More UnBroken - Tom Gerrity Still in the Fight With 'Mortimer'

Back:  P/O Allen R. Page (RAAF) - Capt. Smiling Tom P. Gerrity - M/Sgt Melvin E. Owens - Sgt. Al Fawe - Cpl. Ed D. Connor                                                
Front: T/Sgt Al Simmons - T/Sgt James G. Westbrook - Unknown - Unknown

Yesterday, I wrote about a Leo Alumnus (dec.) - Thomas P. Gerrity* ( Leo Class of 1930 - the Charter Class). Thomas P. Gerrity became one of the pioneers of the Missile Program that eveolved into NASA and landed a man on the moon. Tom Gerrity died of a heart attack in in 1968, while directing the missile program at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio,

The photos linked here were taken in May and and June of 1942.  Less than a month before, Tom Gerrity escaped the Fall of Bataan when he was ordered out to Australia - there were more planes than pilots Down Under.  Tom Gerrity fought in the Phillipines from December 1941 through April, 1942 as a medium bomber pilot whose plane was bombed and straffed (Gerrity was wounded in that attack) before it could fly from Nichols Field, as an air liason officer, flying a P-40 to and from Corregidor for General Wainwright, the scapegoat chosen by Douglas MacArthur for his own failures, as a member of the Bataan 24th Pursuit Group flying obsolete and shot-up planes against the Japanese and as a rifleman when the planes ran out.

Gerrity starved on Bataan and stayed in the fight even though he was racked by malaria and bone-breaking dengue fever.

Lieutenant Gerrity and several other pilots managed to get a Navy float-plane back in shape and flew it to Mindanao, where they were picked up and taken to Australia by members of their Bomb Group, who had been ordered out earlier.

Tom Gerrity was married and had a son back home in the States.

America was beaten all over the Pacific and Asia. Only a few pilots managed to take the fight to Japan,  Tom Gerrity, starved, wounded and sick, stayed in the fight.  He flew a bomber nicknamed 'Mortimer.'
In the following months, Gerrity flew 49bombing missions and sank 28 Japanese ships,

 B-25C   "Mortimer"   41-12443  

Ask yourself, " Should our kids know about a Tom Gerrity, a Motts Tonelli, a Louis Zamperini, inorder to lead good life?"

That is not a rhetorical question.


Tom Gerrity
Born December 8, 1913
Harlowton, Montana
Died February 24, 1968 (aged 54)
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio
Buried at Arlington National Cemetery
Allegiance United States of America
Service/branch United States Air Force
Years of service 1939-1968
Rank General
Commands held Air Force Logistics Command
Battles/wars World War II
Awards Air Force Distinguished Service Medal (2)
Silver Star
Air Medal (2)
Purple Heart
Relations Thomas P. Gerrity (son)[1

UnBroken -American Heroism

 

To the Officers and Enlisted men of the of the 27thBombardment Group (L) dead or missing in action in the
Philippine Islands, Australia Java, and New Guinea, we
dedicate this book and all our efforts to repay, ten thousand
times over, the Japanese for every one of our men lost.

Thomas P. Gerrity ( Leo 1930) Top row extreme right - shortly after his escape from Bataan.

 It was great to see that Angelina Jolie's film of UnBroken, based upon Laura Hillenbrand’s wonderful book of the same name, has exceeded box office expectations.  Hollywood no longer wants movies that extol common values like valor, honor, courage and faith. Instead, movies are churned out that cast doubt on any one's ability to reach deeply to the human core forged in faith, commitment, sacrifice and duty.  Valor comes not from a political bequest and certainly not from a reparation of grievances and is therefore taboo to the Procrustean themes forced by Harvey Weinstein, Peter Gruber, or Scott Rudin.

Marvel and DC Comics are the script templates replacing the Torah, the Pentateuch, or the Rights of Man.  Abe Lincoln fights Vampires, Werewolves, or the demons of his sexual identity.  Valor only works when pagan totems are doled out by Odin, Zeus, Minerva, or learned in the classrooms of Hogwarts Staff.

Anything that leads a person to behave selflessly and in good-faith from a First Cause is verboten.

Yet, thanks to Ms. Jolie's UnBroken, it is evident that People will pay to witness a man act without the aid of PC, or magical powers.

Our Thumb-Dummy Kultur Kampf is meant to keep people from talking with another person and arriving at mutually satisfying conclusion that 'boy, a man's faith in God and himself can sure give him an edge in a tough situation.'

Tough situations abound, but tough people ( people who can it - whatever it happens to be) are getting scarce it seems.  Seeming is not being.   We can be tough without Bat Utility Belts, a bog-ass Mjǫlnir in our mitts, or help from President Obama.

I linked a story writtten by a group of very tough people - the battered, under equipped, out-numbered and alone survivors of the 27th Bomb Group, including Lt (later Captain) Tom Gerrity of 17th Bomb Squadron who were sent to the Phillipine Islands less than a month before Pearl Harbor.

Tom Gerrity (Leo Class of 1930) flew a B-18 bomber that only seems to appear in a Bugs Bunny Cartoon

The plane was obsolete and Gerrity never got his plane off the ground of Nichols Field on December 9, 1941 when the Japanese destroyed General Mac Arthur's air power on the ground. 

The next day, (9th), found the 17th with some of the crews manning machine gun
posts at Nichols Field and with flying crews standing by to man the B-18’s. Tom Gerrity
and Ed Townsend had one, Pete Bender and Harry Roth of the 16th had the second, and
Gus Heiss and F.E. Timlin of the 17th had the third. All had it easy on the 9th but on the
10th all were called out. Tom and Ed were down at Nichols preparing for a bombing
mission when shortly afternoon the Nips staged a huge raid. Tom and Ed ran for cover as
the Zeros began to strafe the B-18’s that they were to use on their mission. Tom
unfortunately was hit in the hand by a piece of shrapnel and Ed got to cover just as the B-
18’s load of bombs blew up. “Tim” and “Gus” ran into a dog fight but finally managed
to get to San Marcelino.
In the same raid, several of the 17th gunners at Nichols were strafed and one crew
manned its post until blown out by bombs.

Nine days later:

The 27th Group Commander, Major Davies and a number of pilots left early this

morning by plane for Australia. They plan to pick-up the 27th’s A-24 dive bombers, and
ferry them back to the Philippines. In the absence of Major Davies, Major Sewell acted
as Group Commander with Captain Whoffell as executive officer and Tom Gerrity as
group Material Officer.
Due to the lack of aircraft and the dis-organization of the entire situation, the 27th
was left high and dry. A complete air corps unit with no airplanes with which to fight.
The “Powers the be” later turned the Group into an infantry outfit.
On December 20th Tom Gerrity was assigned to the North Luzon force as Air Corp
Liason Officer. On the way north he stopped off at Stotsenberg. Clark Field was a
shamble. Wrecked airplanes lay burned all over the field.

Tom Gerrity served as liason to General Wainwright, flying from the island fortress of Corregidor to Bataan and back keeping the man desiganted by MacArthur to be the goat for his monumental failures and arrogance in the Phillipines apprised of the appaling air defences,

Gerrity front row far right on Bataan as a P-40 pilot

 Tom Gerrity later went to Bataan as a pursuit pilot in one of few remaing P-40's, until malaria, dengue fever and the Japanese Zero turned pilots into rifle men.
Gerrity was one of the last men to escape the Death March when he was ordered to Australia only hours before the fall of Bataan. Gerrity patched up a Grumman Floatplane and flew himself and others one thousand miles south Mindanao's Del Monte Field, where he was picked up by comrades from the 27th Group ordered to Australia months earlier.

The next day two more missions were flown by
each flight. Cebu Harbor and Dabao was heavly bombed. Anti-aircraft fire was heaby
on all missions, but the Japs consistenly underestimated the speed of the B-25. After the
last mission both flights landed at Del Monte, and under cover of darkness bomb bay
tanks were reinstalled and the ships were serviced for the long hop back to Darwin. Up at
the clubhouse, the 27th Pilots welcomed back into the fold, two 27th men who had make
their way down from Bataan bare hours before it’s fall.
The faces of Tom Gerrity and Jack Wienert clearly showed the strain of four
months on beleaguered Bataan. They could give no information about the men of the
27th who remained on Bataan to the last, except that all the officers were still alive up to
the last day and that the casualties among the men had been small.
Take-off time was set at 2300, and shortly before midnight ten B-25s, each
overloaded to capacity with officers recently evacuated from Bataan - - took off from Del
Monte, bored up through a low overcast, and headed south toward Darwin, 2000 miles
away in the darkness. The scourge of the tropic “old man dengue” had smacked Talley
squarely between the eyes just before the last mission, and Pete gladly let Jack Wienert take his place as co-pilot during most of the return trip. All the ships landed at Batchelor
Field, forty miles south of Darwin, after daylight the morning of April 14, staying only
long enough to gas up, and taking off immediately. Night found them back in Charters
Towers, more than a little weary from nearly fifty hours of hard flying in four days, and
asking for nothing but a bed.
After a few days of rest, the group was called on to furnish ships for constant patrol
out of Port Moresby. J.R. Smith and Talley – now recovered from his battle with dengue
- - took two ships up April 23 and spent the usual four or five days, running a nine hour
recon flight every day over all Jap bases from Kavieng in the North to the deboyne
Islands in the south. The recons were long, lonely, and dangerous, but the pilots who
flew them gained an intimate knowledge of the entire combat area which was to be
invaluable to them later on.

Gerrity flew B-25s against the Japanese is credited with sinking 28 ships in the Bismark Sea.

UnBroken.   There are many tales of Unbroken people. We need to tell those tale. Shared memory is civilization.

"Who's the Water Head, Now, Hollywood?" Angelina Jolie Sure as Hell Ain't

"I never had a plan for my life," she said. "I do what I want to do. And if suddenly tomorrow I couldn't do anything, I could deal with that. I'd be happy at home being a mom." Angelina Jolie in People

“She's seriously out of her mind.” Scott Rudin e-mail to Amy Pascal

Seriously.  Sony pictures was hacked by the North Koreans, because it produced a movie intended to 'goof-on' the tubby, dictator who orders live ammunition practice on his Kin and paramours.  The hack-job mined a bonanza of Tweets, e-mails and cyber messaging between Sony executives. These same executives produce untold hours of loud,dull, self-congratulatory,  insulting, violent and meaningless 'entertainment' that goes immediately to Blue-Ray and Cable. Every once in a while the odd 'film' manages to squeeze through that is not loud,dull, self-congratulatory,  insulting, violent and meaningless 'entertainment' and lands somewhere in the level of artistic value next to Mitchell (considered the # 1 Worst Movie of 1975.

1975 was the year actor and director Angelina Jolie was born.

Since that time, the young lady seems to have done pretty well for herself - married a successful guy, adopted many children, engaged in charitable works with a grace well beyond her years and zip code, "She has received an Academy Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards, and was named Hollywood's highest-paid actress by Forbes in 2009, " directed two films and has avoided rehab, scandal and managed to not make a complete train-wreck of her image.

She is a cute girl - some say beautiful.

That said, the executives at Sony who have managed to allow the tubby sociopath of the Pacific Rim to unmask Hollywood for the fetid cesspool it happens to be 24/7 and no days off for religious holiday.

In 1975, I was a baby teacher at Bishop McNamara High School in Kankakee, IL ( home of actors Kara Zediker BMHS '88, and Fred MacMurray).  Years later, while Kara Zediker trod the boards of Steppenwolf Theatre with John Malkovich, appeared in The Babe, Uncle Buck, Dig Two Graves, Contagion, Rock Star, The Babe, Janie Jones and No God, No Master, as well as made her talents evident on TV shows Like Star Trek, 24, King of Queens and Zena Warrior Princess, I became aware that Angelina Jolie was making a splash in Hollywood.

I saw Ms. Jolie in a couple of her films and recognized her intelligence, humor, depth and good heart.

I did not pick up on any clues as to her mental stability. She seems like a person who is centered and one not prone to worry about what is in the gift bags, or the place in line.

Hollywood is powerful.  Kim Jong Un is powerful.  Some people with power make life a living hell for others whom they deem inferior.

In 1975, I would go from Kankakee back home to the south side and tend bar.  I made more from Friday through Sunday than I did as a teacher.  There was a guy who used come into the bar who was a full blown nut-job. He would disguise himself with fake beards, glasses, trench coats and flash cards and badges that he got from Riley's Trick Shop and cage drinks and snacks.  He was nuts but relatively harmless.

"Shayyy? I'm jusht in from the coasht, and Bosh ( Boz) shed any thing I ashked for wash Ok, until my finanshesh get shquared away, Shpill me a Millersh and a shot of Chevash,"

Despite the disguises and the false identities, Larrensh (Larry) was afflicted with 'Fountain Mouth' - the Eddie Foy disease -"Shhay It, Don' Shhhpray it." That he could not hide.  Therefore, bar tenders immediately knew that Lawrensh Washhh In the Housh! The bartenders and owners gave the poor guy a couple of beers, a bag or two of Chipshhhh and the odd ride home. All but one.

Hollywood Hogan hated Lawensh like he was freshman Algebra. He would order Larry out with threats and maledictions and call him Water-head.

One very foggy night, after Hollywood ( a stunningly handsome black Irish Colin Farrell look-alike in full possession of a room temperature IQ) broke his ankle in softball game, Larry showed up an taunted the hobbled Hogan.

"Sha Madder Hollywood? Shpring in your Shtep Vanishhhhed?  Shum moush shcare you?"

Hollywood tucked a crutch under one arm and struggled to give chase.

Now, the city of Chicago had dug up the streets for sewer replacement and massive moats paralled the bar access.  Larry bolted Slushing out taunts and teases in the path of Hollywood Hogan doing his very best Walter Brennan giddy-yap.

Hogan decided to run down Larry with his big 1973 Pontiac Catalina. He tossed his crutch and fired up the car.  Larry hopped only yards from its path.

Hogan gunned the engine and tossed the Pontiac into drive. Larry hopped to the side and the quality vehicle careened into the City of Chicago created moat.  The rear wheels spun Hollywood beat the steering wheel with desperate and congenial hatred.

We witnessed this theatre.

From the fog, beyond the sewer ditch on Pulaski Ave. we heard the familiar voice of master of disguise, " Whoooshhhhhh The Water Head Now?"

Hollywood.