W E B Griffin – Men at War 2 – Secret Warriors

THREE I Memphis, Tennessee may 28, 1942

A reporter-photographer team from Time-Life visited the U.S. Army General Hospital in Calcutta in early May looking for “upbeat” stories.

The United States of America had been taking a bell of a whipping in the opening months of the war, and with the exception of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle’s B-25 raid on Tokyo the month before, there was a surfeit of depressing stories of courage in the face of defeat.

It didn’t take them long to find out there were several Flying Tigers in the hospital. One of these had a story that would go over well in New York. The first story about him appeared in the Time issue of May 28, 1942. There was a one-column photograph of Edwin Howell Bitter in a hospital bathrobe, sitting in a wheelchair with his right leg in a cast sticking straight out in front of him. The cudine under the photograph read: “Civilian” Ed Bitter. The story itself seemed sure to satisfy the editor’s demand for something upbeat:

There are five American “civilian” patients in the new US. ga rmvgeneralhospitatincalcutta.Theirbfllsarepaidbythecht ncserovernment.

They are employees of the American Volunteer XGROUR) who were “injured on the job.” The job 24-year-old @exlnavy pilot Edwin H. Bitter, of Chicago, was injured doing was Nstrafing the huge Jap air base at Chiengmai, Thailand, in a worn out Curtiss P-40B War hawk, an aircraft the Chinese and their American volunteer pilots were able to fly only because the British turned them down as obsolescent for service against the Germans in Europe.

Bitterdownedninejapaneseaircraftinhis obsolete’p-40before he himself was downed by ground fire in Thailand. He was rescued from certain imprisonment and possible execution as a “bandit” when another “civilian” Flying Tiger pilot managed to land his War hawk on the dry riverbed where Bitter had crashed. E He squeezed the wounded flier into his cockpit and took off again Names of AVG pilots still fighting the Japanese are not released. Annapolis graduate (’38) Bitter sees no future for himself in the U.S. Navy, which, he says, “has no use for people with stiff knees.” When he is able, he will return to his “civilian job” as a Flying Tiger.

Life magazine, ten days later-it took time to get all the photographs necessary for a photo-essay to the United States-had a longer story about the AVG men in Calcutta, but by then Time had been published. It was not known whether the order had come from President Roosevelt himself, or from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who had been wounded as a sergeant charging up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War, but the word came down from way up high: “Get that fellow Bitter back in the U.S. Navy as soon as he can be sworn in, even if you have to do it with him on a stretcher.”

Not long afterward a letter addressed to Miss Sarah Child that bore the return address “Ltcomdr E. H. Bitter, USN, Det of Patients, USA Gen Hospital, APO 65Z San Francisco, Calif ” appeared in Sarah’s and Ann’s box in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Before Sarah saw it, Ann Chambers took the letter and kept it in her purse until she found time to steam open the envelope over a teakettle and read it. Ann had opened all of Sarah Child’s mail since the visit to Memphis of Sarah’s mother. When Sarah’s mother had asked her husband to take her to Memphis to see her daughter, Joseph Schild-Sarah had Americanized the German a Jewish Schild to Child before going off to college-had desperately wanted to believe that time and the maternal instincts of his wife had overcome her first reaction to the news that their unmarried nineteen -year-old daughter was pregnant. Her first reaction-rage and fear-had put Sarah’s mother into the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connect it, for six weeks. But Joseph Schild had taken his wife out of the IOL cu against medical advice when she asked to go to Memphis. Sarah shared a suite in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis with her best friend from Bryn Mawr, Ann Chambers. There was no question in Joseph Schild’s mind that Ann, the daughter of Brandon Chambers, the newspaper publisher, was in Memphis as much to give Sarah refuge from her in other in New York as she was to work for her father’s newspaper.

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