Year 1940

__________ 

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” 

Winston Churchill

__________ 

 

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN pits 3,000 Royal Air Force pilots and crew against vastly superior German forces. At the height of the fighting, 749 British fighter planes were matched against 2,550 Luftwaffe fighters. John “Paddy” Hemingway is one of those Royal Air Force pilots, flying a Hurricane – and will go on to be the last survivor of that battle, for the Brits. (He dies in 2025, at age 105.)

 

    What does it take to be the last survivor of any event? Hemingway was shot down four different times, during his years in combat. “During the war, all my closest friends were killed, and my memories and thoughts about them I have always regarded as a private affair,” the aging pilot said on the 80th anniversary of the beginning of the battle.

 

    “But being the last of the Battle of Britain veterans has made me think of those times,” he said. “Fate was not democratic. New pilots with just a few hours in Hurricanes did not have the instincts of us more experienced pilots and were very vulnerable in combat. Many did not last long.”

 

    Hemingway’s time in a cockpit was certainly eventful. In the spring of 1940, he flew cover for the British Expeditionary Force, sent to the continent to try to hold back the German advance. In May, he shot down a Luftwaffe bomber – and the next day had to make a forced landing after being hit by anti-aircraft fire. On August 18, he was involved in an effort to turn back enemy bombers over the English Channel.  

   “Somebody clobbered me,” he told The Daily Mirror in 2018. “They hit me in the engine. It covered the inside of the cockpit with oil, and things got very smelly and hot. I had no hope of getting to England, so I bailed out and landed in the sea.  

    “There were jellyfish everywhere,” he continued. “I started swimming. Two hours later, a rowboat from a lightship bumped into me.”

    He climbed aboard, grabbed an oar and helped the crew return with him to England. 

   Later in August, Mr. Hemingway survived a third close call, this time while pursuing a German bomber over southeastern England. As he told The Daily Mirror: “I got a Dornier in my sight and started to pull around and have a second go. That was it — ‘bang, bang’. There was smoke everywhere.” He bailed out. “I landed in the Pitsea marshes, where I faced the local Home Guard,” he said. 

He added wryly, “I could speak reasonable English, so they didn’t shoot me.”

 

    He was eventually given command of a squadron, and in April 1945, at the controls of a Spitfire, he was shot down in Italy. Once again, he bailed out, floated safely to earth, and was rescued by farm workers who dressed him in peasant clothing and smuggled him back to British lines.

 

   In September 2020, Hemingway, already 101 years old, explained in an interview, “I am here because I had some staggering luck and fought alongside great pilots in magnificent aircraft with ground crew in the best air force in the world at that time. It was just a matter of taking each day at a time. Others write the history – we were doing our job.”

 

*

BUGS BUNNY made his official debut in a cartoon called “A Wild Hare.” For an example of Bugs’ hare-raising escapes, see “Dynamite Dance.” 

Elmer Fudd is foiled again.

* 

Lawrence Brooks is drafted to serve in the U.S. Army. Brooks, an African American will end up the oldest living veteran of World War II, dying in 2021, at age 112. Like most members of his race, Brooks did service work in the military, taking care of the needs of three white officers, as an enlisted man in the 91^st Engineer General Service Regiment. His unit mostly built bridges, roads and airstrips in Australia during the war. 

Brooks admitted later that he was not sorry to avoid combat, explaining, “I got lucky. I was saying to myself, ‘If I’m going to be shooting at somebody, somebody’s going to be shooting at me, and he might get lucky and hit.’” 

Asked about his experiences in 2014, Brooks remembered that he was treated better in Australia than back home in Louisiana. He told an interviewer it made him angry to think about all the Jim Crow laws, so he tried not to.

 

* 

February 29: Hattie McDaniel shows up at the Coconut Grove Restaurant in Los Angeles, to accept her academy award, for best supporting actress, in the movie Gone with the Wind. She is shunted off to a side table for two, at the far back wall. The restaurant has a strict “no blacks allowed” policy, but she and her escort are served, as a favor to the movie industry – and her white agent does sit with them. 

In the movie, McDaniel plays a stereotypical role, as "Mammy" to Scarlett O'Hara.

Louella Parsons, a gossip columnist wrote about the moment McDaniel rose from her seat receive her award:

 

Hattie McDaniel earned that gold Oscar by her fine performance of 'Mammy' in Gone with the Wind. If you had seen her face when she walked up to the platform and took the gold trophy, you would have had the choke in your voice that all of us had when Hattie, hair trimmed with gardenias, face alight, and dress up to the queen's taste, accepted the honor in one of the finest speeches ever given on the Academy floor.

 

McDaniel herself called it “one of the happiest moments of my life” and thanked the Academy. I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race,” she added, “and to the motion picture industry. My heart is too full to tell you just how I feel, and may I say thank you and God bless you.” 

That line – that McDaniel would have to prove a “credit” to her race, somehow prove that African Americans had worth, says more about the barriers people of color faced than Parsons, or perhaps even McDaniel understood that night. No white actor had to prove anything about his or her race. 

If they had talent, that was enough. 

Rita Dove, an African American poet, later penned a poem about that night: 

late, in aqua and ermine, gardenias
scaling her left sleeve in a spasm of scent,
her gloves white, her smile chastened, purse giddy
with stars and rhinestones clipped to her brilliantined hair,
on her free arm that fine Negro,
Mr. Wonderful Smith.

It’s the day that isn’t, February 29th,
at the end of the shortest month of the year—
and the shittiest, too, everywhere
except Hollywood, California,
where the maid can wear mink and still be a maid,
bobbing her bandaged head and cursing
the white folks under her breath as she smiles
and shoos their silly daughters
in from the night dew … what can she be
thinking of, striding into the ballroom
where no black face has ever showed itself
except above a serving tray?

Hi-Hat Hattie, Mama Mac, Her Haughtiness,
the “little lady” from Showboat whose name
Bing forgot, Beulah & Bertha & Malena
& Carrie & Violet & Cynthia & Fidelia,
one half of the Dark Barrymores—
dear Mammy we can’t help but hug you crawl into
your generous lap tease you
with arch innuendo so we can feel that
much more wicked and youthful
and sleek but oh what

we forgot: the four husbands, the phantom
pregnancy, your famous parties, your celebrated
ice box cake. Your giggle above the red petticoat’s rustle,
black girl and white girl walking hand in hand
down the railroad tracks
in Kansas City, six years old.
The man who advised you, now
that you were famous, to “begin eliminating”
your more “common” acquaintances
and your reply (catching him square
in the eye): “That’s a good idea.
I’ll start right now by eliminating you.”

Is she or isn’t she? Three million dishes,
a truckload of aprons and headrags later, and here
you are: poised, between husbands
and factions, no corset wide enough
to hold you in, your huge face a dark moon split
by that spontaneous smile—your trademark,
your curse. No matter, Hattie: It’s a long, beautiful walk
into that flower-smothered standing ovation,
so go on
and make them wait.

* 

In France, Josephine Baker, the famous American dancer, turns to work with the French underground, after Nazi forces overrun France. She has already developed a bitter hatred for Hitler and fascists, in general. As The New York Times notes,

 

On tour in Austria in the early 1930s, churches rang their bells to drown out her performances, and once France was occupied in 1940, she was banned from the stage there, along with all Black and Jewish performers. Undaunted, she joined the French Resistance and collected intelligence while performing in North Africa, smuggling back information written in invisible ink on her score sheets.

 

(In 1961, the French government would award Baker the Croix de Guerre in honor of her bravery. Two years later, she would return to the United States and speak at the March on Washington, organized by civil rights leaders, including Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.)