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On 15th June 1975, the Seattle Time
s ran a two page centrefold biography of John Harder.
The initial editorial introduction read... JOHN WORTHINGTON HARDER sounds right as the name of the man portrayed by Irwin Caplan on today's cover.
It is a big, substantial name for a man who has led a big and substantial life.
Caplan's illustration shows Harder when he was in the Royal Air Force during World War II. Behind him is a Spitfire, the historic mainstay of the British air force that Harder flew.
The lower section of the cover shows Harder in his Mercer Island home where he has many memorabilia of his career as "the archetype of a generation of flamboyant risk-necks whose exploits made their trade a legend." That's how Bob Roberts describes Harder in an article, on Pages 8 and 9 that tells of Harrier's many exploits as an aviation adventurer.
To the left is a copy of the front cover drawing...
... the remainder of the article follows...
John Harder aviation adventurer By Bob Roberts
Officially, I have 13 1/3 planes destroyed — and if I'd been a better shot, probably no one I know had more opportunity to become the leading scorer of World War II.
"But I couldn't hit a bull in the butt with a banjo. I was a lousy shot..."
To Capt. John W. Harder, senior pilot instructor, late of The Boeing Co., any mention of combat marksmanship reminds him of his own, and is boundlessly amusing. In fact, to Captain Harder, most everything is amusing, one way or another.
He is the archetype of a generation of flamboyant risk-necks whose exploits made their trade a legend. He has flown nearly everything designed to fly, and some that weren't — 248 different aircraft. The usual experienced pilot has flown no more than 10 to 15.
Harder's laughter begins like the onset of some mortal internal seizure, working its way upward between shoulders simultaneously a-tremble from uncontrollable hilarity. It is explosive laughter, singed by 10,000 cigarettes.
Harder laughs best and most frequently at his own expense; at some joke on himself that he deliberately expands and embellishes. He seems at all times virtually consumed by good humor. And one is helpless not to laugh with him.
A startling shock of red-blond hair tops lively green eyes behind horn-rim glasses, combining a scholarly mien with the alert expression of a woodpecker that has just poked its beak into a light socket.
His speech is at once cultivated and picturesque; a studied mix-of Oxonian pure and Rabelaisian bawdy. He is that rarity in assembled company — an easy, natural raconteur.
His tales about experiences in the Royal Air Force are contrived to present himself as a ludicrous amalgam of Peck's Bad Boy and Laurel and Hardy, who stumbled by dumb chance into the British service, producing a notable handicap the RAF was somehow able to surmount.
"I was an aviation nut and nothing else," Harder says. "I never would misrepresent the facts by saying that I was fighting for democracy. I didn't know what it was. It was a chance to fly bigger, heavier airplanes. And that's all I knew about it. But, of course, I didn't realize until I got to England that they were using real bullets."
HARDER tells things HIS way. But the treasures and mementos in his Mercer Island home tell a different story: a framed fragment of parachute silk bearing the signatures of all the residents of a French hamlet; a shadow box containing a cluster of medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, second only to the Victoria Cross in recognition of heroic conduct; pictures of aircraft that suddenly seem very old, and portraits of veteran faces that look now so very young.
And at the bottom of a dresser drawer, thrown in with socks and underwear, two scraps from an airplane: the throttle linkage to the automatic boost control and the bottom of the control stick where the aileron cross-over was fastened.
These are the mortal remains of Spitfire #MK-750. The rest of the plane Harder flew his last 15 months in combat is fragmented in a French hedgerow. He acquired these souvenirs by a remarkable circumstance I'll get to later.
JOHN WORTHINGTON HARDER grew up in Manhattan, in what he calls "providential proximity to the Jacob Ruppert brewery."
He describes his father fondly as a "would-be tycoon who lacked the touch” – a potential for pecuniary instability that was offset by his mother’s happy fortune to be a daughter of one of the founders of Texaco.
Much of the time during his early years Harder languished in a boarding school, a cloister which – to judge by his grades – was most noteworthy for its adamant resistance to his interest in aviation.
At 13 he played hooky to make his first solo flight.
Harder was still in high school in 1940 when the Royal Air Force set up an American recruiting office in the Waldorf-Astoria under auspices of the Clayton Knight Committee
Bored as usual with school, and eager to grab any job that would let him fly an airplane every day, Harder fudged his age and applied. If the RAF was unimpressed by his appearance, it soon was compelled to surrender to his enthusiasm. Within a few weeks he received his commission. He was 16.
For the remainder of 1940 he was assigned to Allied Ferry Command, flying Hudson bombers from California to England.
He was ordered to the United Kingdom in 1941, serving first in Coastal Command, then in Bomber Command, before finally brazening his way into the famed 64th Fighter Squadron.
A year later, and barely 18, he had risen to squadron commander. At 19, he was the youngest wing commander in the RAF, deferred to respectfully by his subordinates as "Junior."
By 1944 Harder had a confirmed score of 131/2 enemy planes (the accounting system is too involved to get into here), with perhaps twice that number of "probables." Moreover, he had himself been shot down four times, suffered burns and lacerations, and survived an icy ditching in the North Sea.
Before the war ended, he would be shot down again, have his back broken and endure severe punishment for repeated attempts to escape German prisoner-of-war camps.
Like nearly everyone who had first-hand dealings with the Luftwaffe, Harder is generous in praise of the German pilots.
"Man for man, they were superb," he says.
And two of them he calls the best pilots he's ever seen: Adolph Galland, chief of the Luftwaffe Fighter Command, and Eric Hartmann, World War II ace of aces, who shot down more than 300 Allied aircraft.
Both survived the war. Galland is a business executive in West Germany, and among John Harder's closest friends.
Hartmann is a colonel-general of the Luftwaffe.
"It's a good thing for us that jackass Goering was running the Luftwaffe," he says. "If Hitler had had the sense to listen to men like Galland and Hartmann, the whole thing might have been different But 'if is the story of war and of history, isn't it?"
IN 1946, Harder bought up his commission in the RAF, a decision he looks back on with mixed feelings in view of events that followed.
"I could have made the RAF a career," he says. "But like everyone else, I wanted out. I'd had it with war; or thought 1 had. The trouble was, I didn't realize then what a siren I'd been courting."
The siren beckoned two years later from the Middle East, suddenly aflame. Bewitched, Harder signed with the high bidder as a contract pilot (he deplores the term, "mercenary"), and found himself flying against some of his former messmates.
"We were professionals," he says. "It was supposed to be all business and no sentiment; $2,500 a month in gold deposited in a Swiss bank, and no questions asked, no favors, no regrets."
But just here the green eyes lose their mischief, and focus in unspoken reflection upon some moment back yonder. And one senses that at least one of those "all business" encounters ended in tragedy that is felt still.
But the mood is of the instant, and evanescent. It passes. The infectious humor returns to dispel the melancholy.
"Maybe I'd better not say too much about those hitches in the Middle East till we've got all the oil we need."
Harder gives a mirthful account of his decision to give up contract flying to start a new air line.
"I had my own air-freight outfit," he says, and the explosive laugh tells what little there is about the success of that venture.
Prior to joining Boeing in the 1960s, Harder had organized an executive flying service. He was personal pilot to Lady Bird Johnson ("a marvelous person") during her beautification-of-America campaign. He became friend and confidant of the great and near-great: Madame Chiang Kai-shek ("a great lady"); Lyndon B. Johnson ("an 'interesting' man"); Jean Fair-cloth MacArthur, widow of the general ("an absolute delight").
Then, a young 46 and at the peak of his energy with Boeing, he was grounded temporarily by a sudden and severe circulatory attack. There was a long schedule of medication to correct the condition. It failed.
Next, a precarious operation to save his life. That succeeded, but his grounding was final. His license to fly was permanently revoked for reasons of health. He was medically retired from Boeing.
FINANCIALLY secure, Harder turned a lively mind to other interests. He attended Bellevue Community College to earn his high-school diploma. He indulged an old passion for photography, in which he is professionally skilled.
And he travels where the mood takes him. A son is an Army master sergeant in Germany. There are wartime cronies in Britain, Adolph Galland in Germany and former squadron mates, from Sao Paulo to Marrakesh, from Salisbury to Cape Town.
But his warmest interest is an annual pilgrimage that began in 1967 when the Boeing public-affairs office spotted a letter in "Air Mail," the official journal of the RAF Association:
"Sirs:
"On the 10th of June, 1944, when the battle was raging on the ground and in the air all over Western France, a Spitfire of the British RAF was hit by a German anti-aircraft gun above Rennes. The pilot bailed out before the machine crashed in a farm run by the Le Blanc family. They realized the danger the pilot was in if he was found by the Germans. The son of the farmer, age 21, found the pilot before the Germans did. He dressed him with his own jacket and in his own hat . . . Sitting beside his rescuer in a light cart harnessed to a pony, the British pilot passed through the German unit sent into the area to search for him.
"In the farmhouse the pilot was well looked-after and refreshed. His name was John W. Harder ...
"After one night with the farmers in a building surrounded by enemy soldiers, John Harder refused to stay any longer, although the farmers proposed to hide him. He also refused a bicycle which the farmers offered to give him. Fully dressed in civilian clothes and provided with supplies of food, he set out on foot in the direction of Caen, hoping to get across the front.
"Since that day 23 years have passed. The family Le Blanc has waited for news of John Harder, but nothing more was heard of him. They are living as many modest country people do, and know no one who could help them find out if their rescued pilot is still alive, or if he succeeded in his escape . . .
"It would be a great thing for the Le Blancs to know the end of the adventure, and if John Harder is still alive to get in touch with him and eventually to welcome him and to accommodate him again in more peaceful circumstances.
"By chance they have opened in my presence the cabinet in which they kept, in spite of mortal danger in the event of a German house search, the RAF uniform, the compass and the maps printed on fabric. When I saw those objects which are treasured by the family, I promised to try to elucidate the mystery. I should be most grateful for any information which your readers may be able to give us as to the outcome of this brave adventure.
"Yours, Bertrand Mauduit, Haras des Vignes Evron (Mayenne, France)."
John Harder went back that year to the vineyards of Evron to thank the Le Blancs for risking their lives to help him, and to tell them that the first shelter he dived into in his escape attempt was occupied by four alert and very aggressive German soldiers who insisted that he be THEIR guest for the remainder of the war.
At a festive turnout of the entire village of Evron, Harder was given the autographed scrap of his parachute, the bits of his Spitfire exhumed from a hedgerow and a copy of Mauduit's letter to the RAF magazine as souvenirs of that first reunion at the Le Blanc farm. He has returned every year since.
JOHN HARDER and I have talked the day away here in this comfortable home. And just now the scarlet fingers of a dying sun have reached across the lake to touch a group of five or six faces framed on the wall just yonder, coloring them red.
The faces are German faces; forever smiling and young. And one does not need to be told that the faces belong to the company of the 13 ½
But to know John Harder is to know also that the pictures do not hang as trophies.
They are memorials.
Bob Roberts is a Seattle writer and radio commentator.
s ran a two page centrefold biography of John Harder. The initial editorial introduction read... JOHN WORTHINGTON HARDER sounds right as the name of the man portrayed by Irwin Caplan on today's cover.
It is a big, substantial name for a man who has led a big and substantial life.
Caplan's illustration shows Harder when he was in the Royal Air Force during World War II. Behind him is a Spitfire, the historic mainstay of the British air force that Harder flew.
The lower section of the cover shows Harder in his Mercer Island home where he has many memorabilia of his career as "the archetype of a generation of flamboyant risk-necks whose exploits made their trade a legend." That's how Bob Roberts describes Harder in an article, on Pages 8 and 9 that tells of Harrier's many exploits as an aviation adventurer.
To the left is a copy of the front cover drawing...
... the remainder of the article follows...
John Harder aviation adventurer By Bob Roberts
Officially, I have 13 1/3 planes destroyed — and if I'd been a better shot, probably no one I know had more opportunity to become the leading scorer of World War II.
"But I couldn't hit a bull in the butt with a banjo. I was a lousy shot..."
To Capt. John W. Harder, senior pilot instructor, late of The Boeing Co., any mention of combat marksmanship reminds him of his own, and is boundlessly amusing. In fact, to Captain Harder, most everything is amusing, one way or another.
He is the archetype of a generation of flamboyant risk-necks whose exploits made their trade a legend. He has flown nearly everything designed to fly, and some that weren't — 248 different aircraft. The usual experienced pilot has flown no more than 10 to 15.
Harder's laughter begins like the onset of some mortal internal seizure, working its way upward between shoulders simultaneously a-tremble from uncontrollable hilarity. It is explosive laughter, singed by 10,000 cigarettes.
Harder laughs best and most frequently at his own expense; at some joke on himself that he deliberately expands and embellishes. He seems at all times virtually consumed by good humor. And one is helpless not to laugh with him.
A startling shock of red-blond hair tops lively green eyes behind horn-rim glasses, combining a scholarly mien with the alert expression of a woodpecker that has just poked its beak into a light socket.
His speech is at once cultivated and picturesque; a studied mix-of Oxonian pure and Rabelaisian bawdy. He is that rarity in assembled company — an easy, natural raconteur.
His tales about experiences in the Royal Air Force are contrived to present himself as a ludicrous amalgam of Peck's Bad Boy and Laurel and Hardy, who stumbled by dumb chance into the British service, producing a notable handicap the RAF was somehow able to surmount.
"I was an aviation nut and nothing else," Harder says. "I never would misrepresent the facts by saying that I was fighting for democracy. I didn't know what it was. It was a chance to fly bigger, heavier airplanes. And that's all I knew about it. But, of course, I didn't realize until I got to England that they were using real bullets."
HARDER tells things HIS way. But the treasures and mementos in his Mercer Island home tell a different story: a framed fragment of parachute silk bearing the signatures of all the residents of a French hamlet; a shadow box containing a cluster of medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross, second only to the Victoria Cross in recognition of heroic conduct; pictures of aircraft that suddenly seem very old, and portraits of veteran faces that look now so very young.
And at the bottom of a dresser drawer, thrown in with socks and underwear, two scraps from an airplane: the throttle linkage to the automatic boost control and the bottom of the control stick where the aileron cross-over was fastened.
These are the mortal remains of Spitfire #MK-750. The rest of the plane Harder flew his last 15 months in combat is fragmented in a French hedgerow. He acquired these souvenirs by a remarkable circumstance I'll get to later.
JOHN WORTHINGTON HARDER grew up in Manhattan, in what he calls "providential proximity to the Jacob Ruppert brewery."
He describes his father fondly as a "would-be tycoon who lacked the touch” – a potential for pecuniary instability that was offset by his mother’s happy fortune to be a daughter of one of the founders of Texaco.
Much of the time during his early years Harder languished in a boarding school, a cloister which – to judge by his grades – was most noteworthy for its adamant resistance to his interest in aviation.
At 13 he played hooky to make his first solo flight.
Harder was still in high school in 1940 when the Royal Air Force set up an American recruiting office in the Waldorf-Astoria under auspices of the Clayton Knight Committee
Bored as usual with school, and eager to grab any job that would let him fly an airplane every day, Harder fudged his age and applied. If the RAF was unimpressed by his appearance, it soon was compelled to surrender to his enthusiasm. Within a few weeks he received his commission. He was 16.
For the remainder of 1940 he was assigned to Allied Ferry Command, flying Hudson bombers from California to England.
He was ordered to the United Kingdom in 1941, serving first in Coastal Command, then in Bomber Command, before finally brazening his way into the famed 64th Fighter Squadron.
A year later, and barely 18, he had risen to squadron commander. At 19, he was the youngest wing commander in the RAF, deferred to respectfully by his subordinates as "Junior."
By 1944 Harder had a confirmed score of 131/2 enemy planes (the accounting system is too involved to get into here), with perhaps twice that number of "probables." Moreover, he had himself been shot down four times, suffered burns and lacerations, and survived an icy ditching in the North Sea.
Before the war ended, he would be shot down again, have his back broken and endure severe punishment for repeated attempts to escape German prisoner-of-war camps.
Like nearly everyone who had first-hand dealings with the Luftwaffe, Harder is generous in praise of the German pilots.
"Man for man, they were superb," he says.
And two of them he calls the best pilots he's ever seen: Adolph Galland, chief of the Luftwaffe Fighter Command, and Eric Hartmann, World War II ace of aces, who shot down more than 300 Allied aircraft.
Both survived the war. Galland is a business executive in West Germany, and among John Harder's closest friends.
Hartmann is a colonel-general of the Luftwaffe.
"It's a good thing for us that jackass Goering was running the Luftwaffe," he says. "If Hitler had had the sense to listen to men like Galland and Hartmann, the whole thing might have been different But 'if is the story of war and of history, isn't it?"
IN 1946, Harder bought up his commission in the RAF, a decision he looks back on with mixed feelings in view of events that followed.
"I could have made the RAF a career," he says. "But like everyone else, I wanted out. I'd had it with war; or thought 1 had. The trouble was, I didn't realize then what a siren I'd been courting."
The siren beckoned two years later from the Middle East, suddenly aflame. Bewitched, Harder signed with the high bidder as a contract pilot (he deplores the term, "mercenary"), and found himself flying against some of his former messmates.
"We were professionals," he says. "It was supposed to be all business and no sentiment; $2,500 a month in gold deposited in a Swiss bank, and no questions asked, no favors, no regrets."
But just here the green eyes lose their mischief, and focus in unspoken reflection upon some moment back yonder. And one senses that at least one of those "all business" encounters ended in tragedy that is felt still.
But the mood is of the instant, and evanescent. It passes. The infectious humor returns to dispel the melancholy.
"Maybe I'd better not say too much about those hitches in the Middle East till we've got all the oil we need."
Harder gives a mirthful account of his decision to give up contract flying to start a new air line.
"I had my own air-freight outfit," he says, and the explosive laugh tells what little there is about the success of that venture.
Prior to joining Boeing in the 1960s, Harder had organized an executive flying service. He was personal pilot to Lady Bird Johnson ("a marvelous person") during her beautification-of-America campaign. He became friend and confidant of the great and near-great: Madame Chiang Kai-shek ("a great lady"); Lyndon B. Johnson ("an 'interesting' man"); Jean Fair-cloth MacArthur, widow of the general ("an absolute delight").
Then, a young 46 and at the peak of his energy with Boeing, he was grounded temporarily by a sudden and severe circulatory attack. There was a long schedule of medication to correct the condition. It failed.
Next, a precarious operation to save his life. That succeeded, but his grounding was final. His license to fly was permanently revoked for reasons of health. He was medically retired from Boeing.
FINANCIALLY secure, Harder turned a lively mind to other interests. He attended Bellevue Community College to earn his high-school diploma. He indulged an old passion for photography, in which he is professionally skilled.
And he travels where the mood takes him. A son is an Army master sergeant in Germany. There are wartime cronies in Britain, Adolph Galland in Germany and former squadron mates, from Sao Paulo to Marrakesh, from Salisbury to Cape Town.
But his warmest interest is an annual pilgrimage that began in 1967 when the Boeing public-affairs office spotted a letter in "Air Mail," the official journal of the RAF Association:
"Sirs:
"On the 10th of June, 1944, when the battle was raging on the ground and in the air all over Western France, a Spitfire of the British RAF was hit by a German anti-aircraft gun above Rennes. The pilot bailed out before the machine crashed in a farm run by the Le Blanc family. They realized the danger the pilot was in if he was found by the Germans. The son of the farmer, age 21, found the pilot before the Germans did. He dressed him with his own jacket and in his own hat . . . Sitting beside his rescuer in a light cart harnessed to a pony, the British pilot passed through the German unit sent into the area to search for him.
"In the farmhouse the pilot was well looked-after and refreshed. His name was John W. Harder ...
"After one night with the farmers in a building surrounded by enemy soldiers, John Harder refused to stay any longer, although the farmers proposed to hide him. He also refused a bicycle which the farmers offered to give him. Fully dressed in civilian clothes and provided with supplies of food, he set out on foot in the direction of Caen, hoping to get across the front.
"Since that day 23 years have passed. The family Le Blanc has waited for news of John Harder, but nothing more was heard of him. They are living as many modest country people do, and know no one who could help them find out if their rescued pilot is still alive, or if he succeeded in his escape . . .
"It would be a great thing for the Le Blancs to know the end of the adventure, and if John Harder is still alive to get in touch with him and eventually to welcome him and to accommodate him again in more peaceful circumstances.
"By chance they have opened in my presence the cabinet in which they kept, in spite of mortal danger in the event of a German house search, the RAF uniform, the compass and the maps printed on fabric. When I saw those objects which are treasured by the family, I promised to try to elucidate the mystery. I should be most grateful for any information which your readers may be able to give us as to the outcome of this brave adventure.
"Yours, Bertrand Mauduit, Haras des Vignes Evron (Mayenne, France)."
John Harder went back that year to the vineyards of Evron to thank the Le Blancs for risking their lives to help him, and to tell them that the first shelter he dived into in his escape attempt was occupied by four alert and very aggressive German soldiers who insisted that he be THEIR guest for the remainder of the war.
At a festive turnout of the entire village of Evron, Harder was given the autographed scrap of his parachute, the bits of his Spitfire exhumed from a hedgerow and a copy of Mauduit's letter to the RAF magazine as souvenirs of that first reunion at the Le Blanc farm. He has returned every year since.
JOHN HARDER and I have talked the day away here in this comfortable home. And just now the scarlet fingers of a dying sun have reached across the lake to touch a group of five or six faces framed on the wall just yonder, coloring them red.
The faces are German faces; forever smiling and young. And one does not need to be told that the faces belong to the company of the 13 ½
But to know John Harder is to know also that the pictures do not hang as trophies.
They are memorials.
Bob Roberts is a Seattle writer and radio commentator.
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