AIR: MOTHER’S CRY

Near Long Island’s Mitchel Field one last week, Lieut. Roy W. Scott of the Air Forces saw sudden trouble on the instrument board dials of his swift Bell Aircobra. With his Allison engine revving at critically high speed (ground witnesses his suspected his propeller control had gone of whack), he headed for home, was too late by a tragic few seconds.

Approaching the field he was suddenly blinded by a burst of stinging smoke, burned by red flames. The ship was out of control and coming down fast when he went over the side, landed precariously in a tree.

With a roar and a burst of flame his sleek P39 crashed among the houses of Hempstead (pop: 21,000), south of the air base. Mothers’ cries, neighbors’ shouts told the incoherent rest of the story of one of the saddest crashes in history. The P39 had fallen near three children at play, doused them with flaming gasoline. That day they died.

Few days later, Mitchel Field’s officers read their neighborhood newspaper, found themselves the objects of bitter denunciation in a letter which subsequently got into other papers. Eloquent with grief, written with telling effect it was addressed by Mrs. I. Arthur Kramer, mother of one the children, to Eleanor Roosevelt:

“Maybe you can do something about flying over congested areas at low for experimental purposes. . . .[My child’s] little coffin was covered with flowers . . . but not a single word of condolence, not one little flower . . . came from the United States Army. . . .

“About one-half hour after the [crash] a Second Lieutenant — shavetail — came into our home. He dared to thrust a paper into the badly burned hands of [the child’s father] and said: ‘Sign here for no property damage.’ ”

In the face of this indictment, Mitchel was cautiously closemouthed. Yet it had a telling answer for every charge was made.

Its flying is not experimental. Mitchel’s are officers in combat squadrons assigned to the job of defending New York City and vicinity. At places like Hempstead pilots are forced to fly low over the city in landings or takeoffs. And 24-year-old Mitchel Field, representing an investment of millions, could not reasonably be abandoned nor could most of the Army’s other great bases, which are cities.

After Pilot Scott’s crash, Mitchel Field’s Chaplain Paul J. Giegerich visited the next day attended the funeral as Air Forces representative. Because the Kramers are Orthodox Jews he advised fellow officers to send no flowers in keeping with Orthodox custom. But flowers were sent to the funerals of the two other victims of the crash, who were Roman Catholics. The request for a so-called damage-to-property report was routine, if undiplomatic at the time. It called for no waiver of damage rights.

In the face of these facts, Mitchel Field’s airmen were hard put to it to explain Mrs. Kramer’s indictment. Some saw a glimmer of significance in the fact that the letter was printed as an exclusive story by Newsday, a bumptious local daily. Editor of Newsday is Alicia Patterson (Mrs. Harry Guggenheim) daughter of Captain Joseph Patterson, isolationist owner of the great New York Daily News.