3 War Buddies Gather After Years Apart, and Find the Going Easy

One of the advantages afforded by the visibility of a job like this is the chance of being called to the attention of people with whom you’ve long ago lost contact--and wish you hadn’t. That’s why I had lunch the other day with Po Harwell and Joe Blizzard. I flew with them in World War II, and a recent column inspired both of them to phone me. Separately. They didn’t know about each other, either, so with me as a connecting link, the three of us got together for lunch.

I always approach such meetings with trepidation. The immediacy of a war--or any other human crisis--often makes close friends of people who might otherwise have found little in common. My friends in the movie business talk about this frequently. People involved in making a film together share a very intense experience that sometimes leads to intense relationships. Then the film ends, the cast members make feverish plans to get together--and often never see each other again.

A war is like that--intense relationships multiplied by months or years instead of the weeks on a movie set. But I discovered the hard way in the years immediately after World War II that lacking the glue of shared danger (or ennui), these relationships can come unstuck. We looked up a lot of wartime friends in various parts of the country and often found that once the war had been relived, there was no place to put down. So it had been a long time since I’d renewed any of these wartime friendships.

I didn’t know Po Harwell very well. We had instructed in the same training squadron, but we had different sets of close friends. So our friendship involved an occasional card game in the ready room or talk over a beer at a squadron party.

Joe Blizzard was different. We had been so close that I almost didn’t get shipped overseas because of our friendship. We were both dive-bomber pilots who had been transferred to the Naval Air Transport Service, and we got our overseas orders at the same time. We were being flown to the South Pacific individually, so when Joe and I arrived in San Francisco and checked in for transportation overseas, we asked the WAVE on duty if she would try to get us flown over together. As it turned out, she took that request all too seriously.

She stapled our cards together, with Blizzard’s on top, and when he was sent out, his card was filed with mine stuck to the back. So for all intents and purposes, I was gone, too. But, of course, I didn’t know it. We had to sit at a phone number we had provided between 11 and 12 each day; if we weren’t called, we were free for another 24 hours. I sat by my phone for three weeks after everyone else had gone. I toyed with the idea of sitting out the war there, but I wasn’t getting paid and also figured I was getting in trouble. So I reported in and was told that they were looking all over the Pacific for me. When they found my card stapled to Blizzard’s, I was off the hook and they sent me out instantly.

I found Blizzard again--wondering what in hell had happened to me--and we served out the rest of the war in the same transport squadron. We also made a fair amount of side money off visiting civilian pilots. Blizzard and I had played bridge together for two years, and whenever Pan Am pilots--refueling and resting--passed through our squadron and wanted a bridge game, Blizzard and I obliged. Since they made about four times as much as we did, we were never reluctant to appropriate some of their largess--at half a cent a point.

Rich memories. We drank our way through a three-hour lunch, reliving them. But when the time came to move on to other topics, we made the transition without a hitch. We found that we all live in the present, too--and that we had much to share there.

Po Harwell stayed in the Navy for 23 years, coming out as a full commander and assistant director of the Navy’s flight-testing program. After that, he spent another 16 years as a research pilot for Rockwell, working on the Apollo program with many of America’s early astronauts. He’s retired now, in Orange, after a lifelong love affair with the airplane.

Blizzard considered a Navy career and even stayed in for six months after the war--until he discovered that in the peacetime Navy, Annapolis men got the choice assignments and reservists the dregs. So he took his flying experience into private industry, where has worked ever since with firms supplying aeronautical equipment. He has worked for more than two decades in Los Alamitos and lived in Tustin.

Although our lives have taken divergent courses, we found a lot of common strains that never got talked out. Even the waitress got in the spirit of these three old dogs reliving a period when she wasn’t even born--and unable to lie about it because we had all been there.

When we broke up, it was with the promise that we would do it again soon. I think we will.