Stuart J. Wright | ཐུབ་བསྟན།

I haven’t watched the 2024 Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg TV series, Masters of the Air. Waiting for the right moment, give or take nine hours, I feel rather ambivalent. A year ago, I wondered how this World War Two drama about American bomber crews based in England would resonate during an unprecedented U.S. election year, fearing that it would just entrench existing beliefs amongst some viewers – armchair consumers of historical “content” overlapping with online ecosystems of information, misinformation, and disinformation – and that it would do nothing to elucidate our contemporary precarity. Because World War Two curiosity often leads to romanticisation that corrupts our better judgement more than it educates.

A conversation with a veteran

On Monday 4th January 2010, I took a bus from New York City to a Boston suburb to meet a veteran of the 490th Bomb Group, an Eighth Air Force unit based at Eye, Suffolk, during 1944–1945. The former Eye airfield is twenty-five miles from the English village where I grew up in the 1980s, and well within the circumference of my bike rides to those eerie, liminal spaces – between derelict and agricultural – that had been American wartime airfields. Eye is just five miles from the base featured in Masters of the Air.

Walking shin-deep in snow along a tree-lined suburban street in Auburndale, Massachusetts, I wondered if I was about to get out of my depth. Pre-interview anxiety. Would my interviewee think I was wasting his time with naïve questions he considered unimportant? Howard’s smiling face at the door immediately put me at ease. He made me a cup of coffee, lamented the current computer problems that were interrupting his work – he was in the middle of writing the introduction for a book he called The Bomb – and then invited me to take a seat in his living room. And so began a two-and-a-half-hour discussion, although for the first half hour Howard seemed more interested in finding out about me. Such was his sociable disposition and interest in other people.

At the age of twenty, Howard had been compelled to leave his job as a shipbuilder in New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard – employment that made him exempt from military service – and volunteer to join the Army Air Force because, as he put it, “I could not bear to stay out of a war against fascism”. A Jewish airman flying missions over Nazi Germany and occupied territories, Howard was a B-17 bombardier on Lt. Carl Mueller’s crew in the 490th Bomb Group. I took a camera with me, hoping to get a photograph with Howard, but we were so engrossed in conversation after I finished recording the interview, I almost missed the bus back to New York. Howard asked his neighbour to drive me to the bus station. As I stepped back into the snow, I thanked Howard for his time. He responded with a smile and said, “You’ve got me thinking about many things I’ve not thought about in so long”, adding, “We’ll be in touch by email”. And for a few weeks, we were. But then Howard died of a heart attack, just twenty-three days after our meeting.

History forgets

A lot has happened since then, and I regret we have not benefitted from Howard’s analyses, wisdom, and humour. It was striking to hear President Trump utter Howard’s name, most contemptuously, a few of years ago – for “Howard” was Howard Zinn, a famous historian and best-selling author. Ironically, he was an historian and Eighth Air Force veteran that Eighth Air Force history forgot, and still forgets.  A Google search reveals several dozen obituaries by a diverse range of publications around the world, but I was unable to find a single obituary for Howard amongst Eighth Air Force veterans’ associations newsletters in the American Library in Norwich, England, in 2010.(1) As expected. But I had to look because that, not Google, is research. An early draft of this essay was politely rejected by the magazine of the Eighth Air Force Historical Society two years ago. Again, as expected, but I had to check. The editor agreed with the article’s sentiment and concluding remark, but feared that some members “would not fully appreciate the depth and voracity” of my arguments.

Howard – Professor Howard Zinn – was the author of numerous books, most famously A People’s History of the United States, which has sold more than two million copies since the first edition was published in 1980. Described by Noam Chomsky as someone who “changed the consciousness of a generation”, Zinn’s writing even inspired some of the music of Bruce Springsteen and Pearl Jam. I had first seen a copy in a Waterstones bookshop in London’s Camden Town, circa 1995. The title caught my attention. I read the back cover, and made a mental note. I was reminded in spring 1998 by the movie Good Will Hunting, in which Matt Damon turned to Robin Williams and asserted, “If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States”.

I bought a copy from Waterstones on the corner of Exeter Street and Newbury Street, Boston, in August 1998, and began reading it on a boat on Cape Cod while visiting with my friend, Bill, an Eighth Air Force veteran who I had met in Norwich library over a decade earlier, when I was thirteen. Bill, a graduate of Boston University, disapprovingly commented that Professor Zinn had led his Boston University students in protests against the Vietnam(-American) war. My Harper Perennial 1995 edition contains no biographical details, and I don’t think it was until 1999, when I bought a copy of The Zinn Reader (Zinn 1997), that I discovered that Howard Zinn was actually an Eighth Air Force veteran.

For Zinn, history was about understanding the past and the present, and seeing the possibilities for the future. Because, as he once remarked, “If you don’t know history, it’s as if you were born yesterday”. And being “born yesterday” leaves one vulnerable to the lies of powerful people.

A People’s History of the United States was intended as an alternative to dominant historical narratives that typically chart history through the lives and strategies – and from the perspectives of – elites with power. Zinn’s approach was different. He considered himself to have been politicised as a child while living in a Brooklyn tenement, seeing a family evicted from their home as a crowd confronted the police and attempted to move the family’s belongings back inside. In A People’s History, Zinn attempted to narrate U.S. history from the perspectives of ordinary people, forgotten people, whose voices have often gone unheard – “American women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers”, as the book’s back-cover blurb describes. And yet, reactionary critics have condemned A People’s History for being “progressive” and, therefore, unpatriotic.

Cancelling Howard Zinn

In 2004, Larry Schweikart and Michael Patrick Allen published a book intended to set Howard Zinn straight, and to restore the mainstream historical metanarrative. Co-opting Zinn’s book title but replacing the word “people” with “patriot”, A Patriot’s History of the United States was given the subtitle, “From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the War on Terror”. In their introduction, Schweikart and Allen wrote, “At least Howard Zinn’s A People’s History […] honestly represents its Marxist biases in the title!” It’s true that some left-wing historians in France and England, from the 1920s to the 1970s, had been writing “people’s histories”. Zinn’s work has influenced a continuation of that tradition. But it’s as if Schweikart and Allen are two historians of the United States who had heard of “the People’s Republic of China” (a nation quite unlike Marx’s utopian vision) but had, embarrassingly, never noticed that the U.S. Constitution begins, “We, the people of the United States”.

Of course, Schweikart and Allen had their own biases, glaring from their coupling of “patriotism” with the “War on Terror” in their book title, ironically demonstrating an argument often made by Zinn that most people have a misguided notion of what patriotism is. Weeks after Zinn’s death, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels wrote to local education officials. He expressed not even a hollow, tokenistic, “Thank you for your service” for veteran Zinn. Instead, he wrote, “This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away”. Describing Zinn’s bestseller as “a totally false version of our history”, Daniels aimed to ensure that A People’s History was not available in any Indiana schools.(2) Zinn’s books also came under attack in Arkansas and elsewhere, with bills attempting to ban them from classrooms and school libraries.(3)

The response to the work of Howard Zinn is clearly a precursor to the current era: On the one hand, for example, Zinn’s legacy including A Young People’s History of the United States, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, and debates about the epistemic decolonisation of academia and academic knowledge. On the other hand, we’ve seen the banning of Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed from a high school Mexican American studies program in Arizona in 2006, Trump’s neo-Maoist “patriotic education” agenda central to the “1776 Commission” in 2020, and the conflation of critical discussions of history with communist indoctrination. In recent years, centre-stage has been the hysterical – and largely ignorant if not simply disingenuous – attacks on Critical Race Theory, the myth that this postgraduate-level legal studies theory was being taught in America’s elementary schools, and the so-called “culture war” on “woke”.(4) In sum, the subsequent pendulum swing has seen a backlash against the progressives, as the political right wrestles to regain control of the historical narrative, reaching fever pitch in the ongoing Trump era. History is not the only target of these fascistic tendencies to ban books, to censor expression and silence discussion. In 2023, Florida’s Orange County apparently banned 673 books from schools.(5)

In September 2020, during a White House “Conference on American History”, Donald “Bone Spurs” Trump – not known for being much of a student of history, or a reader of anything – declared: “Our children are instructed from propaganda tracts, like those of Howard Zinn, that try to make students ashamed of their own history”.(6) On the contrary, many educators have testified – in the relatively rare educational spaces where Zinn’s A People’s History has actually been studied – it inspires and empowers young people. Similarly, it had inspired Springsteen, who remarked that the book “made me feel that I was a player in this moment in history”.

Following this article’s rejection by the Eighth Air Force Historical Society, the editorial board of the American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History magazine suggested it focus less on people’s histories and contemporary politics. Instead, it should focus more on Zinn’s wartime experiences, and put additional emphasis on the Eighth Air Force’s institutional memory of him, because, I was told, “it has often been much easier to defend Zinn if one does not actually defend Zinn”. That struck me as a peculiar position for an academic publication to adopt – seemingly a cowardly aversion to serious historical discussion. After all, the article title is “remembering”, not “defending”, Howard Zinn. Ironically, the comments – and eventual rejection – raised questions about the American Historical Association’s own institutional memory of Howard Zinn.(7) The American Historical Association’s editorial committee seemed to miss the point entirely, considering that the Eighth Air Force Historical Society has no institutional memory of Howard Zinn. And understanding the cause of this amnesia means understanding Howard Zinn’s relationship with people’s histories and U.S. politics. Because Zinn was a member of the so-called “greatest generation”, and yet forgotten, ignored, and vilified in equal measure for having the “wrong” political views.(8)

Rethinking the “good war”

When Lt. Carl Mueller’s crew arrived in England, everyone knew the war was winding down. In his autobiography, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Zinn recalled that one morning at Eye airfield, seemingly amid some admin error and confusion, he argued with another bombardier over who was meant to be flying a mission to Regensburg, Germany, on which heavy flak was expected.(9) Lieutenant Zinn insisted and flew that day. “We were both war-crazed, wanting to rack up more missions”, he wrote, adding that neither bombardier seemed to understand that “the more missions we flew the more likely we were to die”.

That summer, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a cause for celebration: Zinn would no longer have to join the war in the Pacific. However, he went on to be a critic of the dropping of the atomic bombs, and reconsidered his own experiences, questioning what had been depicted by mainstream U.S. society as the “good war” – even a “people’s war”.

Zinn’s civilian career is well documented: An undergraduate degree, courtesy of the G.I. Bill; a PhD at Columbia University while working part-time in a warehouse; a professorship at Spelman College in Atlanta, a college for African American women, from which he was fired for involvement in the civil rights movement; and twenty-four years as a professor of political science at Boston University. In 1968, Zinn along with Reverend Daniel Berrigan made a diplomatic visit to Hanoi, leading to the release of three U.S. airmen: the first American POWs to be released by the North Vietnamese and to return home.

Meanwhile, in 1960–1961, Zinn went to France to research one of his wartime bombing missions. The town of Royan, France, had mostly been levelled by RAF bombing in January 1945, with well over one thousand French lives lost. As the German army retreated, an isolated unit of German troops continued to maintain control of port facilities, although with no supply lines or means of retreat, surrender was inevitable. Nonetheless, they came under Eighth Air Force bombardment on the 14th and 15th April.

Howard’s crew was awoken in the very early hours of the 15th of April. The prospect of another thousand-bomber raid was a surprise, considering that everyone knew the end of the war was imminent – just three weeks away, it transpired. The 490th Bomb Group crews were briefed to wipe out a German garrison near Royan. The 490th’s “informal history” – compiled soon after the end of the war from the monthly records written by the Group’s “Historical Officers” – recounts, simply: “The Group gave support to the French by bombing defence installations of the Nazis holding out at Royan, France” (Lightner and Holland 1946).

At the mission briefing, the crews had been told that they would be carrying a different kind of bomb – “jellied gasoline”. Years later, Zinn realised it was napalm.(10) In his Zinn Reader essay, “The Bombing of Royan”,(11) Howard Zinn reflected: “I remember distinctly seeing, from our great height, the bombs explode in the town, flaring like matches struck in fog. I was completely unaware of the human chaos below.” The New York Times described the bombing in terms of “460,000 gallons of liquid fire”.(12) Based on his research in Royan, Zinn argued that those isolated German troops were waiting to surrender, and he noted that the loss of five Eighth Air Force bomber crews – about fifty airmen – on the previous day had been unnecessary. Furthermore, the bombs were not dropped with precision, and struck in the vicinity of French civilians, no doubt causing civilian casualties. Zinn condemned the napalm bombing of Royan on 15th April, calling it a war crime.

In his autobiography, Howard Zinn recounted the only time during the war that any doubts crossed his mind “about the absolute rightness of what we were doing”. Zinn had made friends with a gunner on another crew who startled him by declaring that they were not simply fighting a war against fascism, but that it was an imperialist war for empire. When Zinn asked him why he had volunteered for the Army Air Force, to fight in a war for empire, the gunner responded, “To talk to guys like you”. Two weeks later, Zinn’s friend was killed in action.

Comparing notes: “Political correctness” at the military reunion

Attempts to disparage Zinn as unpatriotic and anti-American by the political right, which often claims a monopoly on patriotism, brings us to the question of “political correctness” as well as “cancel culture”. Charges of “political correctness” are invariably made by those on the right, levelled at those on the left who are construed as oppressive, opposing freedom of speech. Meanwhile, I argue, the more dominant right-wing “political correctness” has always been ubiquitous but often invisible in plain sight. And we have seen right-wing “cancel culture” in the calls to ban Howard Zinn’s books.

Howard and I compared notes about the post-9/11 era, about how World War Two nostalgia in popular culture – maintained by Hollywood productions from Memphis Belle to Band of Brothers – had been appropriated and distilled into support for the “War on Terror”, whereby you were, as President George W. Bush delineated, either “with us or against us”. I recalled spending a few days with the Collings Foundation’s B-17 and B-24 aircraft in Florida just five months after 9/11. According to much of the conversation I heard amongst local volunteers and visitors, the obligation of waging an uncompromising war on the Middle East and Afghanistan at whatever cost was somehow a debt owed to U.S. World War Two casualties and veterans. Alternative perspectives were suppressed as if anti-American “political incorrectness”.

Howard Zinn didn’t look back with nostalgia. He remembered visiting Norwich on V.E. Day with fond memories, although he never returned to Norwich or Eye. He had been curious about attending a 490th Bomb Group reunion, but disliked the contemporary military emphasis of those events. He spoke of his crew with affection during our meeting – including his joy when one of his former crew members, the flight engineer, appeared at a book signing in the Midwest, and his sadness when his pilot passed away. When talking about his crew, Howard reminded me of all other Eighth Air Force veterans I had met over the previous quarter century.

I had attended about a dozen Eighth Air Force reunions over the years (ranging from a few hours to a few days). In hindsight I realise I had been as much a teenage amateur anthropologist as I was an historian – curious about the present as much as the past, silencing my own consciously anti-Reagan/Thatcher political views and adopting a kind of “methodological relativism” in an overtly Republican and militaristic context. I also encountered unsettling “casual” racism, particularly during my first trip to the Deep South, aged fifteen, to cut a long story short.  Family had warned me of such prior to my trip, suggesting that we cannot change the views of the older generation, reassuring me that thanks to the civil rights movement, future generations would be more tolerant. I was optimistic, but found the situation frustrating.

The inescapable politics of the electronic mailing list: Social media just before Facebook

At some point during the first decade of the 2000s, following the 2004 publication of my book about Eighth Air Force air crews based in England, I found myself receiving “political” emails from various “electronic mailing lists”, soon before these things shifted to the social media we know today, and particularly during the first years of the Obama administration. Perhaps because the recipients were part of a relatively “closed” and less “public” audience, contempt for left wing politics and liberal politicians – especially President Obama, usually depicted as a Muslim – was generally much more explicit than what is shared amongst Eighth Air Force-related Facebook groups today. But those emails were prone to the same kinds of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theorising that tend to dominate our contemporary social media. Usually I just deleted them, but then decided to file some for future reference in an email folder marked as “USA propaganda”, before asking at least one veteran and one secretary of a veterans’ organisation to remove me from their mailing lists.

Those emails included: Condemnations of President Obama for going to a barbecue in Chicago instead of attending a Memorial Day service at Arlington National Cemetery (2010), when in fact he visited the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Illinois, in the company of military families.(13) A campaign to boycott “Pepsi in the new can” because it included the Pledge of Allegiance but omitted the words “under God” (received by email in 2011, nine years after that claim had been debunked). Accusations that Stephen Spielberg was “re-writing history again” (2012), seemingly with reference to a film about the Tuskegee airmen – an African American Fighter Group, segregated from the rest of the Army Air Force – when in fact the 2012 film Red Tails was made by George Lucas. 

There was controversy over the “7th grade Islam booklet” that got “accepted into out [sic] school systems” (2012), with reference to a claim by Act for America – an organisation that “propagates the hateful conspiracy theory that Muslims are infiltrating US institutions in order to impose Sharia law”, according to the Anti-Defamation League(14) (this email came from the non-veteran secretary of an official “Bomb Group Association” email account). Then there was an email sharing the transcript of a speech entitled, “America is the Greatest Country in the World”, which begins by promising to tell the reader something they will never read in history books, and later included a claim that Hitler promised healthcare for Austria and then raised taxes by eighty percent (email received in 2012). This, of course, was around the time that Obama was, allegedly, simultaneously working to bankrupt citizens through high taxes to pay for the Affordable Care Act, and “planning to do to old people what Hitler did to the Jews” (something I was told outside my local post office in New Jersey in 2009 by a campaign organisation disseminating information against universal healthcare).

Gatekeeping: “Healthy debates are natural” but the exclusion of politics is unquestionable

When, in July 2021, an American man posted a photograph of himself in front of a B-17 World War Two bomber on the “Masters of the Air Behind the Scenes” Facebook group (concerning the TV series then in production), the Confederate flag on his T-shirt caused significant discussion, including justifiable objections but also angry counter-objections and accusations of “woke”. Some related discussions remain, but the original post was deleted by the moderators a day or two later. When it became apparent from initial previews in 2023 that the Masters of the Air series would not only feature white B-17 crewmembers, but also the Tuskegee airmen, there were numerous accusations that Hanks and Spielberg had become “woke” and were distorting history. Because, some argued, there were no Black flyers in the Eighth Air Force, and, they believed, the series should feature the 100th Bomb Group exclusively! But there were also many comments that welcomed the inclusion of the Tuskegee airmen. In this case, discussion was mostly polite, while differing opinions were discussed. However, on balance when I compared these social media discussions with the social reality of recent years, it did not seem that future generations had become more tolerant and any less racist.

Two days before the 2024 U.S. election, I checked the rules of the official Eighth Air Force Historical Society Facebook group (activated 28-07-2010) and found only one: “Be Kind and Courteous. We’re all in this together to create a welcoming environment. Let’s treat everyone with respect. Healthy debates are natural, but kindness is required”. Since the rules did not explicitly oppose “politics”, I posted a link to a two-minute video by VoteVets, in which the son of a 100th Bomb Group veteran – featured in Hanks and Spielberg’s Masters of the Air – warned about Trump and fascism.(15) I added a simple comment: “Important message from the son of a 100th BG navigator”. 

In the mere two hours before the post was deleted, it received three “likes”. But it also received three “laughing emojis” and one comment, “Can we not do this here?” Nothing in the visible Facebook activity of the four individuals who expressed “humour” or objection to my post indicated any family connection to the Eighth Air Force. But they had seemingly adopted the Society’s official Facebook group as one of their sacred “safe spaces” for the consumption of historical “content”. They came to honour the “Greatest Generation” but three of them laughed at the anti-fascist conviction of a veteran of the “Bloody Hundredth”. Meanwhile, even on election day, numerous non-political posts relating to B-17s and World War Two suggested that “all is well with the world today”. As if, “Nothing to fear here!”

Whereas the many individual bomb group veterans’ organisations emerging during the 1970s named themselves “associations”, the overarching Eighth Air Force veterans’ organisation defined itself as an “historical society”. Scale, rather than a unique commitment to historical scholarship, was the distinguishing factor. Unlike many of the smaller organisations that ultimately disappeared when veteran numbers dwindled, the Eighth Air Force Historical Society has been passed down to the care of younger generations. The Society’s President is Brigadier General Paul Tibbets IV, the grandson of Paul W. Tibbets Jr., the commanding officer of two Eighth Air Force B-17 bomb groups in England during World War Two, who later piloted the Twelfth Air Force B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

It is noteworthy that whereas the Society’s publications used to focus solely on World War Two, nowadays its website includes a post-war timeline, normatively tracing the history of the Eighth through Vietnam, Afghanistan (“Operation Enduring Freedom”) and Iraq (“Operation Iraqi Freedom”). Politics prevails in these kinds of militaristic “safe spaces” under the pretence of being apolitical, but only the officially sanctioned version of political history. As of November 2024, the Society’s Facebook group membership is over 47,000 people, yet its 8th AF News magazine had a total distribution (both print and digital) of only approximately 1,400 copies in 2022, the editor informed me. The Society’s current mission is:

Arguably it’s supposed political “neutrality” means it is failing its current mission. Because, as Howard Zinn asserted, "you can’t be neutral on a moving train". Although Zinn was a critic of Nato, in recent times I’ve been wondering how many Eighth Air Force veterans – invariably pro-Nato – would have been happy with a U.S. president toying with the idea of withdrawing from the alliance, especially at a time when Russia has invaded a European neighbour. And all the while, the Society remains silent, and open discussion is silenced.

Social media moderators have a daunting task, considering our contemporary online ecosystems of disinformation and angry “keyboard warriors”. Arguably, the best approach would not be to pander to the reductionist appetite of “content” consumers in search of safe spaces, and to not moderate difficult discussions through deletion. Silencing “healthy debates” means silencing meaningful discussion. I don’t suppose the “Greatest Generation” back in 1942–1945 would want us to be so complacent. We live in an era of extremely powerful pseudo-intellectual “influencers” in a climate that is anti-intellectual and suspicious of education. Is the role of the custodians of history – or the Eighth Air Force Historical Society’s gatekeepers – to provide fodder for entertainment and escapism that reinforces existing beliefs, or to challenge those beliefs toward a deeper understanding of the past and present?

History that entertains and uplifts, or history that interrogates, educates, and democratises?

Members of the Eighth Air Force Historical Society’s official Facebook group clearly have a strong interest in the numerous published personal accounts and unit histories – important aspects of the historical record – according to their posts and discussions. But published accounts of the Eighth Air Force tend to recount the same arc of experiences as those that came before them, and never seem to ask new questions. Unfortunately, there seems to be a dearth of academic research on this topic. The overwhelming majority of texts produced on the Eighth Air Force and the so-called “greatest generation” depoliticise that generation; and while it might not be the authors’ intentions, the reception seems to lean towards romanticising World War Two. In remembering, veterans and those killed in action are often homogenised as one-dimensional soldiers, devoid of individuality, background, experiences, and politics – and serving under leadership underserving of scrutiny. One has to ask, are we critically engaging with history, or indulging in Eighth Air Force myths, legends, and even fantasy? 

The Eighth Air Force Historical Society's mission statement expresses a concern with “the preservation of Democracy”, so why won’t the Society allow a wide range of viewpoints – including relatively challenging/scholarly discussion – in its quarterly publication? Could it sponsor young scholars in some way – and not restrict their ideological standpoint? Or is the Society ultimately a “safe space” Facebook group for casual social media-based genealogy, hegemonically sanctioned discourse, and virtue signalling?

Research on the topic is beyond my current professional research interests, but I remain interested. What interests me most – and what I hope others might tackle – are the complex, critical, and uncomfortable questions, contextualised in broader socio-political history. Inspiration can certainly be drawn from remembering Howard Zinn. Because what good is a nostalgic and sentimental celebration of an historical war against fascism if it does not provide the political literacy required to recognise twenty-first century fascism when it stares us in the face?

Stuart J. Wright, 11-11-2024

Stuart J. Wright, PhD, is the author of An Emotional Gauntlet: From Life in Peacetime America to the War in European Skies (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). He is a research fellow at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford.

Acknowledgments: Thanks to: Nigel Perrin for general comments and invaluable feedback on two drafts; Eric Swain for sharing official 490th BG records acquired though his own research; and Thomas Warren for sharing crew photographs from his family’s collection. Thanks to Debra Kujawa (8th AFHS) and to Leland Grigoli (AHA) for trying! And to Myla Kabat-Zinn and Jeff Zinn for photographs, interest and encouragement, and David Detmer for kindly taking the time to read the final draft and giving it the “green light”.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this essay are my own, not those of the people mentioned in the above acknowledgements.

Dedication: This essay is dedicated to my friend, John P. Durborow (1954–2020), nephew of Lt. John B. Durborow (453rd Bomb Group) and Lt. Paul J. Durborow (100th Bomb Group), both killed in action flying from Norfolk, England (8th April 1944 and 29th July 1944 respectively). John seemed as enthused as I was at the prospect of my meeting with Howard Zinn.

Notes

1. The online archive of the American Air Museum in Britain provided no information on Howard Zinn aside from nationality, service number, highest rank, role, and pilot’s name as of the beginning of November 2022. Around that time, I found one photo of him with his crew – the Lt. Carl L. Mueller crew – in the 490th Bomb Group Facebook group, but no mention was made of Howard in the caption or comments. My request for information posted in that Facebook group (20-11-2022) prompted a member to post crew photographs on the Museum’s online archive (22-11-2022). Hattie Hearn, Curator of the American Air Museum, read an early draft of this article in 2023 and kindly shared some general comments about Eighth Air Force scholarship; subsequently (on 29-10-2024), she posted some information about Howard Zinn on the Museum’s online archive. The Norfolk and Norwich Millennium Library had several of Howard’s books, available in the adult non-fiction collections, when I checked online in 2022. However, the American Library – formerly the 2nd Air Division Memorial Library, located inside the Millennium Library – had none. And not because Zinn was assigned to the 3rd Air Division – there are plenty of 1st and 3rd Air Division accounts in the American Library, and it also covers U.S. history and society more broadly.

2. Democracy Now! (22-07-2013). Censoring Howard Zinn. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAe_T1voV1A [last accessed 01-10-2024]

3. HowardZinn.org (2017). Arkansas bill attempts to ban Howard Zinn books. Available at: https://www.howardzinn.org/arkansas-bill-attempts-ban-howard-zinn-books [last accessed 01-10-2024]

4. Most people who use the word “woke” (and who are angry about so-called “wokeness”) don’t seem to have any idea where it came from, what it really means, or how it is used (and how they are using it) to neutralise and silence valid critique. For a concise summary: See BBC Radio 4 (2023). Woke: The journey of a word. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001jc1l/episodes/player [last accessed 01-10-2024]

5. Limbong, Andrew (2023). Nearly 700 books have beenremoved from classroom libraries in one Florida county. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2023/12/21/1221040451/nearly-700-books-have-been-removed-from-classroom-libraries-in-one-florida-count [last accessed 06-11-2024]

6. National Archives Museum, Washington, D.C. (17-09-2020). Remarks by President Trump at the White House Conference on American History. Available at: https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-white-house-conference-american-history [last accessed 06-11-2024]

7. Howard Zinn has received criticism from many historians. See David Detmer’s book Zinnophobia: The battle over history in education, politics, and scholarship (Zer0 Books, 2018) for an extended defence of Zinn, including “a detailed response to twenty-five of Zinn’s most hostile critics, many of whom are (or were) eminent historians”.

8. For an interesting discussion on the “Greatest Generation” in popular culture and in Hollywood, see Elizabeth Samet interviewed on The Majority Report with Sam Seder (30-09-2023), How Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks whitewashed WWII. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O09qDyo7Ww0 [last accessed 09-11-2024]

9. It appears Zinn might actually be referring to his first mission, on 11th April 1945, to the marshalling yards at Treuchtlingen, Germany, fifty miles west of Regensburg. Other Eighth Air Force groups did attack Regensburg on that day, according to Freeman (1981).

10. This was the first and only use of napalm by the Eighth’s heavy bombers according to Roger Freeman (1981: 488). Elsewhere, Freeman suggests wider use of napalm by the Eighth, “on a few special missions where blanket fire cover was required” (1984: 226).

11. This essay was first published within a chapter entitled “Hiroshima and Royan”, in Howard Zinn’s 1970 book, The Politics of History, and later in The Zinn Reader (Zinn 1997).

12. New York Times (16-04-1945), quoted in Zinn (1997: 270).

13. Associated Press / Amanda Seitz (02-05-2019). Obama did not opt for a Memorial Day BBQ over a visit to Arlington National Cemetery in 2010. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/4687620002 [last accessed 08-11-2024]

14. Anti-Defamation League (ADL) (28-06-2017). ACT forAmerica. Available at: https://www.adl.org/resources/profile/act-america [last accessed 08-11-2024]

15. VoteVets (22-10-2024). Son of WW2 ‘Master of the Air’Speaks Out: VOTE AGAINST TRUMP! Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr_tKAQ20Dg [last accessed 03-11-2024]

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