The year was 1942 and the first American forces had landed in Europe. The U.S. was desperate to get men trained and deployed. At Luke Field in Arizona, hundreds of young men went through rushed flight training, and 14 from the entering class of new recruits called 42J were selected to become fighter pilots and were deployed overseas. Within six months, 12 of the 14 were dead.
Today, Fredric Arnold is the last man alive of that original group, and at 92 years old, the Boulder resident and artist is undertaking a monumental sculpture project in memory of not just the 12 in his group who died in combat or in training, but all 88,000 U.S. Airmen who were killed in WWII.
The sculpture will consist of 12 life-size bronze figures, and Arnold says the scene depicted will be unfamiliar to most people. It is a moment Hollywood hasn’t paid attention to.
“I don’t go for Hollywood,” says Arnold. “What they did to the image [of war] is glorification. The glorification of the war and of the men who serve, that’s bologna. It’s a job to be done. It’s like taking out the trash. It smells. It’s dirty. But somebody has to do it, and that’s exactly what we were doing. Killing, killing, killing everyday, and getting killed everyday, losing guys to the point that in the end, I didn’t have a single guy left.”
The sculpture portrays a briefing, the time spent before a mission familiarizing the young fighter pilots with what they have to do, where they have to go and who they have to kill. Arnold says the quiet bravery of that moment is more powerful than Hollywood’s glorification.
“Each morning, the squadron leader would stand in front of these maps,” says Arnold. “He would say, ‘Today we are going to bomb Sicily,’ or wherever, and he would go through whatever the specifics of the mission were. The men couldn’t write this down because if they were shot down the enemy could use any maps or notes to their advantage.”
While not meant to represent specific individuals, the 12 figures display characteristics and attitudes that were common to all the fighter pilots Arnold knew. Figure one, titled “Teenager,” is the first completed sculpture and it will be on display at The Dairy Center for the Arts when Arnold delivers a lecture there in conjunction with Veterans Speak on Nov. 17.
“Teenager” represents how young some pilots were, often 18 and fresh out of high school. The teenager’s face is anxious and intensely focused, representing the uncertainty, the terror and inability to really understand what the briefings were meant to teach.
“There were things like, ‘Fire your guns, drop your tanks,’” says Arnold. “But these were only words. They didn’t mean anything until you get into it.”
Like the 11 other figures, “Teenager” represents a fighter pilot who would die.
“I remember someone asking what the life expectancy of a fighter pilot was,” says Arnold. “They said 17 missions. In the beginning, we were
Though he did not talk openly of expected to do 25.” the war until 45 years after he returned home, Arnold says his experience as a fighter pilot has influenced his art all along. From the book he wrote, to the illustrations he drew, to this colossal sculpture project, Arnold says art has helped him deal with post-traumatic stress disorder and allowed him to give recognition to the men who died before him.
“I didn’t survive due to more skill than the others,” says Arnold. “It was luck. Those who died were teaching others, through their mistakes, how to survive.”
Trained as a sketch artist, Arnold had worked in courtrooms prior to the war. Drawing was not allowed while court was in session, so Arnold would sit through court cases, then go outside and “they would give me twenty minutes to recreate everything I had seen,” he says.
Over time, he built up the skill of memory. He couldn’t forget images. Of the war, he says, “I know every single image. I can’t get rid of the pictures.”
Using this same skill, Arnold would often sit in the cockpit of his P-38 fighter plane after one of his missions and he would draw the scenes he remembered from the sky. On sketch pads he had brought from New York City, he illustrated what had happened, paying particular attention to mistakes that had been made — mistakes that cost his fellow U.S. fighter pilots their lives.
“He was illustrating the errors,” says Arnold’s son, Marc Arnold. “One after the other, he was illustrating these lessons that he had learned that they had no way of teaching [the pilots] at the time.”
Among his illustrations were depictions of unsuccessful attacks, dive-bombing missions that were approached from the wrong angle and other missions that often left one or more of his comrades dead.
“Early in the war, the U.S. had a desperate need to get pilots trained and deployed,” says Marc Arnold. “The training methods were primitive by today’s standards. Fighter pilots today typically have more than 1,000 flight hours and far more ground training before seeing combat.”
In WWII, pilots were sent into combat with as little as 90 hours of flight-time training and were expected to “learn the job on the job.”
Arnold’s sketches may have saved his life. While pinning Arnold with a Distinguished Flying Award in 1943, a general took note of Arnold’s sketches.
“General [Carl] Spaatz pins this medal on me,” says Arnold. “Then he picks up my sketch book and he flips through it and says, ‘You did these sketches? What the hell is this guy doing in combat? He shouldn’t be in combat, he’s going to die in combat! We need this guy back in the office in the states.’” For the last two years of the war, Arnold was reassigned to the Office of Flying Safety and worked to create the first Pilot Training Manual that would be given to new P-38 fighter pilots.
“Then,” he says, “I was able to save lives instead of killing.”
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