Wing and a prayer

The New Yorker recently interviewed Laura Hillenbrand, author of the new book, “Unbroken.” The book is a biography of Louis Zamperini, a former Olympics runner and aviator who survived multiple, harrowing ordeals during WWII.

What caught my eye was this startling passage about Army Air Corps casualties during the war:

"There were many surprises during my research, but two stand out. I knew how deadly combat was in the air corps, but I had no idea how dangerous it was simply to fly the planes. Fifteen thousand Army Air Forces personnel died in training, stateside, without ever seeing a combat theater; at one point, an average of nineteen AAF personnel were dying stateside every day. And during the war, thirty-six thousand air corps personnel died in non-combat incidents, the vast majority of which were accidental crashes. Put that together with the extraordinary dangers of combat—airmen only had a fifty-per-cent chance of surviving their thirty-to-forty mission tours of duty--and you had fearsome statistics. Louie saw this firsthand. When he arrived on Oahu, he roomed with fifteen other young officers. By war’s end, only four of those sixteen men were still alive, and two of the survivors—Louie and his pilot, Phil—had been mistakenly declared dead after their plane had vanished in the Pacific. Only one man in the sixteen completed his tour of duty."

Then as now, death in war is tragic. But the above facts are a sobering reminder of what sacrifice looked like when the stakes for the country were the highest. And it puts our current conflicts into perspective.