In April of this year, I wrote a series of articles about the men of the 384th Bomb Group who remain missing in action to this day. One of the stories was about the disappearance of Frederick Arnold Maki, the radio operator of the Robert Clax Long crew. The crew ditched in the North Sea on February 3, 1945. Maki was washed away and never seen again. The remainder of the crew struggled to stay alive while awaiting rescue.

Edward Field, the navigator of the crew, did not have a spot in a life raft, but clung to the side of one of them. When he started going numb from the cold, the ball turret gunner, Jack Coleman Cook, traded places with him, slipping into the icy water as Edward took Jack’s place in the raft.

Even though the crew was rescued, both the pilot, Robert Long, and the ball turret gunner who had given up his spot in the raft, Jack Cook, died from exposure. Edward Field, who began writing poetry during the time he was flying bombing missions in WWII, wrote about the experience in a moving poem entitled “World War II,” which was originally published in 1967, again in several of Edward Field’s books, and in the 2003 Library of America anthology of World War II poems, “Poets of World War II.”

Edward Field has given me permission to share his poem with you here.

World War II

It was over Target Berlin the flak shot up our plane
just as we were dumping bombs on the already
smoking city
on signal from the lead bomber in the squadron.
The plane jumped again and again as the shells burst
under us
sending jagged pieces of steel rattling through our
fuselage.
It was pure chance
that none of us got ripped by those fragments.

Then, being hit, we had to drop out of formation
right away
losing speed and altitude,
and when I figured out our course with trembling hands
on the instruments
(I was navigator)
we set out on the long trip home to England
alone, with two of our four engines gone
and gas streaming out of holes in the wing tanks.
That morning at briefing
we had been warned not to go to nearby Poland
partly liberated then by the Russians,
although later we learned that another crew in trouble
had landed there anyway,
and patching up their plane somehow,
returned gradually to England
roundabout by way of Turkey and North Africa.
But we chose England, and luckily
the Germans had no fighters to send up after us then
for this was just before they developed their jet.
To lighten our load we threw out
guns and ammunition, my navigation books, all the junk
and, in a long descent, made it over Holland
with a few goodbye fireworks from the shore guns.

Over the North Sea the third engine gave out
and we dropped low over the water.
The gas gauge read empty but by keeping the nose
down
a little gas at the bottom of the tank sloshed forward
and kept our single engine going.
High overhead, the squadrons were flying home in
formation
—the raids had gone on for hours after us.
Did they see us down there skimming the waves?
We radioed our final position for help to come
but had no idea if anyone
happened to be tuned in and heard us,
and we crouched together on the floor
knees drawn up and head down
in regulation position for ditching;
listened as the engine stopped, a terrible silence,
and we went down into the sea with a crash,
just like hitting a brick wall,
jarring bones, teeth, eyeballs panicky.
Who would ever think water could be so hard?
You black out, and then come to
with water rushing in like a sinking-ship movie.

All ten of us started getting out of there fast:
there was a convenient door in the roof to climb out by,
one at a time. We stood in line,
water up to our thighs and rising.
The plane was supposed to float for twenty seconds
but with all those flak holes
who could say how long it really would?
The two life rafts popped out of the sides into the water
but one of them only half-inflated
and the other couldn’t hold everyone
although they all piled into it, except the pilot,
who got into the limp raft that just floated.
The radio operator and I, out last,
(did that mean we were least aggressive, least likely
to survive?)
we stood on the wing watching the two rafts
being swept off by waves in different directions.
We had to swim for it.
Later they said the cords holding rafts to plane
broke by themselves, but I wouldn’t have blamed them
for cutting them loose, for fear
that by waiting for us the plane would go down
and drag them with it.

I headed for the overcrowded good raft
and after a clumsy swim in soaked heavy flying clothes
got there and hung onto the side.
The radio operator went for the half-inflated raft
where the pilot lay with water sloshing over him,
but he couldn’t swim, even with his life vest on,
being from the Great Plains—
his strong farmer’s body didn’t know
how to wallow through the water properly
and a wild current seemed to sweep him farther off.
One minute we saw him on top of a swell
and perhaps we glanced away for a minute
but when we looked again he was gone—
just as the plane went down sometime around then
when nobody was looking.

It was midwinter and the waves were mountains
and the water ice water.
You could live in it twenty-five minutes
the Ditching Survival Manual said.
Since most of the crew were squeezed on my raft
I had to stay in the water hanging on.
My raft? It was their raft, they got there first so they
would live.
Twenty-five minutes I had.
Live, live, I said to myself.
You’ve got to live.
There looked like plenty of room on the raft
from where I was and I said so
but they said no.
When I figured the twenty-five minutes were about up
and I was getting numb,
I said I couldn’t hold on anymore,
and a little rat-faced boy from Alabama, one of the
gunners,
got into the icy water in my place,
and I got on the raft in his.
He insisted on taking off his flying clothes
which was probably his downfall because even wet
clothes are protection,
and then worked hard, kicking with his legs, and we all
paddled,
to get to the other raft
and tie them together.
The gunner got in the raft with the pilot
and lay in the wet.
Shortly after, the pilot started gurgling green foam from
his mouth—
maybe he was injured in the crash against the
instruments—
and by the time we were rescued,
he and the little gunner were both dead.

That boy who took my place in the water
who died instead of me
I don’t remember his name even.
It was like those who survived the death camps
by letting others go into the ovens in their place.
It was him or me, and I made up my mind to live.
I’m a good swimmer,
but I didn’t swim off in that scary sea
looking for the radio operator when he was
washed away.
I suppose, then, once and for all,
I chose to live rather than be a hero, as I still do today,
although at that time I believed in being heroic, in
saving the world,
even if, when opportunity knocked,
I instinctively chose survival.

As evening fell the waves calmed down
and we spotted a boat, not far off, and signaled with a
flare gun,
hoping it was English not German.
The only two who cried on being found
were me and a boy from Boston, a gunner.
The rest of the crew kept straight faces.

It was a British air-sea rescue boat:
they hoisted us up on deck,
dried off the living and gave us whisky and put us
to bed,
and rolled the dead up in blankets,
and delivered us all to a hospital on shore
for treatment or disposal.
None of us even caught cold, only the dead.

This was a minor accident of war:
two weeks in a rest camp at Southport on the Irish Sea
and we were back at Grafton-Underwood, our base,
ready for combat again,
the dead crewmen replaced by living ones,
and went on hauling bombs over the continent of
Europe,
destroying the Germans and their cities.

© Edward Field, 1967, 1987

* * * * * * * *

The mission on which Edward Field chose survival over death in the North Sea was only his third mission, but he went on to fly twenty-four more and complete his tour of duty. Today Edward Field is searching for a way to honor the man who saved his life. In his words, “Something should be done to credit Jack Cook’s incredible act of bravery.” I agree. Do you?

Edward Field in WWII

Edward Field, long after the war

Edward Field’s books and awards include:

Poetry

• Stand Up, Friend, With Me (1963)
• Variety Photoplays (1967)
• Eskimo Songs and Stories (1973)
• A Full Heart (1977)
• Stars in My Eyes (1978)
• New and Selected Poems from the Book of My Life (1987)
• Counting Myself Lucky: Selected Poems 1963-1992 (1992)
• A Frieze for a Temple of Love (1998)
• Magic Words: Poems (1998)
• After the Fall: Poems Old and New (2007)

Fiction

• The Potency Clinic (1978), with Neil Derrick
• Die PotenzKlinik (1982), translation of The Potency Clinic
• Village (1982) by Bruce Elliot (pseudonym of Edward Field and Neil Derrick)
• The Office ( 1987)
• The Villagers (2000) by Edward Field and Neil Derrick, 2nd revision of Village
• The Villagers (2009) by Bruce Elliot (pseudonym of Edward Field and Neil Derrick), 3rd revision of Village

Non-fiction

• The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Profies of the Bohemian Era (2005)
• Kabuli Days, Travels in Old Afghanistan (2008

Awards

• The Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets (1962)
• Guggenheim Fellowship (1963)
• An Academy Award for writing narration for the documentary film To Be Alive (1965)
• The Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America (1974)
• The Prix de Rome from the American Academy of Arts & Letters (1981)
• The Lambda Literary Award (1993)
• Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award (2005)
• W.H. Auden Award (2005)

© Cindy Farrar Bryan and The Arrowhead Club, 2016 (excluding Edward Field’s poem, “World War II”)