John Ciardi
was born in Boston on 24th June 1916.
The son of Italian immigrants, he was
educated at Bates College, Maine, Turfs University and received his
master's degree from the University of Michigan in 1939.
While at
university Ciardi developed left-wing political opinions and joined
the campaign against fascist governments
in Italy, Germany,
Portugal and Spain.
His first volume of poems, Homeward to America,
in 1940.
When the
Japanese
Air Force
bombed Pearl
Harbor, Ciardi joined the United
States Air Force.
After training he failed to get a commission as he had been classified
as a PAF (a premature
anti-fascist) because as a student he had signed petitions in favour
of the Popular
Front government in Spain.
During the Second World War Ciardi was a gunner
on a B-29
Superfortress.
After the
war he taught English at Harvard University
(1946-1953) and Rutgers University (1953-61). Ciardi was a strong
advocate of poets writing for a mass audience. His poems How
Does a Poem Mean? (1959) and I
Met a Man Who Sang the Sillies (1961) were much used in
schools and colleges.
Books by
Ciardi include Other Skies (1947),
Live Another Day (1940), Dialogue
With an Audience (1963), Person
to Person (1964), A Genesis
(1967), The Little That Is All
(1974), A Browser's Dictionary
(1980), A Second Browser's Dictionary
(1983) and The Birds of Pompeii
(1985), John Ciardi died of a heart attack in Edison, New Jersey,
on 30th March, 1986.
(1)
Studs
Terkel interviewed John
Ciardi of the United
States Air Force about his
experiences during the Second
World War for his book, The Good War (1985)
I had dreams of being a pilot, so I signed up as an aviation cadet.
The army decided I was not pilot material. The army was right. They
sent me to navigation school. I would have come out as a navigator
and been sent to the Eighth Air Force. As a graduate student, I had
signed some petitions in favor of the Spanish Loyalists. When I came
up for graduation from the navigation school, I was classified as
a PAF - a premature anti-fascist. The Dies Committee had wired in.
I did not get a commission. A year later, I heard that all forty-four
men of my graduating class were either dead or missing in action.
When we got to Saipan,
I was a gunner on a B-29. It seemed certain to me we were not going
to survive. We had to fly thirty-five missions. The average life of
a crew was something between six and eight missions. So you simply
took the extra pay, took the badges, took relief from dirty details.
On the night before a
mission, you reviewed the facts. You tried to
get some sleep. The army is very good at keeping you awake forever
before you have a long mission. Sleep wouldn't come to you.
You get to thinking by this time tomorrow you may have burned
to death. I used to have little routines for kidding myself: Forget
it, you died last week. You'd get some Dutch courage out of
that.
We were in the terrible
business of burning out Japanese towns. That meant women and old people,
children. One part of me - a surviving savage voice - says, I'm sorry
we left any of them living. I
wish we'd finished killing them all. Of course, as soon as rationality
overcomes the first
impulse, you say. Now, come on, this is the human race,
let's try to be civilized.
I had to condition myself
to be a killer. This was remote control. All we did was push buttons.
I didn't see anybody we killed. I saw the
fires we set. The first four and a half months was wasted effort.
We lost all those crews for nothing. We had been trained to do precision
high-altitude bombing from thirty-two thousand feet. It was all beautifully
planned, except we discovered the Siberian jet stream. The winds went
off all computed bomb tables. We began to get winds
at two hundred knots, and the bombs simply scattered all over Japan.
We were hitting nothing and losing planes.
Curtis LeMay came in and
changed the whole operation. He had been head of the Eighth Air Force
and was sent over to take on the Twentieth. That's the one I was in.
He changed tactics. He said. Go in at night from five thousand feet,
without gunners, just a couple of rear-end observers. We'll save weight
on the turrets and on ammunition. The Japanese have no fighter resistance
at night. They have no radar. We'll drop fire sticks.
I have some of my strike
photos at home. Tokyo looked like one leveled bed of ash. The only
things standing were some stone buildings. If you looked at the photos
carefully, you'd see that they were gutted. Some of the people jumped
into rivers to get away from these fire storms. They were packed in
so tight to get away from the fire, they suffocated. They were so
close to one another, they couldn't fall over. It must have been horrible.
Available
from Amazon Books (order below)
