#saul levitt

[thatsrightice]

The Rosenthal Legend by Saul Levitt

(See below for text version)

THE sweat had turned Maj. Robert Rosenthal soaking wet around the shoulders the way it always was with him. His busted up, burning plane was eighteen miles past Berlin. His crew, those that were alive, had already escaped.

It was February 3, 1945, and Rosie was on his fifty-second mission. The plane was dropping and he took a chance on falling behind the Russian lines.

He bailed out….

Rosie came down hard, breaking the right arm which had been fractured once before.

Strange soldiers with bayonets ran up to him yelling and he took a chance and yelled "Americanski" and the bayonets pulled back.

He had come through once more, and headed via a Moscow hospital back to England. The Rosenthal Legend was kept intact.

It was real legend, made up of the following ingredients: that he could have stopped flying and that he couldn't get killed.

When Lt. Robert Rosenthal came overseas in the summer of 1943, he was a shy, strapping, frizzle-headed guy; he looked like a big-boned, shambling country ballplayer. Rosenthal was a Brooklyn boy who had played college ball and earned a law degree just in time to go into the Air Corps. He never got over being a shy, quiet man who could get easily embarrassed if you asked him how he kept going, why didn't he go home after a tour of operations, etc.

The legend around Rosenthal didn't grow up all at once. I think I was in on the beginning of it, and it was on a night in October 1943 when Maj. John Egan, sitting in the 418th Squadron Orderly Room, and setting up his flight order for the next morning, said, "I think this boy Rosenthal is quite a flyer." The next day, Egan went down on the Munster raid and Rosenthal kept on going and he did become quite a flyer just like the major said he would.

He couldn't get killed. ... His first flight over

Bremen saw the Hundredth take a bad smashing up; his second, all the way to Marienburg, was one of the longest B-17 flights in the ETO until that time, and his third was Munster. One, two three ... one day after the next, and his ball turret gunner, S/Sgt.

Ray Robinson, said of those three flights ... "The first night after Bremen we were too tired to sleep, the second night after Marienburg we were too scared, and the third night after Munster we were just through ... finished."

In the late afternoon, as Rosenthal's ship came in over the airfield at Thorpe Abbotts, it was all alone in the sky on that October day in 1943. The careful landing procedure for formations was un-necessary. There was only one plane coming in ... actually half a plane, for two engines were out.

Twelve planes had failed to return.

Bill DeBlasio, the tail gunner, wrote in his diary... "By the grace of God we were the only ship to come back. Our pilot brought us home safely."

The interrogation that afternoon was very exclusive, like a consultation with a private physician.

The story of Munster was in terms of the evidence of one tired, battered crew. With the formation smashed to pieces before the target was reached, Rosenthal dropped his bombs on Munster and kept on going.... The legend was under way.

The tour that began with Bremen ended with Berlin and by that time it became something special.

"Rosie's Riveters" came home to a crazy holiday greeting from Berlin, March 1944. The sky was filled with flares. Radio operator Bocuzzi rode down to the interrogation on the back of an MP's motor-cycle. Ground Crew Chief J. E. Woodard was crying.... The legend was really under way. Rosenthal was Capt. Rosenthal now.

He wouldn't stop flying.... I saw him in London after the first tour and he asked me, did I think he ought to go home? I said "Sure, why don't you go? Go home to the ice cream, the girls, the ball games, and all in one piece. You deserve a break.

I don't know why he asked me, because he wasn't going to go. He looked like a big, stubborn farmer who knew exactly what he was doing....

The legend had a root somewhere. He said, "But do the Russians go home after they do a tour?"

"Sure," I said. "Everybody goes home for a rest after a tour."

I didn't know what the Russians did, but it didn't make any difference, anyway. He was on his second tour a week later. He was flying again, and in the same way; with his shirt dripping wet with perspiration around the shoulders all the time he was in the cockpit and with no particularly exciting information for the interrogators after he came back.

("If you come back," he told the interrogators, "it's a milk run.")

Now it must be said just once that Robert Rosenthal is Jewish. Some people liked to think that he was taking revenge on Germans; that he had a mother or sister or somebody who had been killed by the Germans. Legends take on things that aren't there. Rosie flew against the Germans because they were Nazis and they were killing a lot of people, Jewish as well as non-Jewish. His family was safe at home in Brooklyn, and he didn't like to talk about why he was fighting.

He couldn't get killed.... It was luck, nine-tenths of it, and Rosenthal will tell you that. Sure he could fly but so could a lot of other good men who went down.… and Rosie will tell you that too.

When he came home alone from Munster, it spelled nearly the end of the original Hundredth Bomb Group which had assembled at Boise, Idaho, in 1942. He came into the war when the going was hotter than it was ever to be again in the European Air War. We had no fighters in the sky then. The Jerry planes simply lay around the target area. What fighter cover American planes had, turned back at the German coast, leaving the big babies to take it by themselves.

Now that the war is over, it might as well be said that a single bomber is just a big tin can and it never was a match for skillful fighter formations.

We were dropping over enemy targets like leaves in autumn. Rosenthal survived the early fighterless days and went into the second phase, when we had fighter cover....

He couldn't get killed. His His plane got hit hard over France during that second tour and she rolled brakeless into a tree and Rosie fractured his skull. The dogfaces were fighting the war in France then and he was safe behind our lines. He ended up in a hospital and still wouldn't go home. Capt.

Bowman, the group S-2 officer by that time said complainingly, "The only way to get that guy home is to put travel orders under his pillow in the hospital some dark night."

He was hit over Germany again in May 1944, and with two engines out, both on one side, and alone in the sky, he tried the long trip home. A P-47 called over to him, "Big friend, what can I do for

"P-47 from big friend….. stay with us," said Rosie. He didn't bail out over the Channel, the gas was running out, and at last, as his third engine sputtered out, he rolled on an airfield just off the surf of the North Sea... and England. Still OK and still flying.

And then in February 1945, Major Rosenthal went down again and this time it looked like it, though hope remained after "observers saw engine Number Three explode ... and six men bail out...." Rosie got himself a silver leaf on his return to Thorpe Abbotts. The war ended in the summer of '45 or he would have gone on to the Pacific. He was a stubborn guy. He had 52 missions under his belt and plenty of fruit salad on his chest, right up through the Distinguished Service Cross. He had been flying from the fall of 1943 to February 1945.

He came home at last to Brooklyn, took off the brass and the decorations and the legend and slipped quietly back into civilian life. So quietly that no one has got hold of him since then. Maybe though, he might be found in the music store on West 44th Street in Manhattan where he used to go before the war in order to listen to the newest hot jazz records.

The one thing I would like to ask him is this:

When he was with the Russians, did he ever find out if the Russian flyers went home for a rest after a tour?

Saul Levitt

[deramin2]

I FOUND IT!! I FOUND IT!!! I FUCKING FOUND IT!!!!! My White Whale of endangered media!

The Trial Of The Catonsville Nine (1972)

The straight to VHS shoestring budget courtroom drama based on the play by Father Daniel Berrigan, one of the defendants, about the trial of nine Catholic clergy and lay people who used home-made napalm to burn the Vietnam War draft files of the Catonsville office of the Selective Service on Frederick Road on May 17, 1968 in a symbolic act of civil disobedience. The intent of the action (which they tipped off a local news station about so it would be filmed) was to be arrested while holding hands in prayer, openly admitting what they'd done, and use the very public trial to grandstand about their motives and beliefs. (Later termed the hit & stay tactic.) Including that they believed the war was illegal and unethical, and therefore any attempt to non-violently stop it was justified.

It's taken almost directly from the court transcripts, though out of order (as they state) so that the order of how they all came to be there is presented more linearly. The one substantial inaccuracy is that the trial was successful in being sensational and very public, and the courtroom was very raucous, mainly in their favor. The excellent documentary Hit & Stay (2013) talks about it, as well as other actions taken by the same group as part of their anti-war actions.

It was powerful before, but it is so, so deeply powerful today (even as a lifetime atheist very critical of the Church, Father Daniel Berrigan was my childhood hero and I thought it was very cool that he was the first priest on the FBIs most wanted list). If you liked the dialogue about religion as stories that motivate deeds in Wake Up Dead Man (2025), this is the group of real people Father Jud would be inspired by.

I got a VHS copy in high school in the early 2000s, but it's been misplaced through a couple moves and technology changes. Still hoping it'll turn up in some box somewhere. I briefly found it on the Internet Archive, but it was pulled for copyright before I could download it and rewatch it. Finally came across this YouTube version! It's low resolution, but that's also pretty much what it looked like on film, and there's only a slight glitch near the end. There was only one run of VHS tapes ever made because they struggled with distribution (had no money and made back even less). So it's a miracle that a home VHS tape recording made it to digital at all.

If you enjoy this film, please download it and preserve it. Let it keep popping up like mushrooms if and when it gets taken down. Show it to your friends and activist groups. Please send it to religious people in your lives, especially Christians, since it talks about how their belief in a just and loving God as well as their belief in aspirational United States values led them into direct confrontation with a Church and a government that did not seem to really share them. This was a message flung forward half a century in time to speak to us right now while trying to meet another terrible moment. As Christians, or US Americans, or simply as fellow human beings.

I want to be very clear that this message worked. This delivery in the courtroom, on public record, in the news, in play houses, and as a film changed hearts and minds about the Vietnam War. When you see religious leaders being willingly arrested today in the name of their beliefs, please know that reaches people that other actions may not. There's no one right way to protest and resist. There's no one right group of people to do it or one right set of values to uphold. Every bit of resistance from as many angles as possible is what stops atrocities from continuing.

[thatsrightice]

The following is an article written in Yank Magazine about the miraculous return of Blakely’s crew from the Bremen on October 8, 1943 from two different perspectives.

The first page is navigator Harry Crosby’s personal report, which you can read in full HERE

The second page is an article written by Saul Levitt, 100th BG radio operator turned writer for the Yank, who describes his experience waiting for Blakely’s crew to return (transcript below)

...SWEATING IT OUT

And at the last minute came the news of nine men alive and one fatally wounded.

Written by Saul Levitt, radio operator of the 100th Bomb Group, for the December 1943 issue of Yank Magazine

* * *

We couldn't do less than to sweat out Captain Blakely's boys.

Because my old crew and the Captain's

had been quartered in the same barracks all through training and now in the ETO; because we had exchanged phone numbers with them in Sioux City and other places; because we had been in the chapel at Gowen Field, Idaho, when Captain Blakely was married and his crew in turn had shared the drinks when our bombardier, Lt. Hamilton had his wedding celebration, we could not do less than sweat them out.

They did the same for us. Also, you must understand, the money situation was all mixed up, nearly all the time, with their boys owing dough to us and the other way around so it would have left the books in very bad shape if one crew didn't come back.

Then the lightning struck. It was 20 mm. and flak lightning, and this particular variety of lightning not only struck more than twice in the same place but kept hitting in there for about an hour and a half, It was on a raid over Bremen. Their ship was staggering home by itself. At the end of the hour and a half the box score read like this: Luftwafle, nine fighter planes destroyed; American Air Force, one badly battered B-17 with most of the control cables shot away, radio equipment all smashed, and four men wounded, one critically.

On that night Captain Blakely's crew was due back at six o'clock. You know how it is these days toward evening. In this theater it's usually chilly and with that blackout night beginning to come in. The boys were not back at six. Every couple of minutes another plane roared overhead, showing its lowered landing gear. At a few minutes after six, all the planes were back reporting heavy damage on the operations blackboard. All except Blakely.

When we could hear no more planes overhead we didn't know what to do except sit in the barracks. On one side were our six beds, on the other side theirs. We had made up their beds in the morning, and whenever we flew, they made up ours. A very cosy arrangement.

Finally, George Petrohelos, our right waist gunner, said, "Saul, how about listening in for them, see if you can pick up Forky calling in." Forky was Captain Blakely's radio operator.

I went over to Operations. Jennings, the Operations clerk, was sitting at the phone and waiting. In Operations there's a radio, the same kind of receiver that's used on the Fort. I set the receiver on our home station frequency and got a pencil and paper. A few calls came in. I thought I would surely recognize Forky's, because I had listened to him pound the key often enough.

Back in the States, on long fights, we had sometimes picked out a frequency and pounded messages back and forth. They were dopey messages usually such as "from commanding officer Greek Air Force Lester Saunders, to Pfc. Greek Air Force, George Petrohelos: Greek, watch your step." The answer to this would be something equally snappy: "Tell your Greek to watch his step.”

You see, that was something else our two crews had in common. We each owned a Greek.

I listened in for ten minutes, but Forky never came in. Jennings phoned flight control and the answer was, "If they aren't heard from in five minutes, you can consider them missing. Their gas can't last past six-thirty.”

George Petrohelos—our Greek—and H.E. Clanton of Oklahoma, the inseparable pair, came in. They sat dolan and me in and stared through the window at the dusk beginning to creep over the fields.

George's face was absolutely flat and without expression. At six-thirty, as in the best movies, the phone rang again.

Jennings said, "They crash landed five minutes ago near—“

"Who's hurt?"

Jennings shook his head.

Five minutes later there was another call, from Captain "Smoky" Stover, our medical officer. There were four men hurt, two seriously, but no names had been given.

George said to Jennings gravely, "Well, Ok, thanks, buddy."

We went back to the barracks and waited some more. You must understand that this is a very special kind of waiting. Everybody looks through everybody else and says nothing. Also, you try to figure out who is hurt, and whom you would like less to be hurt than anybody else. This last part can drive you crazy.

"Four men wounded," said H. E., "and I'll bet they're all enlisted men." He shook his head. "It's the enlisted dogs that get it all the time." Nobody paid any attention to him, first because it wasn't true, and second, because he didn't mean it.

Their effects, their clothes, the pictures over their beds were looking at you. You had to smile, glancing over into Forkner's corner. He had it all rigged out, with a desk lamp and supports for clothes hangers strung on wires and all kinds of gadgets lying around. A very ingenious kid, that Forky.

"At ten o'clock they came in. Just three of them. Forkner the radio operator; Nord, the tail-gunner; and "Little britches" Thornton, the engineer. Thornton didn't say much. Forkner gave it all out in spurts. As for Nord, he kept laughing too much and he had a pie on a tin tray in one hand and a bottle of Scotch in the other. Major Kidd, who had flown as co-pilot on this mission, had gotten the bottle for the boys at the Officers' Club and he had given them explicit instructions to drink it down. Forky, who never drank much and who certainly didn't like the stuff, sat down and talked, between big slugs of whiskey. He talked about all of them.

He said Lt. Via had kept yelling that his leg was gone. He had had to convince Lt. Via that the leg was there, that it had been hurt but all there. But mostly he talked about their Greek, Lester Saunders.

He said, "That dumb Greek, he never said anything. I asked him where he was hurt and he pointed to his shoulder. So I started to cut away his sleeve—and listen to this, George—“

"I'm listening." said George.

"That knife they give you to cut away clothes with, it's no damn good, so forget it."

"OK," said George. "I'll remember about the knife. Do you want another shot.”

"I think I will," said Forky. “That dumb Greek, he didn't say anything about that 20 mm. right through his gut—that dumb Greek, why didn't he say something about that?" He took another long drink.

Meanwhile, Nord was laughing just a little too much and going around the barracks like a waiter, handing out cuts of pie. It seemed very important. So we did. We were very polite about the pie though nobody was hungry.

Forkner couldn't get over the fact that Saunders hadn't told him about the stomach wound. thought it was his fault that Les was seriously wounded. We put him to bed and all the while he was yelling, “That dumb Greek." And our Greek, Petrohelos, sat on the side of the bed, trying to calm him down.

But it was no go. Finally, "Little britches" got out of bed, put on his clothes and went down to the Orderly Room and put through a call to the medics for some sleeping pills. Captain Kiessling, our Operations officer, came in with the pills.

He said, "Listen, Forky, nobody says it's your fault. Everybody understands you did everything humanly possible. You take these pills. They ought to put you to sleep in a little while. Now you've got to snap out of it; you've got to realize that you did all you could and now it's between him and the medics.

We lay awake most of the night. We remembered the marriages and the celebrations back in the States. Throwing rice at the bride on a rainy afternoon in March. Captain Brady dancing at "Ham's" wedding celebration in his stocking feet.

We were committed to the memory of those young wives of Blakely. Hamilton and Crosby waving goodbye to us as we took off for the ETO of those marriages worked out in the little spaces between stretches of training. The American Army has certainly mixed us into rare combinations.

Saunders, a quick, shrewd, humorous big city boy who had to push his way around to get anywhere, and Forky who had lived in one of those neat private homes set back on a lawn, and with certain facts like college and a profession taken for granted.

And the war had deposited us all here, 12 guys in two rows of beds in the same barracks.

The red alert came on during the night. The searchlights crossed the sky and you could hear the harsh screaming of pheasants roused from their ground nests by the thunder of anti-aireraft.

At four o'clock in the morning. "H. E." said to me, "Are you sleeping?"

We whistled up a ride on a jeep going down the road and had fresh eggs at combat mess. They were very good.