Portrait of flyboy immortalizes WWII air war
NOELLE STRAUB Lee Washington Bureau | Posted: Sunday, June 17, 2007 12:00 am
WASHINGTON - The portrait of her father has always been part of Carol Ready's life.
During World War II, the military commissioned four inspirational paintings of servicemen, one to represent each branch of the armed forces. Her father, Capt. Thomas H. "Tommy" Wakeman, became the face of the Army Air Forces.
The picture appeared on the cover of the Jan. 27, 1945, issue of Liberty magazine, and Ready's grandmother hung a framed copy of a poster version in her house. The artist had vividly captured her father's strong features as he stood in his leather flight jacket holding a bomb, gazing from billowy clouds into the distance.
But Ready and the rest of Wakeman's family never knew what happened to the original painting.
Likewise, the military had lost track of the dashing pilot in the portrait. His name had been lost with the passing years.
Still, the picture kept popping up.
Shopping at Costco in the early '90s, Ready did a double take as her dad's image gazed out at her from a package of VHS tapes, "Wild Blue Yonder: the History of Air Combat."
In 1997, she received a mail-order clothing catalog. Flipping through it, she landed on a page featuring $495 leather bomber jackets, and lo and behold there was her dad again, standing boldly in his brown leather.
Later, leafing through a book about the U.S. Military Academy, where a family friend was a cadet, she saw the portrait reproduced across a full page.
The flier portrayed was never identified.
Tommy Wakeman died in 2000, but his presence in the picture haunted his daughter.
Ready wondered where the original painting ended up.
Carol Ready has lived in Billings since 1979, where she has worked as a bank loan officer.
Ready's journey to the portrait began last year, when her husband, Bruce, decided the best Christmas surprise he could give her would be a trip to see the painting. But first he had to find it.
Bruce called Montana Rep. Denny Rehberg's office to inquire about getting tickets to tour the White House. He mentioned the portrait and asked for help in locating it.
By coincidence, Senior Master Sgt. Craig Kirwin called Rehberg's office around the same time to ask about White House tickets for his own visitors. Born in Billings and raised in Helena, Kirwin is manager of Current Weather Operations Policy for the Air Force.
Given Kirwin's Pentagon connections, a Rehberg staffer mentioned Bruce Ready's inquiry on the painting, but offered no information for him beyond a general description.
Not long after, Kirwin was walking through the Pentagon and headed past the office that coordinates tours. There, on a stand full of postcards, one jumped out at him: an airman gazing into the distance and holding a bomb.
"I thought, 'That's got to be it,' " Kirwin said.
Kirwin contacted a military art historian, who helped him track down the painting. It had hung for years in the Pentagon and was damaged by folding when it was put in storage at the time of Vietnam war protests in the 1960s. It was later painstakingly restored and now was in Historic Hangar II at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington. He phoned the Readys late last year with the news.
Tommy Wakeman flew B-26 bombers in the European air offensive. The B-26 was fast and light, designed to come in low over a target. There was not a single mission Wakeman flew, he told his daughter, when no one died.
Of the 3,000 or so men he went overseas with, he told her, only 10 percent made it back.
The longer he was there, the more he wondered when it would be his turn to die. It was like playing Russian roulette every time you went out, she said.
A military document Wakeman saved said he flew 51 combat missions. A newspaper article from the time put the number at 69. He was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal with eight Oak Leaf Clusters, which Ready still keeps.
Wakeman's good looks may have helped him be chosen for the portrait, but chance played a part, too.
Toward the end of the war, after all those missions, the military saw that Wakeman needed a break, his daughter said. He was hospitalized briefly for "operational fatigue," what today would probably be diagnosed as a stress disorder, she said.
So when the artist searched for an airman to paint, Wakeman had the time.
"They picked him because he was available," Carol said. "It wasn't like they had a contest."
The painter was Jes Schlaikjer, the official artist of the War Department who created inspirational war posters and portraits of top brass. Ready's dad told her that he posed for a week, holding the bomb.
Air Force officials invited the Readys to Washington for a private viewing last month. Carol and Bruce visited the Air Force Band facility at Bolling.
On that day, Carol Ready felt a thrill as she finally gazed at the portrait.
"It's absolutely, totally 100 percent fulfilling," she said. "It's like an 'I've come home' type of feeling."
She marveled at the painting's vibrant colors and lifelike detail, noting the tension in her father's hands from holding the bomb. "He looks so alive," she said.
The clouds behind Wakeman form a gentle V shape. They look like angel wings and suggest also the symbolism of Winged Victory.
Like many who flew in combat, Wakeman had a lucky charm he brought on every mission. It was a bracelet, which he earned as the top cadet in his Cal Aero Academy training class in 1942.
The bracelet is depicted clearly in the painting on his right wrist. Ready brought the bracelet with her to Washington. She held it up in front of the portrait. It was a perfect match.
Other aspects of her father's life convince Ready that her father's portrait is in the right place. The Air Force Band got the painting in part because words from the "Star Spangled Banner" - "O'er the ramparts we watch" - were at the top. But Wakeman loved music and "just knew" how to play lots of instruments, Ready said. Playing and listening to music was when he let his hair down, she recalled.
The painting hangs between portraits of 1940s band leader Glenn Miller and Robert Crawford, who wrote the Army Air Corps song. The Readys can't imagine a more perfect place.
The Readys got a tour of the Air Force Band recording studio. The Silver Wings, an ensemble group, played a Wynonna Judd song, "Only Love," for them. Carol Ready choked up. The keyboardist looks just like her dad did, she told the group. It brought back memories of him playing an organ when she was young.
"It's been a whole day of goose bumps," she said.
Fortunately, Wakeman saved scores of photos and much of the paperwork from his wartime service. On the day the Readys visited Bolling, the photos, scrapbooks and medals spilled out over the table, filling the room with Wakeman's ghost.
There was a picture of the handsome pilot looking out of the cockpit of his plane, painted with the logo "The Grim Reaper." In another, taken when he was home in California on leave in 1944, Wakeman's pretty young wife - Ready's mother, Ginny - has donned all of her husband's flight gear, smiling in the comically oversize garments.
Hundreds of official documents include flight school exams, life insurance forms, records of gear, flying rosters, medical information.
In all, Ready brought 1,120 photographs and documents with her to Washington.
The Air Force Band's chief music librarian, Chief Master Sgt. Joe Tersero, had them all scanned to make a digital archive on three discs.
Air Force officials couldn't be happier to have the well-preserved records and to have identified the young pilot in the painting.
"It's always been one of the centerpieces," Tersero said of the painting on display. "When people come here they always dwell on it."
"It's no longer just a great painting; it's a painting with a story."
After the visit, Tersero wrote to the Readys to thank them for sharing the story.
"Whenever I pass by your dad's portrait (which I have the joy of doing several times a day), I'm now seeing family," he wrote. "The artist brilliantly captured the ideas of warmth and compassion while clearly conveying the Airmen's job of supporting and defending our nation through airpower. Absolutely remarkable!
"Your father's portrait is a national treasure."