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.
3
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 hell 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 cutline 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 U.S. Army General Hospital in Calcutta. Their bills are paid by the Chinese government. They are employees of the American Volunteer Group who were “inJured on the Job.” The Job 24-year-old ex-Navy pilot Edwin H. Bitter, of Chicago, was injured doing was strafing the huge Jap air base at Chiengmai, Thailand, in a worn-out Curtiss P-40B Warhawk, an aircraft the Chinese were able to get for their American volunteer pilots to fly only because the British turned them down as obsolescent for service against the Germans in Europe.
Bitter downed nine Japanese aircraft in his “obsolete” P-40 before 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 Warhawk on the dry riverbed where Bitter had crashed. 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 652, San Francisco, Calif.” appeared in Sarah 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-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