They were only just seated when the door opened and a sleepy-eyed man in pajamas and a bathrobe—a commanding figure at more than six feet, two inches—wandered in. He was immediately recognizable despite his mussed hair and sartorial informality: Wendell Willkie.
Mitch had been training at Muroc Lake, listening to the radio on election night 1940 as the results were reported showing FDR trouncing Willkie, his Republican challenger. Now he and his cohorts greeted in person the popular lawyer and business executive, and Willkie plopped down in a club car chair to chat. Mitch and the others were eager listeners. Willkie had campaigned as an interventionist for increased US involvement in the Second World War. They were heading to England, and Willkie, just a few months before, had traveled there at FDR’s request to demonstrate the country’s building bipartisan US support for Great Britain. Willkie had seen firsthand bombed-out sections of London and other industrial cities, such as Manchester and Liverpool. He’d gone into the bomb shelters, stepped around the rubble, and reassured the Brits that the United States was with them. Once home, he had testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in favor of FDR’s Lend-Lease Act to supply military aid to the Allies, which had pitted him against the country’s most famous isolationist, Charles Lindbergh. In all, Willkie was the pilots’ kind of guy, and Mitch thoroughly enjoyed listening intently as Willkie made what he considered brilliant commentary on world affairs. The bull session ended when Willkie’s wife, clearly annoyed, arrived to retrieve her husband and usher him back to their sleeping compartment. Before he left, however, Mitch pulled out his business card. Printed on the front was “John William Mitchell, Lieutenant Air Corps Reserve, United States Army.” He asked for an autograph. Willkie turned the card over and signed his name in a swirling script.
Though delayed, the pilots arrived at Wright Field outside Dayton the next day and for the next twenty-four hours were put through their paces. The men were vaccinated for smallpox and given their tickets, passports, and whatever other paperwork was needed for the trip. They were taken on a tour of the army air base, where many new planes and aerial technology were being developed and tested. One particular fighter plane in the pipeline, which Mitch would continue hearing about in the months to come, was the P-38 Lightning, made by Lockheed Aircraft Company in Burbank, California. The twin-engine plane was said to combine speed, versatility, and shooting power greater than those of any other plane to date. It was supposed to be able to reach speeds of nearly 400 miles per hour, or 50 miles per hour faster than Japan’s premier fighter plane, the Mitsubishi Zero; it was armed with four .50-caliber machine guns and a 20 mm cannon; and it could undertake longer-range missions of more than five hundred miles. The expectations for the P-38 were running high, except for the fact that test flights had revealed technical problems yet to be resolved: tail flutter occurring at high speeds and carburetors freezing up during dives. The pilots were briefed on the P-38 and other new planes and equipment. “They wanted us to find out all we could about our most up-to-date stuff before going over,” Mitch said.
Flying from Dayton to New York, they boarded a ship on Saturday night, April 26, and sailed for Bermuda. Mitch made sure to dash off a quick letter to Annie Lee, again emphasizing the importance of the mission: “This trip is going to mean a lot to me in many ways and I am going to get all I can out of it. It will mean I have knowledge that very few people in the U.S. possess.” He wasn’t sure how much detail he’d be able to share—the mission being classified—but asked her to save his letters nonetheless. “Who knows, I might write a book when I return.” He then lamented that he did not have a picture of her, having left the glass-framed photograph at Hamilton Field. “I was afraid of breaking it,” he said, and would have to make do with her image in his mind’s eye.
Traveling circuitously, it took Mitch, Monty, Booth, and Ellery Gross twenty-three days to reach England. The journey proceeded in fits and starts, which meant that along the way, while awaiting their next move, the men combined sightseeing and socializing, although at one point Mitch conceded that drinking “was getting a little tiresome.” The first leg to Bermuda took forty-three hours by boat to cover the 650 miles. After a three-day layover, they left Bermuda on the USS Siboney, a ship chartered for war service for round-trip voyages between Lisbon and the United States to fetch Americans fleeing Europe. Whereas on its return the Siboney would be filled with hundreds of passengers, heading toward war the ship was nearly empty. Besides the four pilots, there were only twenty-three other passengers. Though the civilians on the ship suffered bouts of seasickness, none of the pilots did. Mitch even had one of his full-moon moments. “Last night after leaving the Captain’s quarters at 2 a.m.,” he wrote Annie Lee, “I stood on the deck and watched the full moon reflecting in the rippling water. Guess who was on my mind.”
The men grew antsy as the voyage continued for more than a week, averaging about 375 miles a day across the Atlantic Ocean. They knew they were in for some more waiting once they reached Lisbon. The plane to England would carry only six passengers. Though they would have priority, there was a line of foreigners heading to Great Britain for any number of reasons. To make the best of their idleness, the pilots planned to stay in Estoril, the beach resort to the west of Lisbon that was a favored destination of Europe’s elite and, during the war, spies. In fact, after the Siboney docked, they headed directly to the resort. Given Portugal’s neutrality, Estoril was mobbed with people wanting to get away from it all. The pilots checked into the luxurious oceanfront Palácio hotel, with its grand white facade and extensive gardens. They sunbathed, drank, and gambled in the casino—where Mitch played roulette for the first time and lost. The men kept checking on their flight as three days turned into four and four days into five. Mitch had gotten a taste of the good life—unlike anything he’d ever experienced—but it was a taste of war he was after. Then, after six days, they finally got word they were leaving. “We were only too glad.”
Not that the pilots would have recognized him had they stayed longer, but they left the Palácio a day before a British spy of particular note checked in. He was Lieutenant Commander Ian Fleming, the future creator of the fictional spy James Bond, or 007. Fleming was on his way to Washington, DC, to meet with his US counterparts.
THE FLIGHT TO ENGLAND LASTED NINE HOURS, THE LONGEST nonstop flight Mitch had ever flown. They arrived May 19, shortly after a climactic Nazi bombing raid. The previous September, Hitler had initiated the Blitz to soften up England for an invasion. But the Royal Air Force and other British forces had successfully thwarted the Nazis’ aims. Even so, the air raids had continued at a relentless pace into early May 1941, when Hitler pivoted to another war front: Russia. That meant the Blitz was effectively over, but not before a final massive air raid on central London. On the night of May 10, more than five hundred German bombers had descended upon the city. RAF fighters and British antiaircraft units had fought back, but the raid, lasting until dawn the next day, had proved to be the deadliest yet—more than 1,300 Londoners had been killed and more than 1,600 others seriously wounded. When Mitch, Monty, Booth, and Gross arrived on May 19, the devastation still pockmarked the city. Bridges and railway lines were badly damaged, along with factories on the south side of the Thames River. Most notably, the House of Commons, the lower house of Parliament, had been hit hard, resulting in a fire that had caused the roof to collapse. The city seemed coated in plaster dust, and Tube stations were filled with Londoners who’d relocated their families underground for shelter. To all appearances London was a far different city from six years earlier, when the world’s powers had convened for naval arms talks and where Japan, represented by Vice Admiral Yamamoto, had rejected the terms and left, signaling that the world order was unraveling.
Their first morning in London, the pilots reported to the US Embassy. Each was given a gas mask and a steel helmet, and they were told that in a few days they’d begin staying at a base near London to prepare for flying. In the meantime they met various US and British officials to discuss what Mitch described to Annie Lee as “military affairs, which would not interest you.” Their first week ended with a surprise no one had expected: an audience with the queen of England. “That’s right,” Mitch wrote. “Friday afternoon we were taken to Windsor Castle.” The men toured the castle, which Mitch called “beautiful, unique and ancient.” One large room—an armor room—displayed thousands of ancient spears, swords, guns, knives, suits of armor, shields, lances. “I looked until my eyes were sore.” They were taken to the royal family’s living quarters, where Mitch, Monty, Booth, and Gross climbed a grand stairway and entered a large room. Waiting for them were the queen of England and her daughter Princess Elizabeth. The four second lieutenants from the US Army Air Corps stepped forward and were formally presented. Everyone shook hands, and the pilots joined her royal highness for tea. The queen was curious about the route the pilots had taken to reach London. Mitch described the trip, letting the copious drinking and gambling go unmentioned. “Both of them were most charming,” Mitch said later. “Elizabeth is fifteen now and has certainly changed in the last couple of years from a gangling kid to a quite gracious and nice looking girl.” He and the teenager hit it off. When the royal visit wrapped up, the princess handed him a card. On one side was a color photograph of the royal family—the queen, the king, and their two daughters—and on the back, printed in ink, was written “With Best Wishes from the King and Queen.”
MITCH HAD THOUGHT THEY’D BE CLIMBING INTO A COCKPIT SOON after their arrival, but he was wrong. The US pilots were told they first had to attend ground school for several weeks to learn about the British aircraft. That bored him. He felt he already knew the material, and he didn’t like having to listen to his British counterparts regaling combat “tall stories” and boasting about how British goods were superior to American. Brits rubbed him the wrong way. “I won’t get started on that, though,” he told Annie Lee. He much preferred hands-on learning, believing that the best way to get to know the British planes was to fly them. “I don’t think we are going to learn a helluva lot until we get into an operational squadron,” he said.
It meant that he had more downtime than he had expected, and so he wrote plenty of letters. He wrote to Annie Lee, of course, but also to his father in Enid. Noah replied quickly, saying that he and his stepmother, Eunice, were “mighty proud to hear from you.” Noah shared the news of exchanging letters with Annie Lee Miller, how impressed he was with her handwriting: “Like copy plate writing (every letter distinct and clear) showing characters in every line—beautifully worded, plain and sincere.” Noah was clearly smitten. “I’ll lay a 1000 to 1 that she’s just the gal you need.” Attending ground school also meant that Mitch and the others had time to get out and tour London, especially with the stark decline in air raids. The pilots quickly found London a tough place for ordinary people; food, clothing, and other goods were scarce and rationed. The prices of everything were sky high. “I’ll be glad when I can sit down at some table again, order me a two-pound steak, a pound of cheese, a pound of butter, and eat it all. Wishful thinking.” He had his eye on a Harris tweed suit, but given the wartime price tag, it took him weeks before he finally decided to indulge and buy the suit made of Scottish wool.
No surprise, either, that Mitch splurged when it came to his twenty-seventh birthday on June 14, especially with Booth’s birthday falling the day before. The two pilots lined up dates with “a couple of nice English gals” and planned for a big night: first a show at the Victoria Palace Theatre, where the musical revue Black Vanities was playing, then dinner at the Dorchester, one of London’s fanciest hotels, before ending at a nightclub. For Mitch the birthday was mixed. The musical was lousy as far as he was concerned, and the dinner ended sourly when the waiter mumbled a complaint about the tip. “Whereupon I picked up the tip I had left and gave him nothing.” Mitch tried to pick up his mood but confessed later that “the old spirit was lacking—I’m sure because I was thinking of you and you weren’t there.” It had been nearly a year since he and Annie Lee had seen each other, and Mitch, counting the days, seemed affected. There was an edgy undercurrent to his mood, and the fact that he’d flown only a couple of times since he’d been in England didn’t help.
Things just didn’t seem to be going his way. A few nights after his birthday, he was out with Monty, Booth, and Gross at a crowded dance hall when a Brit bumped into him. Even though he thought the stranger had done so deliberately, Mitch said it was no big deal. The Brit glared. Mitch saw he was “half-tight” and repeated that it was no big deal. But the Brit acted as if Mitch was the one who’d initiated contact. He goaded Mitch, told him they should step outside to settle matters. Mitch refused and told the Brit “to toddle along.” He turned away but could sense the Brit lurking. When he turned to look back, a fist met his face—“Bingo, he let me hold five,” he told Annie Lee. He had been sucker punched. Before he could return fire, a dozen or so others got between them, “and I didn’t get a crack at him.” Blood flowed from a cut above one eye, which later took several stitches to close. “I later laughed about the whole thing but of course was quite angry at the time,” he said.
Though he was writing to Annie Lee regularly, he hadn’t heard from her, which left him “ranting, raving and cussing,” until one day in late June he hit the mother lode: seven letters in a single day. “It is a wonderful world and today is the day of days,” he cheered about the batch. Her letters had apparently been routed through Washington, DC, and carried by boat across the ocean instead of being sent via airplane directly to the embassy in London. The first one was dated May 2, before he’d even left New York City for Bermuda. He read and reread the letters, which were full of news, love, and questions about his trip, and before the night was over, he composed a six-page reply. He predicted that he’d soon be assigned to an RAF squadron but said he’d also been informed that he would not be flying any combat missions, “so you don’t have to worry about anything along those lines.” Finally out from under a cloud, he wrote mainly about the two of them, and the words came out strong: “I want you to have your mind made up—if you haven’t already—and for us to lose no more time.” Their time had come, he said, continuing in no uncertain terms, “War or no war I say let’s get married as soon as I can possibly arrange it after I get back. What’s the sense of waiting?”
Mitch was correct about finally getting the chance to fly regularly. To start, he, Monty, and Booth, along with three British pilots, were sent by train to Scotland to bring back six Spitfires. Ellery Gross did not accompany them; in mid-June he’d experienced severe abdominal pain and had undergone surgery for appendicitis. For his part, on the return flight Mitch discovered that he probably should have paid more attention in ground school. The Spitfire was much faster than any RAF training aircraft; the single-seat fighter plane was highly maneuverable, with finely tuned controls that responded to a light touch. Its long nose made seeing out the front difficult, so when landing, pilots had to learn to jockey the aircraft from side to side to gain a clear view. That was where Mitch ran into trouble. Due to bad weather, he and the five other fliers were forced down before they reached London. The airport they chose had a short landing strip, and as Mitch descended, he realized he was going to overshoot it. He gunned the engine in order to go around and try again. But the engine failed to respond. Mitch kept going down, beyond the strip and smack into a bunch of junk cars, a hedge, and finally a ditch. He wasn’t injured seriously, just some bruising on his arms and left knee. But he’d wrecked the RAF Spitfire. “This is the first time I ever scratched the paint on a ship and I had to completely wipe it out!” he said. The thing that most surprised him was that he hadn’t felt fear. “I’d always thought if I ever cracked up I would be scared to death.”
His RAF hosts forgave him, and a few days later the four US pilots were split into pairs. Monty and Booth were dispatched to southern England to fly with a squadron there. Mitch and Ellery Gross, still hobbled but recovering, were sent north. It was about that time that the pilots got news of an official name change to their service branch: the Department of War had decided that, effective June 20, 1941, the United States Army Air Corps would become known as the United States Army Air Forces.
The afternoon Mitch and Gross arrived, they watched with envy as four squadrons of fighters took off to escort bombers on a mission over Germany. But combat, as Mitch had learned, was not part of their tutorial. Instead the commander basically gave him and Gross free rein to wander the base, talk to pilots, soak up what they could, and test fly the various aircraft. He met pilots from Canada and, given Annie Lee’s lineage on her mother’s side, made sure to connect with a number of Czech pilots. “They had great stories of how they managed to get here or into Africa or someplace when the Germans took France,” he wrote to her. The base commander allowed Mitch the use of his private plane, a small biplane that had a cruising speed of only about 100 miles per hour but that Mitch discovered was perfect for sightseeing. He flew to nearby bases, taking Gross along for the ride, since Gross was still unable to fly alone. Then one day Mitch decided to push things a bit. Instead of the small biplane, he and a British pilot took to the sky in a couple of Spitfires. Maybe Mitch wanted to make up for wrecking one the previous week, to prove he could handle the pride of the RAF. Maybe he was just itching for adventure. Either way, he and his mate flew south toward the English Channel. He had been ordered not to fly the Channel, part of the directive to avoid combat. But that was where he headed anyway. They crossed the waters and flew just over the French coast. Mitch surveyed the war zone intently—until, that is, they were spotted by enemy ground troops. German antiaircraft guns began firing at them. Eluding the gun bursts, the two Spitfires turned and raced safely back to England. Mitch was electrified; he’d gotten a taste of the war he’d so far been denied.
“STOP THE PRESS! WE’UNS COMING HOME!” THE BREAKING NEWS was the lead in Mitch’s July 4 letter—he, Monty, Booth, and Gross were returning to the United States sooner than expected. They wouldn’t be shipped out until mid-July at the earliest, but the end was in sight. “If I arrive August 15 it will be a year almost to the day since I last saw you.” In the glow of the news, he seemed more forgiving about his British tutors. He acknowledged that he’d learned plenty as an observer, had filled notebooks with information about aerial tactics and about firing aircraft weaponry while in flight. RAF pilots had even staged a rerun of the Battle of Britain for them on plotting boards, walking them through the strategic big picture. They’d learned small but key tips, such as not oiling machine guns before flying to high altitudes, where the oil might thicken and muck up the guns. They’d learned critical lessons about flying in formation: that a three-plane configuration was less effective than a more flexible two-plane formation, where the lead fighter could focus on attacking the enemy, knowing his wingman was watching for threats and protecting him. “We were doing a damn fool thing, flying in three-ship flights for combat,” Mitch said. “We learned to keep two guys together, but not too close, but far enough apart to get wide vision. The Germans did this, too.” Mitch was talking shop, but he also waxed poetic, reminiscing about the last time he’d been with Annie Lee in Texas. “Yes, last summer was the ‘good ole days.’ I was pretty happy then. I had you, a car, no money and plenty of fun. Plenty of chicken, barbecued ribs and juke music at Charlie’s and Kline’s.” For Annie Lee, the unexpected news was semishocking. “Now that he says he’s coming I can’t actually believe it,” she confessed to her aunt. “I’m anxious to see him and yet I’m a little afraid. It’s like meeting him for the first time all over again.” But she was excited, too. Noting that Mitch had bought a Harris tweed suit in England, she was not going to be outdone. She went and picked out a tweed coat with a fox collar. “I was extravagant,” she told her aunt, but she wanted to impress Mitch.
Monty and Booth got lucky. They happened to be in London the next week when a bomber with room for a couple of passengers was returning to the States. They jumped aboard. But Mitch and Gross were stuck taking the long way home, retracing their trip to England—first flying to Lisbon and then sailing to Bermuda aboard the passenger/cargo ship SS Excambion. They left England on July 23 and pulled into New York two weeks later, on August 5. Previously Mitch had been scheduled to return to Hamilton Field, but with war preparations ramping up, his assignment had changed. He was now one of the more knowledgeable pilots, especially after his experiences in England, and his commanders wanted him deployed to Louisiana, Virginia, and the Carolinas for war games, training pilots and getting them combat ready. He was named his squadron’s operations officer, a kind of second in charge, overseeing pilot and plane assignments. It meant being reunited with Army Air Forces captain and squadron commander Henry “Vic” Viccellio. Mitch had always liked Vic and was happy to be working directly with the popular Virginian. He also learned that while they had been in England, he, Monty, Booth, and Gross had been put in for promotions; the new rank wouldn’t become official until later in the fall, but First Lieutenant John W. Mitchell had earned his first promotion, with more to come.
It was all good news that he got to share with Annie Lee when he managed to fit in a quick stopover in San Antonio late in August, between multiple flights from Washington, DC, to California and elsewhere, all in preparation for his arrival after Labor Day at Esler Field, Camp Beauregard, Louisiana. The hurried reunion did not turn out as Mitch had expected, however. Things seemed awkward, and Mitch figured that Annie Lee was not as certain as he was about their future together. He left worrying that he’d misread her feelings. But he was wrong. She’d told him many times she loved him; just look at the dozens of letters she’d written. She simply needed more time than he did; an entire year had passed, after all, since they’d been face-to-face. Within a few weeks they were able to meet again, this time at an airport in Waco, Texas, to which Mitch had flown a plane that needed engine work. Annie Lee rode a bus up from San Antonio. They never left the airfield, just talked for a few hours. “Our visit this time seemed to me to be more like old times than ever before,” Mitch said afterward. They reached a meeting of the minds or, more accurately, hearts, to marry. And they began making plans for when and where. “Seeing you this time,” Mitch wrote, “I have felt gay, carefree and that I have nothing to worry about.”
MITCH THREW HIMSELF INTO THE MANEUVERS ALL THROUGH the fall, first in Louisiana, then relocating for more combat training in Virginia, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and lastly in Charlotte, North Carolina. The “wars” were simulated battles involving hundreds of troops, fighter planes, and bombers that lasted anywhere from a few days to more than a week. In the backcountry of Louisiana, Mitch led a squadron of planes searching for a faux Red Army armored division, and when they finally found it after two days, they dive-bombed and machine-gunned it and then reported on their attack. When word circulated by radio that the war exercise was over, his squadron was given kudos for having located the enemy forces. Mitch’s father and brother Phil had driven from Enid to watch the action, and afterward they told him they had gotten a kick out of seeing him in the operations. In Virginia, the “war” there lasted ten days, with Mitch stationed about five miles outside of Norfolk on a grassy field that had no runways but was hard and flat. The worst part was the mosquitoes. In the middle of one letter he was writing to Annie Lee, he quipped, “Pardon me—I was just interrupted by 9,836,431 mosquitoes—I counted them.” For the second half of October, he moved on to Wilmington, where the living conditions were no better. “I’m fighting skeeters with one hand and slinging ink with the other—and let me tell you the skeeters are about to win the battle.” Mitch wrapped a towel around his head to finish that letter. He was camped in a pup tent right beside a main road, with cars coming and going. “We even have to put our pants on in this little tent which is only two feet high anyhow. You have to be a contortionist as well as a pilot in this man’s army.” By contrast, Charlotte, North Carolina, was a five-star hotel—an actual army base with indoor cots, mattresses, hot showers, and food served in an officers’ mess hall. “Seems like heaven compared to what we have had.” Mitch was getting a ton of flying time, up at five and into the air by six, flying missions for a good part of the day. Early in the month, he trained junior pilots in dogfighting and acrobatics. “It doesn’t take much of that stuff to tire you out.” The exercises in early November 1941 were warm-ups for a simulated “war” that was to last two weeks. Mitch was eyeing December as a time to take a break—and to marry.
During the exercises he manned a P-40 Warhawk, the fighter plane he’d flown for the better part of a year and operated with complete comfort. But Mitch, and pilots everywhere, always gossiped in anticipation about the new interceptor pursuit planes in development—both the Bell P-39 Airacobra, the single-engine fighter with a new weapons system that was already in limited use, and especially the P-38 Lightning, the speedy, twin-engine fighter that was much ballyhooed but still undergoing extensive trials to work out its kinks. In fact, Mitch knew one of the test pilots, Ellery Gross, quite well. While Mitch had been deployed to the South after his return from England, his buddy Gross had been assigned to March Field in southern California to pilot the P-38s during trials. And on Thursday morning, November 13, as Mitch rested up at the base in Charlotte for the upcoming two-week war game, Gross was climbing into the narrow cockpit of a P-38 at March Field. He and a companion flier flew east through San Gorgonio Pass, circled Palm Springs, and then headed toward the nearby desert, flying at an altitude of about 10,000 feet. The other flier made a power dive, leveled off at 3,000 feet, and then sped off in the direction of Indio, California, twenty miles further east of Palm Springs. Gross followed in a power dive from 10,000 feet. But when he was at 3,000 feet, the plane did not pull up. Instead, it continued to plummet.
The first to report the crash was a telephone lineman named Boyd Moore, working atop a pole outside Palm Springs. Moore initially heard the roar of the motor, growing louder and louder as the plane descended at full speed, between 400 and 500 miles per hour. He looked out onto the desert to see the P-38 fall from the sky, hit the ground, and explode. The blast shook nearby homes—a red flash followed by a plume of dark smoke, then an eerie quiet. The force of the crash hurled parts of the airplane across a quarter mile of desert. The propeller was found twisted like a piece of wire, and pieces of the fuselage and wings dotted the cactus-covered sand. Lieutenant Ellery Gross was killed instantly and, like the plane, blown to bits; his wallet and other papers were found scattered over the crash site. Gross, just twenty-five, of Greenville, Texas—350 miles north of Annie Lee’s family home in El Campo—was survived by his father and by his young widow in Riverside, California.
News of the tragedy traveled quickly in army circles. When Mitch was told the next day, he was shown a newspaper article. Stunned, he read the detailed account of Ellery Gross plunging to his death. Had Gross blacked out? Had the controls failed as he tried to pull out of the cometlike dive? Had he even tried to bail out? In a P-38 the pilot sat in a tiny control cabin between the two powerful engines. The only way to abandon it in flight was to flip the plane onto its back and drop out of the cockpit. But Gross had had no time for that, given the speed of his dive. He never had a chance. It also turned out his death had occurred exactly one week after another P-38 test pilot had crashed. That pilot, Ralph Virden, a veteran flier, had been returning to Lockheed’s air terminal in a P-38 after a routine test flight. He had been streaking along at 3,000 feet at 400 miles per hour when the tail assembly had mysteriously broken off and fallen away. The plane had flipped onto its back, plunged earthward, and crashed into the kitchen of a Glendale, California, home. The homeowner, awakened by the fiery explosion, had tried to pull the pilot from the plane, but the flames had driven him back. Ralph Virden had perished. The tail assembly had later been discovered in a yard several blocks away. The twin tragedies—one personal to Mitch—were certainly enough to give him, or any pilot for that matter, pause about the new P-38 Lightning, which was described breathlessly in press coverage as “just about the swiftest thing in the sky.” In a letter that night, Mitch shared the sad news with Annie Lee. “You remember me writing you about Ellery Gross, the boy that was with me while I was over in England?” Mitch told her how he had been killed in a P-38 crash in California. “He was a pretty swell guy, too.”
WHILE MITCH WAS PREPARING HIMSELF AND THE JUNIOR PILOTS around him for war, the nation as a whole was doing the same, as its official position of neutrality proved increasingly untenable. In mid-September, President Roosevelt instructed that any US Navy ship facing a Nazi threat could shoot on sight. The order followed the first German attack on a US warship, a torpedo assault on the USS Greer in the waters off Iceland. In Europe the war raged on, and German forces began their siege of Leningrad. In North Africa around that time, British commanders gave approval to an unusual ploy in the hope of reversing Nazi momentum on that continent. The mission was dubbed Operation Flipper, and the target of “leadership decapitation” was Lieutenant General Erwin Rommel. One of Hitler’s favorites, Rommel had previously built a legend as a cunning tactician with a string of battlefield victories in western Europe. Dispatched to northern Africa in early 1941, Rommel’s Afrika Corps had confounded and defeated British forces time and again, earning him the nickname “the Desert Fox.” Bewildered and frustrated, the British, who had secretly formed highly trained commando units within their armed forces, decided that getting Rommel was the very purpose of inaugurating the specialized units. The rationale for the targeted kill, Prime Minister Winston Churchill said later, was to eliminate “the brain and nerve-centre of the enemy’s army at a critical moment.” Despite weeks of careful planning, however, the attack on November 17 failed, due mainly to faulty intelligence. Rommel was nowhere to be found when commandos raided a villa near Beda Littoria in Libya. He’d left weeks earlier. Even so, Operation Flipper showed that taking out an enemy leader was gaining viability as a wartime move.
Meanwhile, in another part of the war-torn world, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s massive carrier strike force, having practiced maneuvers throughout the fall, was in late November mobilizing in secret at Hitokappu Bay in the Kuril Islands. Simultaneously, diplomatic negotiations continued between Japan and the United States. The so-called Hull note, named after US secretary of state Cordell Hull, was delivered to the Japanese government. Officially titled “Outline of Proposed Basis for Agreement Between the United States and Japan,” it was the United States’ final bid in the endless back-and-forth talks. No one was optimistic, however, at that late point, and in early December, Yamamoto hurried to Tokyo for high-level operational meetings.
Mitch kept going, training by day and planning for his marriage by night. He was slated to return to Hamilton Field in December to break in P-39 Airacobras during new maneuvers scheduled for January 1942. “We have 109 new planes, P-39s, waiting for us,” he said. But Mitch was owed a pre-Christmas leave before then, and the couple saw it as their window of opportunity. “Do you realize Miss Miller that in less than two months you will be Mrs. John W. Mitchell?” he wrote hopefully during the fall. They went back and forth about where to marry. Annie Lee thought maybe at her Aunt Golda and Dr. Joe’s ranch just north of San Antonio, if Mitch got enough time off. Mitch said maybe they could meet up in Reno, Nevada, after a brief check-in at Hamilton Field. “We would be married in less than half an hour.” He plotted their honeymoon: a road trip from Reno to Enid, a visit with his family, then on to San Antonio to pack up her things, then a drive west for a tour of a bit of California before settling in for good at Hamilton Field by year’s end. “There are some beautiful sights on the way, such as the Grand Canyon, Boulder Dam, some of the parks.” He ultimately deferred to Annie Lee, though. “I’ve always thought a wedding was the woman’s show so whatever you want concerning it I’m agreeable.”
They finally settled on a wedding in El Campo the week before Christmas. Mitch’s timing abruptly changed when he learned that he would not be returning directly to Hamilton Field with the rest of his squadron. Instead, he was ordered northeast to Westover Field, just outside Springfield, Massachusetts, to pick up a plane another squadron had left behind for repairs. He’d return to Charlotte with the plane, then lead a flight of five planes across the country to Hamilton Field. Luckily the assignment didn’t change the wedding plan; he’d still make it to Texas in time. Plus going north meant that Mitch would get to see one of his sisters, who lived within an hour of the base. “This is Edith, the one who has a little girl,” he explained to Annie Lee on November 30, as he readied to go. “I haven’t seen her since 1938.”
It was on Tuesday, December 2, 1941, when Mitch reunited with his sister, her husband, and his niece, Betty Jo, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts. Edith even called in a newspaper reporter, who interviewed him for a feature story in the local paper. That evening they feasted on a steak dinner, with Mitch going on and on about Annie Lee. Edith surprised him with a wedding gift: a handmade linen tablecloth and twelve matching napkins. Mitch, grateful, planned to be on his way the next morning; his marriage to Annie Lee was just a couple weeks away, so close he could feel it.
But at the same time he was at his sister’s enjoying the warm comforts of her home, thousands of miles away a telegram that would change the course of history was sent through protected channels. It was from Isoroku Yamamoto to his massive strike force in the Pacific north of Hawaii, and it said simply, “Climb Mt. Niitaka.”