Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James

Subject: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: meself
Date: 31 Jan 08 - 10:03 PM

An obit. is http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=w013132A.

I happened to watch the movie again recently - it's held up well, even if "a lot was Hollywood fantasy" ...

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: meself
Date: 31 Jan 08 - 10:05 PM

[Elves: please move below line].

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Beer
Date: 31 Jan 08 - 10:30 PM

That was great reading. Thanks myself.
Beer (adrien)

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: meself
Date: 31 Jan 08 - 10:38 PM

I seem to have bumbled the http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=w013132A though ...

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: meself
Date: 31 Jan 08 - 10:40 PM

Okay - the blue clicky just don't work for me - just like my mojo -

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 01 Feb 08 - 12:01 AM

http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=w013132A

Here it is. Great story. I called my 15-year-old in to read it.

A few years ago we got our first DVD player, and the first film we bought was Chicken Run. He was 8 or 9 at the time, his sister 3 years older. Both lld enough to understand "intertextuality." I had taped Stalag 17, and one evening some weeks after we'd watched Chicken Run I had them stay put and watch Stalag. They kind of fussed and twitched around until they saw just how bad Peter Graves was, then they were riveted. After that one ended, I turned on the beginning of Chicken Run and had them watch the opening as it focuses on the chicken coops and in particular coop "17."

"Oh!" was the response.

And from there, it hasn't been difficult at all to direct them toward interesting films. Their dad is pretty good at this stuff also, and he found them a copy of The Great Escape, which also dovetailed nicely into the story of Chicken Run, though that claymation movie had long since ceased to be the focus of our exercise. It was the process of telling stories, how they are related and are retold, and how we choose what we are going to watch (or pay attention to).

This article is interesting--I'm not surprised that there were no Americans in the escape, but there could be a fascinating discussion as to why the filmmakers decided to tell the story that way. Many layers of politics and meaning. And an American 15-year-old just read the story of the death of a 92-year-old Brit and stored that information away in his critical thinking department for who knows what interesting observations at another point in time.

SRS

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Fliss
Date: 01 Feb 08 - 04:34 PM

'Jimmy' James lived in Shropshire in Ludlow about 35 miles from where I live. Naturally there has been a lot in the local press about him.

Look at some of the info about him on the Radio Shropshire link.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/shropshire/7198062.stm

This is the Shropshire Star link. Its especially nice that the pall bearers were young RAF chaps.

http://www.shropshirestar.com/2008/02/hundreds-at-heros-funeral/

fliss

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: meself
Date: 01 Feb 08 - 10:47 PM

Thanks for the links. Very moving.

Here are a few others:


A first-person account.


A memorial. (Note: they're looking for some of the families).

Memorial project.


(We'll see if the blue clickies work this time).

By the way, in the movie it is implied early on that the Steve McQueen character is the only American in the camp. Later on, it is implied that there are other Americans there. As I recall, anyway ...

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Fliss
Date: 02 Feb 08 - 04:48 PM

Very interesting links. I know its not to do with Folk music, but this is the sort of stuff songs are made of.

My partner Tony and I 'do' 20th Century living history at events round the UK. Mainly portraying UK WWII Home Front. I can ask our friends who portray RAF, what they know about the numbers of Americans in the escape attempts.

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Mrrzy
Date: 03 Feb 08 - 04:10 PM

Wow. Tough person! Are any of the other 22 still alive?

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Bonzo3legs
Date: 03 Feb 08 - 04:38 PM

Yes, and our youngsters today are mollycoddled by health & safety nonsense!

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 03 Feb 08 - 09:22 PM

If it isn't tresspassing too much on the territory, there is another WWII story that just broke:

Death photo of famed WWII reporter Pyle found
Updated: 2008-02-04 07:04
Link (may not be stable)

New York - The figure in the photograph is clad in Army fatigues, boots and helmet, lying on his back in peaceful repose, folded hands holding a military cap. Except for a thin trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, he could be asleep.

But he is not asleep; he is dead. And this is not just another fallen GI; it is Ernie Pyle, the most celebrated war correspondent of World War II.

As far as can be determined, the photograph has never been published. Sixty-three years after Pyle was killed by the Japanese, it has surfaced surprising historians, reminding a forgetful world of a humble correspondent who artfully and ardently told the story of a war from the foxholes.

"It's a striking and painful image, but Ernie Pyle wanted people to see and understand the sacrifices that soldiers had to make, so it's fitting, in a way, that this photo of his own death ... drives home the reality and the finality of that sacrifice," said James E. Tobin, a professor at Miami University of Ohio.

Tobin, author of a 1997 biography, "Ernie Pyle's War," and Owen V. Johnson, an Indiana University professor who collects Pyle-related correspondence, said they had never seen the photo. The negative is long lost, and only a few prints are known to exist.

"When I think about the real treasures of American history that we have," says Mark Foynes, director of the Wright Museum of World War II in Wolfeboro, N.H., "this picture is definitely in the ballpark."

Ernie Pyle, war correspondent beloved by his co-workers, GIs and generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning ..."

The news stunned a nation still mourning the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt six days earlier. Callers besieged newspaper switchboards. "Ernie is mourned by the Army," said soldier-artist Bill Mauldin, whose droll, irreverent GI cartoons had made him nearly as famous as Pyle.

He was right; even amid heavy fighting, Pyle's death was a prime topic among the troops.

"If I had not been there to see it, I would have taken with a grain of salt any report that the GI was taking Ernie Pyle's death 'hard,' but that is the only word that best describes the universal reaction out here," Army photographer Alexander Roberts wrote to Lee Miller, a friend of Ernie and his first biographer.

But Ernie Pyle was not just any reporter. He was a household name during World War II and for years afterward. From 1941 until his death, Pyle riveted the nation with personal, straight-from-the-heart tales about hometown soldiers in history's greatest conflict.

In 1944, his columns for Scripps-Howard Newspapers earned a Pulitzer Prize and Hollywood made a movie, "Ernie Pyle's Story of G.I. Joe," starring Burgess Meredith as the slender, balding 44-year-old reporter.

Typically self-effacing, Pyle insisted the film include fellow war correspondents playing themselves. But he was killed before it was released.

In April 1945, the one-time Indiana farm boy had just arrived in the Pacific after four years of covering combat in North Africa, Italy and France. With Germany on the verge of surrender, he wanted to see the war to its end, but confided to colleagues that he didn't expect to survive.

At Okinawa he found US forces battling entrenched Japanese defenders while "kamikaze" suicide pilots wreaked carnage on the Allied fleet offshore.

On April 16, the Army's 77th Infantry Division landed on Ie Shima, a small island off Okinawa, to capture an airfield. Although a sideshow to the main battle, it was "warfare in its worst form," photographer Roberts wrote later. "Not one Japanese soldier surrendered, he killed until he was killed."

On the third morning, a jeep carrying Pyle and three officers came under fire from a hidden machine gun. All scrambled for cover in roadside ditches, but when Pyle raised his head, a .30 caliber bullet caught him in the left temple, killing him instantly.

Roberts and two other photographers, including AP's Grant MacDonald, were at a command post 300 yards away when Col. Joseph Coolidge, who had been with Pyle in the jeep, reported what happened.

Roberts went to the scene, and despite continuing enemy fire, crept forward - a "laborious, dirt-eating crawl," he later called it - to record the scene with his Speed Graphic camera. His risky act earned Roberts a Bronze Star medal for valor.

Pyle was first buried among soldiers on Ie Shima. In 1949 his body was moved to the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl Crater, near Honolulu.

Roberts' photograph, however, was never seen by the public. He told Miller the War Department had withheld it "out of deference" to Ernie's ailing widow, Jerry.

"It was so peaceful a death ... that I felt its reproduction would not be in bad taste," he said, "but there probably would be another school of thought on this."


The cutline under the photo says:
This photo provided by Richard Strasser, perhaps never before published, shows famed World War II war correspondent Ernie Pyle shortly after he was killed by a Japanese machine gun bullet on the island of Ie Shima on April 18, 1945. Pyle, 44, had just arrived in the Pacific after four years of writing his popular column from European battlefronts. The Army photographer who crawled forward under fire to make this picture later said it was withheld by military officials. An AP survey of history museums and archives found only a few copies in existence, and no trace of the original negative. [Agencies]

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 03 Feb 08 - 09:27 PM

AP ran it also

link

Subject: RE: Obit: 'Great escape' vet Bertram 'Jimmy' James
From: Teribus
Date: 04 Feb 08 - 10:51 AM

From "The Great Escape" Web-site:

Character played by Steve McQueen (Hilts, the Cooler King):

Likely to be an amalgamation of several characters, he has no direct counterpart, although one likely candidate is Jerry Sage. The sequence where McQueen sees a blind spot in the guards' coverage of the perimeter wire is true; this escape was by Toft and Nichols, who cut through the wire but were soon recaptured.

The motorcycle sequences are pure Hollywood and were put in at McQueen's request.

There was indeed a group of prisoners (headed by Jerry Sage and Davey Jones) who manufactured raisin wine and distilled raw liquor from vegetables and virtually any ingredient. The party on the 4th July actually happened, although 'Tom' was not discovered on this particular day.

My Internet correspondent Tom Cleaver offers the opinion that the Steve McQueen character was based on F/Lt Barry Mahon of 121 Squadron RAF -the second Eagle Squadron. Mahon was shot down on Operation Jubilee in August 1942 (where he had just become the 4th Eagle Squadron ace) and sent to Stalag Luft III where he became 'the cooler king' for his many escape attempts. He was brought in from his most recent escape just before "The Great Escape" and actually received first place to go through the tunnel, but decided against accepting, thereby saving his life. Barry later became part of the movie business and was active with United Artists, who made "The Great Escape," and served as a technical advisor on the film. McQueen took a liking to him and had Barry's facts written into his character; Barry allegedly fought like hell to get the movie as real as he could, as his own way of paying respects to the dead.