One of the most surreal recollections I have read of a daylight aerial combat mission was written by the painter Jon Schueler. It was Lt. Jon Schueler when he received his wings in 1942. On a mission over France attempting to flatten the Port area of St. Nazaire on February 16th, 1943 with the 303rd Bomb Group held an immense significance over the life of Schueler. It was the 303rd's 16th mission and Jon was the Navigator aboard the B-17 'S For Sugar' (41-24619). The experince shattered Schueler.

This recounting of the St. Nazaire mission mirrored discussions I had with my father Lt. Ernest Anders Erickson, a pilot with the 95th Bomb Group. Some of his experiences he normally held back emotionally to most folk occasionally spilled out in conversation if I asked the right questions. Many memories from the war he kept silent throughout his life. Sometimes it came out in other ways, sometimes his dreams were terrifying.

The transcription of Jon Schueler's account of the St. Nazaire mission is below, above the photographs.

Jon Schueler was a painter of luminous abstract landscapes. 'Summer Storm' (attached below) speaks of the sky, light, clouds and the atmosphere. Jon became a second generation Abstract Expressionist painter by the early 1950s. He'd attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco starting in 1948 and was part of the influential artistic group centered around Clyfford Still, Richard Diebenkorn, Hassel Smith and David Park, with all of whom he studied. With Still’s encouragement, Schueler moved to New York in 1951.

Once in New York he became part of a thriving artistic community around Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Jon's paintings comprised Leo Castelli’s first solo exhibition.

In 1959 Schueler traveled and painted in Mallaig, Scotland. There, his work became infused with a dynamic attitude of the weather and changing skies. This led to the development of his signature, luminous imagined landscapes. Though his studio was in New York City he often returned to the dramatic skies of Mallaig. He acquired a studio overlooking the Sound of Sleat which is a narrow sea channel peninsula on the island of Skye in the Highland council area of Scotland, known as 'The Garden of Skye.'

While in flight training in the states in early 1942 Schueler wrote:

"All of us knew we were flirting with death from the moment we saw the planes. It was like the feeling at the beginning of a love affair, when all of the enticement is joy, yet one senses also an excitement of unknown possibilities, sadness, treachery, death. We started flying night cross country missions down the Sacramento Valley, over the blue lights of the valley towns, across the threatening mountain shapes through stars to Arizona and back.

One night, a plane full of classmates didn’t return. We learned later that it had crashed against the side of some high mountain mass. We’d hear death in the night as we’d hunch over our instruments in the droning planes, or on the field as we'd listened to the landings. We weren’t dramatic about it. We tried not to think about it. I turned my face or closed my eyes or blinded my intelligence so that I couldn’t see that the black sky, which was my memory, was inexorably filling with images of death. There is no way to say it strongly enough to give the truth. It is terribly important for me to understand, for without understanding it, I can’t understand life."

Schueler became well known for his aerial full sky canvases. In many ways he spent a lifetime with the sky that few ever have. Paint meant everything to Jon starting a few years after the war, but before it was a different story. A one of a kind, life-altering experience with the sky began in 1941 when he joined the Air Corps. By 1942 he became a Navigator aboard a B-17 Flying Fortress with the 303rd Bomb Group.

Stationed at Molesworth Airfield in England the weather was always an issue. The missions over Nazi occupied Europe brought with it an ever changing gloomy landscape. Deep fog and mist, rain, clouds, and intense atmospheric conditions prevailed. These conditions created havoc with the formations and for the returning aircraft after missions.

Once in England with the 303rd, Jon took part in an array of incredibly dangerous and deadly bombing missions sitting in the Navigaror's postion, in the front row bubble seat of a B-17. Years later still fascinated by the sky, he painted it again and again in an attempt to capture something of its power. The missions wore on him tremendously and their memory lingered for decades.

Schueler wrote:

"There in combat and before, the sky held all things, life and death and fear and joy and love. It held the incredible beauty of nature to me."

Jon used the spectacular memoried footage of the shifting weather, the sea, the sky and the islands, and incorporating his acute observations into beautiful images. You can feel the power of the landscape that informed his very being. Schueler's brush flickering over the canvas, and we can sense the transformation revealed in his work from his consciousness.

Schueler's wife Magda Salvesen writes:

"The Sound of Sleat became to Jon a place of experience, memory and mood. The specificity of this body of water fed his paintings - their imagery enlarged through layers of memory. How appropriate and challenging that the symposium celebrating Jon's centenary in 2017 should be held on Skye, an island seen through changing weather from his studio in Mallaig."

Schueler's preoccupation with the power of nature comes forth in so many of his huge canvases. His time flying in a B-17 surely penetrated his life in a remarkable fashion.

St. Nazaire, France
The 303rd Bomb Groups 16th Mission
February 16th, 1943.
Lt. Jon Schueler (Navigator) aboard the B-17 'S For Sugar' (41-24619)

Lt. Jon Schueler recollections of the St. Nazaire mission are surreal and like many of the crews that flew heavy bombers through incredible intenseFlak and being menaced by German fighters in the European Theater of the war are forever recalled.

"Billy (Billy B. Southworth Jr. - 303rd Pilot) had been sick and was not flying. I had a cold too, had not flown for awhile, but I wasn't in the hospital. We were called upon for a raid and we could only get a few ships out of the group in the air - because of lost ships, because of badly shot-up ships, because of shortage of personnel. Either shot down or sick. Two minutes before St. Nazaire, the squadron is down to seven ships. At St. Nazaire it is two. We headed into a steep descent down to the deck from 20,000 feet after dropping our bombs and the pain shot through my head like I had never before imagined.

I see the clouds, the clouds building up so that we couldn't see the ground, we had no sign of movement, the B-17s standing still and the Focke Wulfs and Messerschmidts coming in to meet them, coming in to knock us out of the sky.

For a moment, for a long moment, I was not navigating, I was watching the planes falling, the head-on crash of a fighter into a B-17, the exploding, burning, war-torn falling planes, all too often no chutes in sight, the lonely men, held to their seats, to the walls, to the roof of the plane as it twisted and fell, sometimes with machine guns blazing, and a spume of smoke for a long moment. It seemed endless. It seemed as though we would never go home.

I was looking out of the window at the endless blue sky and white clouds beneath us. We waited for the Focke Wulfs and Messerschmidts and we watched the Fortresses fall. Falling Forts. I wanted to hold them. I wanted to go down with them. I wanted to go home. I prayed. I prayed, please God, I'm bored, please don't make this go on and on and on, it's boring, it's ennui. I can't stand this boring reception, please God, get us out of here and get this over with. I was probably frightened too, although I was seldom scared while actually flying.

Had I been able to feel the fear, call it that name, I might have been able to feel the rage. Had I been able to feel the rage, I could have poured out the machine gun fire. I could have slammed bullets into the sky, into the waiting Focke Wulfs. In combat, I could not feel the fear or the rage and therefore the love, the love and excitement of what I was doing. I was quite cool in combat. I'd always be so goddamned busy with charts, metal averages, counting and noting falling ships. I was a cool cookie. And I lost everything in my cool. I drowned myself in it. I lost my way."

In the Summer of 1943 Lt. Jon Schueler was hospitalized in England with severe combat fatigue. In September of 1943 he returned to the states and in February of 1944 Lt. Schueler was discharged from the Air Force. He and his wife moved to Los Angeles, California in the Spring of 1944.

Below:
Summer Storm 1976
Jon Schueler
54" x 60"
oil on canvas

In time, painting caught Jon Schueler's eye and he focused on a career as a painter. In that, he found himself again. He took off in a succession of canvases that spoke of the openness and the clarity of the sky. Abstraction meets the heavens, was his direction. Jon was finally free to fly high along the edges of the blue sky, unencumbered of his past to seek the purity of space.