The explosion sent a quake through the entire airship and swallowed Virginia Dare up in a temporary sun. Abe and Henry felt their eardrums rupture from the shock wave of the explosion, felt the searing heat that singed their hair and baked their clothing onto their skin. They tried to keep their footing as the bow lurched upward, tilting the blimp at a forty-five-degree angle, breaking the back of the ship’s rigid skeleton and sending her freefalling the last hundred feet to earth. The tail crashed into the ground, sending a shock wave of hydrogen all the way to the bow, where the resulting wall of flames ignited what was left of the frame and shattered the control car, killing eighteen of the crew in an instant. Smoke and fire filled the passenger and crew areas in a matter of seconds.
All was light and heat. My clothes burned away, and I could feel us falling—the tail, falling to the ground. As the fabric over the hull burned away, I caught the briefest glimpse of the ground crew below. Their faces lit by the flames—the superstructure falling toward them, and us with it.
The beam that Abe had been tied to split in the crash, freeing him. His skin was burning, just as it had all those years before in Springfield. But this was a different fire. This fire was a liquid that clung to the surface. Melted his clothing and flesh, joining the two together.
The ship lurched again as the other cells began to explode—silver and china flying from the shelves of the galley. Stacks of luggage falling over along with their well-appointed owners. All the while the newsreel cameras turned, the radio announcers broadcasting live—“oh, the humanity!”—a close-up catching the word “Hindenburg” burning away along with the rest of the hull’s fabric covering.
The canvas covering of the Hindenburg burns away seconds after the initial explosion. It was reported that thirty-six people perished in the disaster, but that figure didn’t account for Virginia Dare or her two associates.
Suddenly I was on the ground. My clothes had burned away, along with some of my hair. All of creation smelled like diesel fuel. The hydrogen burned away in a few seconds, but the diesel—the stuff they used to run the generators and propellers—the diesel covered everything and kept burning. I saw the silhouette of a woman against the flames. The glowing, red-hot tips of her singed hair, ten thousand fiber-optic strands, billowing in the hot air.
Virginia was drenched in fuel, battered, disfigured, but still somehow alive. The flames licked at her ankles, caught the taste of the fuel on her skin, and engulfed her in seconds. Even then, with her skin blackening and rivulets of blood running down her face, she crawled forward.
It was only when the Hindenburg’s metal skeleton collapsed atop her naked body like a great molten mountain that she was finally extinguished.
ELEVEN
’53
Every man’s a would be sportsman, in the dreams of his intent,
A potential out-of-doors man when his thoughts are pleasure bent.
But he mostly puts the idea off, for the things that must be done,
And doesn’t get his outing till his outing days are done.
So in hurry, scurry, worry, work, his living days are spent,
And he does his final camping in a low green tent.
—Reuben Anderson
Of all the battles he’d fought in, all the years he’d spent and horrors he’d witnessed in Europe, Henry only ever dreamed about the beach. An excerpt from a letter he wrote to Abe on June 6th, 1953:
The ramp comes down, too far from shore, much farther than we’d drilled for. I see the muzzle flashes from the bunkers. A half second later, the bullets start whizzing past us. I jump in, taste the salt water as it goes up my nose, my feet trying to find the bottom as the tide bats me around, but finding nothing. So I swim. I have an advantage. I’m stronger, not weighed down by all that gear, so I make it. Crawl to shore, crouch behind a hedgehog,1 get my bearings. I look back toward the LV and see half the boys from my boat floating facedown in the ocean, bobbing with the waves. I see the color of the water changing, cursed by the same plague that touched the Nile. The salt of American blood mixing with the salt of the English Channel.
American forces land on Omaha Beach, June 6th, 1944. Henry was among those to storm the beach during the first wave of the attack. Though he survived, the images of D-Day would haunt his dreams for years to come.
I look up the beach—boys of eighteen, twenty, faceup, facedown, torn to ribbons. Crying out for their mothers, medics hovering uselessly over them, telling them lies. Priests doing the same. There’s so much blood in the water, on the beach, that I can’t help the thought of feeding on it. I feel guilty for even having the thought, but it’s there. I remember the mission, steady myself, and run, making no effort to disguise my vampire speed; zigzagging to throw off the German gunners as I dart between obstacles, taking cover behind one of the few DD Shermans2 to make it. [An artillery] shell goes off ten yards behind me, filling my back with shrapnel, knocking me off my feet. I’m facedown, dazed, in pain, but when I look up and get my bearings, I’m at the entrance of one of the concrete bunkers, having skipped distance and time the way you can only do in a dream.
I pull the pin on a grenade, count off in my head, one one thousand, two one thousand… I throw it into the bunker a split second before it goes off. The blast sends a plume of smoke out the door. The machine-gun fire stops. I wait a moment for the smoke to clear, to see if any of them come running out. None do, so I charge in. There are three Germans inside, one clearly dead from the blast, the other two stunned and wounded. I grab one of them, the gunner, around the neck, push my thumbs into his throat, and make a hole in his Adam’s apple. I pry his neck open from the middle and leave him to bleed out. I take the other’s head in my hands, press my palms flat against his temples, and squeeze. He grabs my wrists, tries to pry my hands away, but it’s useless. I’m too strong. He looks right at me, blood starting to trickle from his nostrils… his tear ducts. Crying tears of blood, like a miraculous statue of the Virgin Mary. He screams, agony, but it lasts only a second, before his head caves like an eggshell and his brains spill out his ears, around my fingers. The blood cascades over my wrists.
There’s another break in time. The operation is over; the beach is full of GIs, cleaning up the mess, carrying away the dead. One of my men tells me there’s a wounded officer asking for me. Moments later I part a small crowd on the beach… and see that it’s you, Abe. Everything below your chest has been blown away; blood foams at the corners of your mouth. I kneel, take your head in my hands. You look at me, glassy-eyed but lucid, and you whisper, “You did this, Henry… you did this.”
And that’s when I wake up.
Nat King Cole crackled over the AM, mixing with the wind and engine noise:
If you ever plan to motor west, travel my way, take the highway, that’s the best.
Henry had gotten hip to that timely tip. He was driving on Route 66, headed toward a sun that just then took its deep-orange bows for the evening and dipped below the edge of the world, off to begin its next performance. He drove due west, doing a hundred miles per hour on the straightaways of the Texas plains. Los Angeles was only one night and one road away, and he meant to power through till dawn, blowing past one-pump gas stations and one-horse towns like he’d been shot out of a pistol, riding on the back of a red bullet—the bullet, in this case, being his Porsche 356 convertible.
I’d never been what you’d call a “car person,” but that car…
It had shown up on his doorstep one morning, on the back of a truck, with a letter taped to its steering wheel:
From: General Dwight D. Eisenhower (ret.)
President, Columbia University
To: Henry Sturges
Dear Henry,
This was recently given to me by Mr. Ferdinand Porsche, who I became acquainted with while serving as military governor of American-occupied Germany. I’m told it’s one of only six of its kind, and that it has an engine to rival that of any race car.
It’s far too flashy a vehicle for
an old soldier and college president, but it made me think of you. A rare breed, faster and more powerful than most, but possessing an unexpected elegance. I hope you’ll accept it with my compliments, as small thanks for your many acts of bravery and valor, on behalf of the United States of America, her allies, and all the free peoples of the world during the war.
Your friend,
War was over, and once again everyone seemed to be in a big hurry to forget it. Optimism was the new patriotism. The whine of air-raid sirens had given way to the beat of Cole Porter. Buy War Bonds! had become See the USA in Your Chevrolet! Henry was all too happy to oblige (albeit in a Porsche).
The whole country seemed showroom new in 1953. The red paint of Henry’s car. The mirrored lenses of his Ray-Ban aviators, which reflected the last of the dying sun. His crisp white T-shirt. His bright-blue jeans and close-cropped, slicked-down haircut. Like the car, Henry looked like he’d been built for speed. Cutting through the air as the chill of a desert night began to set in, his tires stirring up the last of the heat devils that danced above the black tarmac.
I think that after those years of hell, I just wanted to be as far away from Europe and its ghosts as possible.
Abe and Henry had spent years on the battlefields of World War II, but they hadn’t been side by side.
We went our separate ways for a while after [the Hindenburg]. I’d been asked to go to London and liaise with SIS Section D,3 relay the Brits’ findings back to the White House, and so on. Strictly speaking, I was there in an “advisory” capacity, but FDR had let it be known that I was also an asset they could use in the field, and they did. It was one of the ways America was helping the Allies fight the Nazis, without going all in, see. But Abe… Abe was frustrated with Roosevelt’s reluctance to get into the war. He thought it was cowardice, frankly. He was ordered to Russia to liaise with their intelligence people, same as me. But after a week or so of doing that, he walked out of the American embassy and loaned himself out to the Russian army as an infantryman, despite his [permanently disfigured left] hand. He didn’t want to observe and report; he wanted to fight. That’s Abe. He always needs to do what he feels is right… consequences be damned; opinions be damned.
Abe fought with the Russians in Poland in 1939, in the Baltics in 1940, and on the front lines at Minsk and the Dnieper River as Germany invaded Russia in 1941. In October of that year, he wrote a letter to FDR—his first communication with the president (or any representative in the U.S. government) in nearly four years.
Lincoln scholars call it the “senses” letter,4 due to Abe’s use of the verbs “See!” “Hear!” “Smell!” in an attempt to engage Roosevelt on a visceral, emotional level—imploring him to commit American forces to Europe and stem the advance of the Nazis and their slaughter of innocents. It’s one of the longest letters Abe ever sent, and one of the most emotional, written in the immediate aftermath of the massacres at Babi Yar—a ravine in present-day Ukraine where the Nazis executed nearly thirty-four thousand Jewish men, women, and children over a two-day period during their campaign in Russia.
A. Lansing
Moscow
October 16th, 1941
F.D. Roosevelt
The White House
Washington, D.C.
Mr. President,
I have this day returned from Kiev, where I learned of a horrendous massacre of innocent civilians outside that city. This massacre took place on September 29th and 30th. It was perpetrated by the Germans, with the assistance of the local Ukrainian police.
There are photographs, which I have seen with my own eyes, of the victims before, during, and after their executions. Mothers, young and old, forced to strip naked before being shot unceremoniously in the head, their bodies dumped in mass graves. Can you see them? Stripped of their dignity before being stripped of their lives? Can you see that in the hands of many of these women are babes of two years… a year… four months old? Their bodies likewise stripped naked in the cold?
These women, their children in their arms, are confused. Confused as to why the trains haven’t come to whisk them off to safer, distant cities, as they were promised. They stand in line, these women. They stand in line, waiting, waiting… waiting their turn. Can you feel the chill of the autumn air as it hits their shivering, naked flesh? As they press their infants to their chests, trying to give what little warmth they have to their crying young? Can you hear them cry out for their men, who have been taken elsewhere, out of sight, never to return?
These women, these mothers reach the front of the line. They’re told to spread out, at the edge of the trench. Told to face the other direction, still clutching their young to their breasts. Still holding the hands of those children who are old enough to walk on their own. Still clinging to the hope that somehow, this will end well. That it’s all been some misunderstanding, even as they look down at the freshly bleeding bodies in the trench below. As they look away, pistols are held an inch from the back of their heads. There is no fuss or ceremony in this; it’s all done quickly, efficiently, for there are many left to kill. With no more effort than it takes to turn off a wall switch, a trigger is pulled, gunpowder ignites, and a bullet rips through their brains. It ends them, as they stand their holding their babies in their arms. Their babies, who fall with their mothers as they collapse, already dead, into the open trench. They fall, like marionettes whose strings have been suddenly and forever cut, onto the bleeding bodies that fell in the group before them. Can you smell the gunpowder in the air? Can you hear the children cry out in the arms of their mothers? Do you see the face of the three-year-old who cries out beneath his mother’s lifeless body, his mother, just seconds before, the steadiest and most loving thing in his life, now gone? Do you see the round, fair-haired head of the infant, as the barrel of a German pistol is held an inch away from it?
An unidentified woman clings to her child moments before both are shot to death at Babi Yar, outside Kiev. Abe wrote an impassioned letter to FDR after seeing this and other pictures of the massacre, which claimed upward of 34,000 Jews over a two-day period in 1941.
See it. See the infant’s head as the trigger is pulled and the pistol recoils. See the force of the bullet move the head violently as it dashes the skull apart. As it tears through the brain, extinguishing one of God’s good lights. Extinguishing, in a callous, effortless instant, an untold future. A full and fruitful life of eighty… ninety… a hundred years of laughter and tears and joy and sorrow and love and loss and learning and travel and wisdom and contribution and complexity. A hundred generations of promise, snatched away by a five-cent bullet.
See it. See the spark go out of the tiny child’s eyes as the bullet exits his forehead. See the blood shoot from his head in long arcs—pump, pump—as his tiny heart continues to beat a moment longer. See it. Now multiply it by ten thousand. One hundred thousand. Multiply it by the millions, until the sheer volume of it washes over you and blankets you with the warmth of its impossibility.
I once believed that the best way to destroy my enemy was to make him my friend. But that belief seems naive in the face of such evil. The world is facing a darkness the likes of which it hasn’t seen since the Angel of Death descended on the homes of Pharaoh’s slaves. An enemy motivated not by greed or need, but by hatred. By a deep, almost religious conviction in its cause, bred in its bones since an ancient age. This enemy will never relent. It will never surrender. It must be erased, its every cell cut like a tumor from the flesh of the earth.
America must enter this war. She must enter it immediately and unreservedly, and she must employ her every asset. She must come to the shores of Europe before Europe lands on hers. Before women and children are stripped bare and shot like animals on the streets of New York, Springfield, and Los Angeles.
I have led America, as you lead it now. I have steered the Great Ship through turbulent waters, as you are faced with doing. I know what it is to send boys to their deaths in the name of a cause, and I know what it is to write
letters to the mothers of the lost. But as great as their sacrifice will be, it will pale in comparison to the horrors of a world in which this darkness is left unchecked.
You and I have had our differences of opinion about this war, and a great many things. But surely no man of character, no nation of honor, can look away as these atrocities befall innocent people.
Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.5
Yours,
FDR never responded to the letter. He didn’t have to. Six weeks after Abe sent it, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, leaving America no choice but to enter the war.
Henry drove west on Sunset Boulevard, his car a tiny novelty compared to the bulky Buicks and Chryslers, all of them in muted colors and built like tanks. He shared the road with electric streetcars, packed with smartly dressed men and women on their way to work, the marquees of movie palaces promoting films like Roman Holiday and Gentleman Prefer Blondes. The dilapidated Hollywoodland sign in the hills above.
I needed something new to wash away the memories of those rain-soaked, ancient European cities. The rubble, the death, the strife… the insides of ships and rucksack straps making you feel claustrophobic and heavy and hopeless around the clock. Multiply that by four, five, six years… and you start to get a picture of how crazy, how restless I was when I came back.