Chandler Bitter showed Helen the letter, then suggested she call Bran don and read the letter to him. After that he left for work. When he returned that evening, she mentioned to him that she had also called Ann Chambers and read the letter to her. Ann was Brandon's daughter and their niece, and she was working on Brandon's newspaper in Memphis.
Helen had also called Mark and Sue-Ann Chambers in Mobile. The rest of the afternoon she'd spent having Peter Doug lass's letter photographed so that she could send copies to other friends who would be interested.
There was a second letter from the Chinese embassy the next day. Eight flowery paragraphs proclaimed that a second gold miniature Flying Tiger was being sent with the personal gratitude of the Chinese people and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
Mrs. Bitter had that letter photographed, too, so that it could be sent to sundry and assorted relatives and friends. When things calmed down a bit, she was going to have the letters framed. She was also going to have the second gold Flying Tiger mounted and take it to The Plantation in Alabama. She would hang it all in the library of the family vacation residence there with the other family war memorabilia, some of which went back to the War Between the States. Helen's behavior astonished Chandler. He had been married to her a long time, and thought he knew her. What seemed to be the strange truth was that the traditional roles were reversed. He was nearly sick with fear and relief for their child, and she was reveling in his heroism.
THREE I Memphis, Tennessee may 28, 1942
A reporter-photographer team from Time-Life visited the U.S. Army General Hospital in Calcutta in early May looking for "upbeat" stories.
The United States of America had been taking a bell of a whipping in the opening months of the war, and with the exception of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle's B-25 raid on Tokyo the month before, there was a surfeit of depressing stories of courage in the face of defeat.
It didn't take them long to find out there were several Flying Tigers in the hospital. One of these had a story that would go over well in New York. The first story about him appeared in the Time issue of May 28, 1942. There was a one-column photograph of Edwin Howell Bitter in a hospital bathrobe, sitting in a wheelchair with his right leg in a cast sticking straight out in front of him. The cudine under the photograph read: "Civilian" Ed Bitter. The story itself seemed sure to satisfy the editor's demand for something upbeat:
There are five American "civilian" patients in the new US. ga rmvgeneralhospitatincalcutta.Theirbfllsarepaidbythecht ncserovernment.
They are employees of the American Volunteer XGROUR) who were "injured on the job." The job 24-year-old @exlnavy pilot Edwin H. Bitter, of Chicago, was injured doing was Nstrafing the huge Jap air base at Chiengmai, Thailand, in a worn out Curtiss P-40B War hawk, an aircraft the Chinese and their American volunteer pilots were able to fly only because the British turned them down as obsolescent for service against the Germans in Europe.
Bitterdownedninejapaneseaircraftinhis obsolete'p-40before he himself was downed by ground fire in Thailand. He was rescued from certain imprisonment and possible execution as a "bandit" when another "civilian" Flying Tiger pilot managed to land his War hawk on the dry riverbed where Bitter had crashed. E He squeezed the wounded flier into his cockpit and took off again Names of AVG pilots still fighting the Japanese are not released. Annapolis graduate ('38) Bitter sees no future for himself in the U.S. Navy, which, he says, "has no use for people with stiff knees." When he is able, he will return to his "civilian job" as a Flying Tiger.
Life magazine, ten days later-it took time to get all the photographs necessary for a photo-essay to the United States-had a longer story about the AVG men in Calcutta, but by then Time had been published. It was not known whether the order had come from President Roosevelt himself, or from Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, who had been wounded as a sergeant charging up San Juan Hill with Teddy Roosevelt in the Spanish-American War, but the word came down from way up high: "Get that fellow Bitter back in the U.S. Navy as soon as he can be sworn in, even if you have to do it with him on a stretcher."
Not long afterward a letter addressed to Miss Sarah Child that bore the return address "Ltcomdr E. H. Bitter, USN, Det of Patients, USA Gen Hospital, APO 65Z San Francisco, Calif " appeared in Sarah's and Ann's box in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Before Sarah saw it, Ann Chambers took the letter and kept it in her purse until she found time to steam open the envelope over a teakettle and read it. Ann had opened all of Sarah Child's mail since the visit to Memphis of Sarah's mother. When Sarah's mother had asked her husband to take her to Memphis to see her daughter, Joseph Schild-Sarah had Americanized the German a Jewish Schild to Child before going off to college-had desperately wanted to believe that time and the maternal instincts of his wife had overcome her first reaction to the news that their unmarried nineteen -year-old daughter was pregnant. Her first reaction-rage and fear-had put Sarah's mother into the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connect it, for six weeks. But Joseph Schild had taken his wife out of the IOL cu against medical advice when she asked to go to Memphis. Sarah shared a suite in the Peabody Hotel in Memphis with her best friend from Bryn Mawr, Ann Chambers. There was no question in Joseph Schild's mind that Ann, the daughter of Brandon Chambers, the newspaper publisher, was in Memphis as much to give Sarah refuge from her in other in New York as she was to work for her father's newspaper.
But with the world in flames, with the European continent in the hands of the Germans, with most of their European relatives either missing or in hiding from the Nazis, with the United States fighting what looked to be a lo sing battle for its very existence, Joseph Schild reasoned that his wife would see that their daughter's pregnancy was a joyful thing and an affirmation of life. In Memphis, at his first sight of Sarah, Joseph Schild's eyes filled with tears. Not tears of sadness, he realized, but rather because Sarah looked like a living Madonna.
Her skin glowed, her somewhat solemn eyes glistened. "Bitch!" his wife had screamed at their daughter in the suite in the Peabody.
"Godless whore! %%y don't you and your bastard die!" Joseph Schild had had to physically restrain his wife until the hotel could find a doctor who would come to the suite and sedate her. The instant her mother and father were gone, Sarah went into an emotional nose dive.
Two days later, she still had not recovered when, on the day the radiogram from General Chermault arrived in Chicago, she was delivered of a healthy, seven-pound-five-ounce boy in Memphis's Doctors Hospital.
The father was listed as "unknown" and the birth added to the statistics as " illegitimate." Ann Chambers decided that this was not the moment to tell Sarah that Eddie had been injured, had almost been killed.
Postnatal depression had come sooner than it usually did, and with a greater severity than the doctor had expected. In the delivery room he had thought admiringly that Sarah was a tough little cookie. Sarah was in the hospital ten days, and then-still depressed-returned to the suite in the Peabody. There was a nurse all day, but she was alone when the nurse left at five until Ann came home from The Advocate.
Mich meant that Ann often had to rush home when she would have preferred to work. In their suite, Ann steamed open the letter over a teakettle on a hot plate, read the letter, carefully resealed the envelope, and then went to Sarah's door. She flung the door open and, waving the letter, went inside. "Poppa is finally heard from!" she cried. Sarah turned the envelope in her hands and saw the return address. "Oh, my God!" she said.
"He's in the hospital! Then she tore it open and read it.
Calcutta, India 7 April 1942
&nbs
p; Dear Sarah:
I have continued to receive your fine and regular letters, and regret that I have been such a terrible correspondent. I was involved in a small accident, slightly [email protected] my leg, and am spending, as you might have noticed from the return address, some time in the hospital.
I hasten to say that I am really quite well, and there is no cause for concern. And being in the hospital finally gives me a chance to answer your many letters. My big news (which you may also have noticed from the return address) is that I axa back in the Navy. An officer from the staff of the Commander, Naval Element, US. Forces in India came to see me yesterday. He got right to the point. Now that I wasn't going to be of much use to the AVG, had I given any thought to "coming home'?
I told him that I was obliged to fulfill my contract with the AVG, which has until July 4 to run, but he told me that the AVG was willing to let me out of it. My leg will be in a cast for another month or six weeks, and probably a little stiff after that, and by the time I'd be ready to fly again, my contract would just about be over. I thought it was really quite decent of the Navy to take me back as a temporary cripple, but they went even beyond that. We were promised (I guess I can now tell you) that we would be taken back into the Navy with no loss of seniority, and that if we were promoted while in the AVG, we would receive a promotion in the Navy. It seems that the Navy has a policy by which lieutenants (junior grade) with six months in the war zone are considered eligible for promotion, so they took that into consideration, and then also made good their word to promote me since I had been promoted in the AVG. What that means is that I'm back in the Navy with a grade (temporary, of course) two grades higher than I was the last time I saw you. I find it hard, frankly, to think of myself as Lieutenant Commander Bitter (all the lieutenant commanders I knew were old men), but it must be so, for that's what it says on the sign on my bed. The other good news is that I will be returned to the United States. A hospital ship is en route here, and as soon as they have enough people to fill it up (and there probably will be more than enough by the time it gets here) I'll be returned to the United States.
There is a good chance that I'll be gone before any letter you might write could get here, so you can save stamps. I have no idea where I'll be stationed in the States, but perhaps I'll be able to come to Memphis to see you. I would like very much to buy you the most elaborate dinner the Peabody dining room has to offer. Please say hello to Ann, and if you'd like to risk the paper and a stamp, write your Fond Pen Pal, "He's been hurt," Sarah said to Ann.
"Not seriously. He had some kind of an accident."
"He's lying through his teeth," Ann said, Sarah looked at her in surprise. Ann walked back out of the bedroom and returned with the manila envelope in which she had all the rest of the story, copies of the radiogram, and the letters from the Chinese embassy and from Peter Doug lass, Jr." and the clippings from Time and Life.