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  • 2009-03-05 (xsd:date)
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  • Wing and a Prayer (en)
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  • A moving tale about a World War II bomber pilot who chose to go down with his disabled plane rather than abandon a trapped gunner in his dying moments has prompted a good deal of philosophical debate: Did the pilot perform a supremely noble and heroic act of self-sacrifice in providing comfort to a dying comrade in the final moments of the latter's life, or did he needlessly throw away his life (and deprive his side of an experienced pilot) for an inconsequential and transitory benefit? Either way, the vehemence of the debate demonstrates how compelling many have found this anecdote to be: As suggested in the example cited above, this tale was a favorite of Ronald Reagan, who repeated it many times during his 1980 presidential campaign. The following excerpt from an April 1980 news report about a Reagan campaign swing through Wisconsin demonstrates how frequently and effectively the actor-turned-politician made use of it: In later years, journalists noted that the story, at least in the form told by Reagan, was apocryphal and closely matched a scenario from a wartime Hollywood film (although not, as commonly claimed, a movie in which Reagan himself had appeared): We can't say whether Ronald Reagan might have encountered this story somewhere and believed it to be true, whether he saw it in a film and misremembered it as a real-life incident, or whether he simply repeated the anecdote as an inspirational tale without regard for its literal truthfulness. We can verify that the tale was incorporated into the 1944 film Wing and a Prayer, although with some substantial differences from the way it was later told: In the following clip from Wing and a Prayer, the action does not play out on the screen; instead, it is relayed to the crew of an aircraft carrier, who are listening to the stricken plane's radio communications as they are piped over the ship's P.A. system: Andy Rooney, who served as a wartime correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes, suggested in his book My War that the tale might have been an embellishment of an actual incident he witnessed, one involving a ball-turret gunner in the belly of a B-17 who was killed when his turret stuck and the crippled plane had to make a wheels-up landing: Sightings: Television viewers may remember this scenario was used as the plot for an episode of the Steven Spielberg series Amazing Stories (The Mission, original air date 3 November 1985). (en)
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