My father, John Boeman, was the command pilot of an Army Air Corps B-24 Bomber during World War II. The B-24, nicknamed the “Liberator,” was the most popular Allied heavy bomber in the Pacific theater. My father and his crew flew dozens of missions against Japanese targets from their base on the little island of Moratai in present day Indonesia.
During World War II, as at other times in our nation’s history, it was common to say that men and women in uniform in the military were “in the service,” as in the service of our country. As an officer in uniform, especially when wearing his pilot “wings” and campaign medals he earned while in the service, my father commanded a fair measure of respect.
My mother, Lucille Weller, did not serve in uniform during World War II, although two of her older sisters, Anne and Rosemary, and her brother Karl did. After my Mom graduated valedictorian of her high school class she attended the University of Illinois, but when the war broke out after her freshman year she left school to return to help my grandfather Richard Weller on the family farm.
My father’s brother-in-law, Donald Haley, and my Mother’s brother Tony also did not serve in the military during World War II. Both stayed back home and farmed. Neither did any of my wife’s grandparents serve in uniform during World War II, but her grandmother, Mary Mae “Pauline” Barr, worked in a factory during the war which helped manufacture, ironically enough, B-24 Bombers.
The phrase, “an army marches on its stomach,” attributed to both Napoleon and Frederick the Great, is familiar to most students of military history. The phrase is an acknowledgment that no military force, no man in uniform, can fight effectively or fulfill his mission without being well provisioned. For my father during the war, being well provisioned meant not only the food he ate and the uniform he wore, among other provisions, but also with the B-24 Bomber he flew.
I don’t know where Pauline worked when she helped build Liberators. I don’t even know if she worked on the final assembly of those planes or in manufacturing various components. But I do know producing B-24’s for the war effort was a massive undertaking. A total of 18,000 B-24’s were produced during the war, about half at the Ford Motor Company’s Willow Run Plant near Detroit, Michigan. Willow Run was 3.5 million square feet and had the largest assembly line in the world at the time.
Countless individuals were responsible for providing my father with the B-24 he piloted. From Henry Ford, the manufacturing genius who was the founder and chief executive of the Ford Motor Company at the time, to the engineers at Consolidated Aircraft who designed the craft, to the innumerable workers who manufactured the plane itself, as well as the building and machinery used in the plane’s production. And of course all of these individuals, most not in uniform, had to be provided with food, as well as clothing, shelter, and all the other myriad essentials of life.
Most of these individuals had to make some sacrifice, some more, some less, for the collective effort to produce this weapon of war. And the B-24 was just one component of the arsenal the United States brought to the conflict, one small aspect of the total war effort. Many other nations and peoples made their own sacrifices, some much greater than those of the United States. Any one individual’s effort, or the efforts of one group of individuals, pales in comparison to the collective effort made to achieve historically significant common goals.
In most endeavors, the combined effort of many, when efficiently deployed, will be more likely to succeed than the effort of the individual, or the few. But for individuals to willingly sacrifice toward a common goal they must feel as if their service is appreciated, that they are a valued part of the whole, that their individual sacrifices are not just to serve the self-aggrandizement of another self-important individual.
A dramatic episode from the life of Alexander the Great, perhaps apocryphal, illustrates this idea in practice. Alexander was crossing the inhospitable Gedrosian dessert with half his army, the other half having gone forward by boat. With too few provisions, Alexander’s men and those who accompanied the army were dying off in droves. At one point a few cavalrymen found a small watering hole and came back to Alexander, their leader, with a helmet full of water. Instead of drinking the water, Alexander poured it out on the ground. As a true leader, he did not want to put himself above his men, and shared in their sacrifices.
The Apostle Paul sums up the true notion of service in the true Church of Jesus Christ in I Corinthians 12: 14-21 when he writes:
For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.
All are needed to succeed.