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MUSTANG SILLY

The Confederate Air Force
The Sunday Times, October 1998

THE city’s founders called it Midland because it was halfway along the rail line between El Paso and Forth Worth. You get the impression that they thought this part of West Texas would never amount to much - they couldn’t even be bothered naming it after themselves. The discovery of oil beneath the surrounding expanses of rust-coloured desert in the 1920s made Midland prosperous, but not so interesting that anyone without a morbid interest in office blocks would want to go there. For that, Midland needed the Confederate Air Force.
  The Confederate Air Force’s headquarters and museum have been based here since 1991, which means that the CAF have been the only interesting thing about Midland for seven years. When I go for a walk around town on the Friday night before the CAF’s annual air show begins at Midland-Odessa aiprort, I wonder if there’s been some terrible accident on the oilfields, and the town has been evacuated.
  Still, I haven’t come for the nightlife. The CAF’s air show - or, rather, in accordance with that modern belief that mis-spelling something lends it an aura of hip, the “Airsho” - opens on a sunny Saturday morning. The CAF was founded in 1957, when a former World War II pilot called Lloyd Nolen and four other veterans pooled $2500 to buy a surplus Mustang P-51 fighter. The name “Confederate Air Force” was someone’s idea of a joke, as was the decision of the founders to appoint each other to the rank of Colonel, but both stuck. The Confederate Air Force now boasts a roster of around 150 vintage aircraft, and all its volunteer personnel call themselves Colonel.
  The CAF’s objective was not just to preserve the aircraft of World War II – though this was important enough, given that there were no official provisions for doing so – but to keep them flying. In the 40 years since, the CAF has become less a hobby and more a crusade.
  “I don’t know what goes on in schools,” says one CAF Colonel I get talking to. He flew Mustangs in the Pacific, F-86A Sabres in Korea and a B-52 in Vietnam. “There are kids who don’t know when World War II happened. If they can see these planes not as museum pieces, but as living things that make noise, drip oil, and fly, that’s got to be more interesting for them.”
  The CAF Colonels who maintain the aircraft are happy to answer all the questions I can think of and let me climb all over their precious planes. I am given detailed directions around an American B-17 Flying Fortress bomber and a German Junkers Ju-53 transport aircraft, none of which I understand, but the enthusiasm of its owners is endearing.
  Most of the Colonels wear grey CAF uniform overalls, often emblazoned with a patch that reads “This is a rebel aviator - if found, revive with mint julep and keep out of the hands of yankees”. Despite such rhetoric, the Colonels seem a gentle bunch, far from the tobacco-chewing good ol’ boys I confess I’d been anticipating - the CAF museum includes exhibits on the African-American and Mexican airmen of World War II, the Navajo code-talkers that baffled Japanese military intelligence, and the women who flew non-combat aircraft. I do meet one Colonel who has a sticker reading “Don’t believe the liberal media!” tucked into the band of his cowboy hat, and who tells me that he “wouldn’t wipe his ass” on such woolly pinko agitprop as The Sunday Times, but he proves the exception.

THE airborne part of Airsho begins with a fly-past by something the CAF might hope to fly sometime next century: a US Air Force B-2 “Stealth” bomber. These were the planes that, in 1991, levelled Iraq’s air defences before Iraq’s air defences realised there was anything in the air they should be defending Iraq from. The boomerang-shaped aircraft swoops low, eerily quiet, before peeling off and disappearing into a clear sky. This is followed by a less awesome aerial parade of vintage single-seater trainer planes. These things look great fun to fly - their pilots wave from open cockpits and wiggle their wings raffishly - but they look as graceful and congruous as goats on skateboards.
  The warplanes taxi out after that. A riotously entertaining afternoon follows. Replicas of Japanese Mitsubishi Zero fighters, piloted by grinning, mostly heavily bearded Americans wearing sunglasses and rising-sun headbands, take to the air to re-enact Pearl Harbour, making low passes over the airfield as pyrotechnics explode around them. The CAF’s Mustangs and Hellcats take off in pursuit of the Zeroes. I watch all this with a bunch of people who’ve sought refuge from the heat in the shadow beneath a B-1B nuclear bomber. There’s a metaphor for Cold War geopolitics in this scene somewhere.
  The B-1B, like the B-2, has been flown here by the US Air Force, who seem to view Airsho as a terrific opportunity to show off. Their twin-engined A-10 Thunderbolt II, known as the “Warthog” because of its ungainly appearance, is guarded by two young pilots who regard the crowds from behind reflector sunglasses, and never speak. The Apache helicopter, the fearsome robo-wasp whose Hellfire missiles pulverised divisions of Iraqi armour at will, comes with a chattier guardian. When I stroll along to look at his machine, he is explaining the weapons system to two wide-eyed young boys. The father of one of them asks an inspired technical question.
  “Suppose you’re hit,” he enquires. “How would you eject?”
  “Sir,” replies the pilot, his face as straight as a Texas highway, “ejection is impossibile due to the action of the rotors.”
  My eyes are beginning to water.
  “I see,” says the kid’s father, gravely.
  They walk off.
  “Incredible,” says the pilot, when he’s gone. “I tell you, I don’t know how I held it in just there.”
 
ON Sunday, there’s a parachute drop by a troupe of skydivers dressed as Elvis Presley. Tragically, this is not a re-enactment of a military operation – had it been staged before Tet in 1968, it may have confused the North Vietnamese into surrender. The Pearl Harbour performance is repeated, but today it’s a warm-up for a two-hour demonstration of the might of the CAF, culminating in a fly-past by “Fifi”, the only B-29 still flying. As the sleek silver plane passes over the airfield, and the commentator recalls the mission that remains the B-29’s claim to fame, there’s an enormous explosion from the ground, and a black mushroom cloud billows around it.
  Later, I wander into the CAF bookshop. Among the racks of memorabilia, there’s an old man sitting at a table, next to a pile of books. At first, I don’t spare him a second glance – there have been plenty of veterans signing their memoirs this weekend, including Colonel Robert Morgan, who flew his B-17 “Memphis Belle” on an astonishing 25 missions over Germany without losing a man, and inspired a thunderously insipid movie.
  The significance of the stocky, pink-faced gent at the autograph table only registers when I notice the title of the book: “Return Of The Enola Gay”. It’s Brigadier-General Paul Tibbets: the pilot who commanded the mission that bombed Hiroshima. He’s attracting an intermittent crowd, who mostly want their picture taken with him, or his signature on a photo of “Enola Gay”, the B-29 that carried the bomb. It’s a peculiar spectacle, this stern octogenerian being treated like a rock star for having vaporised thousands of civilians 53 years ago.
  I’ve never met anyone I learnt about at school, so I buy a copy of “Return Of The Enola Gay”, and Tibbets’ wife asks me to write down my name so Tibbets can sign it (his hearing isn’t what it used to be, she explains). Tibbets is distracted, discussing CAF politics with a uniformed Colonel leaning over him. When he says what he has to say, he looks at my name, looks at me, and smiles gruffly.
  “Andrew?” he says. “I just signed one for an Andrew. You don’t mean to say we’ve got two loose on the base?”
  I can’t think of anything to say, other than the screamingly obvious – being Paul Tibbets must be like being a singer who had one enormous hit and was never heard from again, condemned to a lifetime of having the same conversation with every person you meet. Eventually, I recall that the crew of “Fifi” had told me that they’d taken Tibbets up in the B-29 the day before the show, along with Tibbets’ grandson, who has taken up the family trade, and flies a B-2. So I ask if he enjoyed the ride, and if he’s enjoying the show.
  “Son,” he says, “if I was enjoying myself any more, they’d have to put me in the booby-house. You know, aviation has been such a big part of my life. I’ve always loved it, and it’s nice to see other people enjoying it.”
  He inscribes his shaky signature, and regards me with mock solemnity.
  “Now, Andrew,” he says, “you’re a young man. I don’t want you reading some of the stuff in here and getting yourself into trouble.”

ABOUT an hour later, I kick myself. I didn’t think to ask Tibbets if he’d ever heard the annoying Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark hit named after his aeroplane. I doubt he would have been asked that before.

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