They Called Him Marvin by Roger Stark
Publisher: Silver Star (September 21, 2021
Category: Historical Romance, WW2, Family Saga, Based on a True Story
Tour dates: April 25-June 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0578855288
Available in Print and ebook, 320 pages
Description They Called Him Marvin by Roger Stark
Three hundred ten days before Pearl Harbor, buck private Dean Sherman innocently went to church with a new friend in Salt Lake City. From that moment, the unsuspecting soldier travelled a remarkable, heroic path, falling in love, graduating from demanding training to become a B29 pilot, conceiving a son and entering the China, Burma and India theater of the WW2.
He chronicled his story with letters home to his bride Connie that he met on that fateful Sunday, blind to the fact that fifteen hundred seventy five days after their meeting, a Japanese swordsman would end his life.
His crew, a gaggle of Corporals that dubbed themselves the Corporealizes, four officers and a tech Sargent, adventured their way across the globe. Flying the “Aluminum Trail” also called the Hump through the Himalayas, site of the most dangerous flying in the world. Landing in China to refuel and then fly on to places like Manchuria, Rangoon or even the most southern parts of Japan to drop 500 pounders.
Each mission had its challenges, minus fifty degree weather in Mukden, or Japanese fighters firing away at them, a close encounter of the wrong kind, nearly missing a collision with another B29 while flying in clouds, seeing friends downed and lost because of “mechanicals,” the constant threat of running out of fuel and their greatest fear, engine fire.
Transferred to the Mariana Islands, he and his crew were shot down over Nagoya, Japan as part of Mission 174, captured and declared war criminals.
Connie’s letters reveal life for a brand new mother whose husband is declared MIA. The agony for both of them, he in a Japanese prison, declared a war criminal, and she just not knowing why his letters stopped coming.
Excerpt They Called Him Marvin by Roger Stark
Meanwhile in Guam
Page 163 - 164
Six flying hours south of the shivering Riku, 334 B-29s were lining up on runways on Saipan, Tinian, and Guam, destination the Shitamachi urban area of Tokyo.
Destination, Riku’s home.
Air Corp General Curtis LeMay briefed pilots bragging that they were going “to deliver the biggest fire cracker the Japanese had ever seen.” The firecracker was built using two thousand tons of incendiary bombs, two thousand tons of fire.
The wind that blew through Riku’s coat would be tailor made for the bombers, blowing away smoke and debris giving their bombardiers clear view of the urban landscape below. It also aided the resultant inferno by acting as a giant bilge that forced air into the waiting mouth of the flames. Tightly built buildings of wood and paper burn very well when gasoline is poured on them, especially when the combustion is force fed the life enhancing steroid of oxygen.
This attack would mark a change in America’s bombing strategy. Bombing raids had begun about six months before. They were occasional in the beginning, but when Iwo Jima fell in late February, they began to be most regular. The raids had been focused on military targets, airplane factories, or strategic inventory, oil tanks and such, attacks that the Allied Army labelled as Strategic Bombing.
Day time raids, conducted at 30,000 feet, they avoided urban areas. They also didn’t produce much in the way of results. A 500 pounder dropped from five or six miles up, aimed at a well defined target would ride the jet stream winds to unintended destinations. Napalm, on the other hand, dropped over a broad urban target from 12,000 feet could not help but hit something and start a fire that probably would also burn something else. A perfect outcome in a General’s mind.
The cruel reality was that civilian workers were just like aluminum, or rubber or TNT, an ingredient in the creation of the armaments of war. Reduce any one of the ingredients and Japan’s war effort would be hampered. Strategic bombing of military targets was not destroying the Japanese war machine fast enough. When the Generals learned they could “disrupt” the workforce by dropping firebombs on their homes, urban areas became the target of choice for B-29s.
The Japanese were unprepared for this change in strategy. They had no expectations of night time fire bombing raids on non-military targets. The B-29s would meet no fighter resistance and ground defenses, altho heavy at times were antiquated and inaccurate and thereby virtually ineffective. This war wasn’t supposed to come to Japan’s shores, no one in Japan saw the need of upgrading and modernizing anti-aircraft defenses. The Pacific Ocean was their anti-aircraft defense.
The inhumanity of the attack stunned honorable Japanese warriors. This apparently indiscriminate bombing of innocent, peaceable urban civilian sites that might or might not surround military sites was inconceivable within the Bushido moral code.
Major Ito would plead at his Yokohama War Crimes trial that public opinion of the Japanese people “was too bitter to put into words.” Most had lost family or friends to the Birds from Hell and they hid not their loathing. They considered the airmen that inhabited the birds as kichiku bei-ei, the Demonic Beasts.
B-29ers that had the unfortunate opportunity to interact with Japanese citizens outside of their airplanes after crash landing felt the brunt of it.
Suzie's Thoughts They Called Him Marvin by Roger Stark
The best historical fiction book that I've read in a
while! 'They Called Him Marvin,' by Roger Stark is the story of a young couple,
true love and the war that changed the 20th century. It is based on
a true story.
Months before the bombing of Pearl Harbor was set to
drag the United States into the second World War, 18-year-old Dean Sherman and 16-year-old
Constance Baldwin met on a double date with friends in Salt Lake City, Utah.
This was only a short time after Dean had enlisted in the army and when he
eventually realized that he wished to marry Constance, she was hesitant only
because she knew that her parents would not want her to marry a soldier. But
eventually Constance's parents came around and the two were married just in
time for Dean to be sent overseas to join the war effort.
'They Called Him Marvin,' serves as a chronicle of the
very real story of these two young people's love for one another, expressed
through retellings of shared stories and real letters passed between them
during Dean's time overseas.
When Dean left, Constance, (or 'Connie' as he called
her) was pregnant and she soon gave birth to their son, Marvin. Dean received
this news via a Western Union telegram, delivering the information while laid
up in a hospital bed after having suffered a broken foot in Calcutta, India.
Despite their distance from one another, the two
continued to write to each other faithfully until Dean's plane eventually went
down over Nagoya, Japan and he and his crew were taken as prisoners of war.
Many years later, Connie's retelling of this
devastating time, and of the uncertainty of not knowing where the father of her
child was, were just as real and painful to read as if they had been fresh.
This is a moving story and one that I'm sure any lover of historical fiction
will enjoy.
Roger Stark, by his own admission, is a reluctant writer. But there are stories that demand to be told. When we hear them, we must pick up our pen, lest we forget and the stories be lost. Six years ago, in a quiet conversation with his friend, Marvin, he learned the tragic story of his father, a WW2 B-29 Airplane Commander, shot down over Nagoya, Japan, just months before the end of the war.
The telling of the story that evening by this half orphan was so moving and full of emotion, it compelled Roger to ask if he could write the story. The result being “They Called Him Marvin.”
Roger Stark’s life has been profoundly touched in so many ways by being part of documenting this sacred story. He prays that we never forget, as a people, the depth of sacrifice that was made by ordinary people like Marvin and his father and mother on our behalf.
Website: https://theycalledhimmarvin.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TCHMarvin
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I'm so glad you enjoyed 'They Called Him Marvin'! Thanks for hosting!
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