A Yankee Notebook
NUMBER 1407
July 14, 2008
German Aviators Inspired Flights Of Fancy
EAST MONTPELIER, VT –
A new banner of glory is unfurled
To the men whose feat thrilled the waiting world.
From the fighting blood of the pioneers
There came three sons in after years;
Their feat unachieved in years gone by
Since man made wings and learned to fly.
It arrived, as most things do these days, by e-mail: a scan of a dark and clearly ancient bit of newsprint from a now-long-defunct local newspaper in the small town of Berlin, Pennsylvania. It’s an undated two-stanza poem titled “The Bremen’s Crew.” The poet – in those days she’d have been called the poetess – was Isabel V. Swope (a misspelling; she was Isobel). The event she was celebrating had occurred in April 1928. She was born in 1909, and I’m guessing she wrote her poem shortly after she read of the Bremen’s crew, when she was nineteen. In any case, it’s an intriguing peek at a particular region of the United States during a time of great change.
If there was any place in America where the feats of German aviators would be celebrated, Berlin, Pennsylvania, was as likely as any. Founded and populated by German immigrants, named after the capital of their homeland, and shepherded toward salvation by the Church of the Brethren, Berlin was almost Amish in its agricultural simplicity. The switch to coal mining had barely begun. Miss Swope’s family name, like so many others, had been Anglicized, from Schwab. Her ancestors had fought for the Union. I recently received photos of the discharge papers of one, who was sent home when he bacame ill while burying the dead at Gettysburg a year after the battle.
Gallant and brave they laughed at fate,
The outcome they scarce dared contemplate;
So westward they sailed o’er the ocean blue,
These three stout hearts which were staunch and true.
Their destiny lay in the hands of fate.
Would it end in the ocean so wide and great?
The Roaring Twenties, we called them in our booming cities. But it’s hard to imagine Berlin roaring or booming in any way. I attended its annual block party once, in 1947, where the most exciting attraction was a game of chance featuring a rubber ball that rolled across a table of red, yellow, and blue muffin tins before settling into one and paying off the lucky bettors. A quiet town, its schoolteachers were most likely not fans of Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, but rather of Tennyson and Dickens. Hence the solid Victorian tone of Isobel’s poem.
Oh favored sons of the world were they,
For they reached the western shore, but stay
Thousands of miles from their goal they strayed,
And on Greenley [sic] Isle their landing made.
The Twenties, squarely between two world wars, were obsessed with the notion of flying the Atlantic solo and nonstop. The US Navy had crossed in seven hops with biplane flying boats in 1919. Two French pilots attempted the east-to-west crossing about 12 days before Lindbergh’s successful flight. They’ve never been found, though woodsmen in Maine claimed to have heard a plane overhead in the clouds about the right time for their arrival . A Vickers Vimy bomber, after incredible difficulties, had made it in 1919, crash-landing in Ireland. Lindbergh, of course, made the solo crossing in May of 1927. And a year later, two Germans and an Irish navigator set out to make the first nonstop east-to-west crossing in a Junkers W33 monoplane.
Their compass malfunctioned by as much as 40 degrees. They took sights of Polaris whenever they could; but instead of a New Jersey landfall, they struck North America in the Torngat Mountains of northern Labrador, some of the world’s most forbidding terrain. They flew up the George River (which some companions and I paddled down a few years ago), turned east toward the coast, and finally decided to set down near a lighthouse on Greenly Island in the Strait of Belle Isle near the mouth of the St. Lawrence River. The plane was lightly damaged; they were not.
This was the exploit so purply described by the young Pennsylvania poetess:
Their faulty compass had lured them north, But for Greenley’s lighthouse whose beams shone forth They’d now be out in the Great Unknown Their fate known but to God alone. The world gave them a lusty acclaim, And won for them undying fame Honor to them and give three cheers To the stalwart sons of the pioneers!
You’ve got to wonder if talent like that can be passed on to descendants. Perhaps it can, but I’m not sure I hope so. Because a few years after this poem was published, Isobel met another Anglicized German, a Knickerbocker named William Lange. Thanks, Mom!
