Photographic Memory
A local World War II veteran tells his war stories in pictures
by Michelle Jones
Joe Thompson wasn’t thinking about future generations as he chronicled his four years in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. Speaking by phone from his office in Nashville, the 86-year-old Nashville native—who, yes, still works four days a week at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance—says he took the photos merely to relieve the tension of his reconnaissance missions and the ennui of the time on the ground. It was only decades later, he says, that a series of talks he gave to students at Montgomery Bell Academy led him to see his experiences in a larger historical context. That realization, and the prodding of his daughter, Mindy Orman, led him to write a book, Tiger Joe: A Photographic Diary of a World War II Aerial Reconnaissance Pilot, recently published through Eveready Press.
When Joe Thompson graduated from Vanderbilt University 65 years ago this week, he had two things in mind: avoiding biochemistry as a first-year med student and avoiding being drafted into the infantry. It was spring of 1941, war was already raging in Europe, and the U.S. government was offering college men $75 a month to keep up their flight hours, with the promise of military flight school and officer training. “Listen, in 1941 that was a lot of money,” Thompson says, adding that the recruiter also promised the rank of second lieutenant, silver wings and assurances that “the girls will think you’re wonderful. I said, ‘Where do I sign?’ ”
He opted against joining a bomber crew or becoming a fighter pilot, he says, because reconnaissance flying would allow him to make his own decisions: “[You] have your own plane and you’re the one who decided how to handle the mission…. Maybe you got shot at, but at least you were the one running the show.” He progressed from primary training in the States, to the “trial by fire” of flying with Britain’s esteemed Royal Air Force, to commanding his own squadron by the age of 25, continuing to take pictures of day-to-day life—however unusual that had become—on the ground. “When I was not flying a mission, I was going around with my camera documenting what was happening to us as an outfit,” Thompson says.
To enable his habit, his mother sent him war-scarce film, and a chance encounter in London provided him with an economical developing solution, which, he says, “lasted all the way to Central Germany.” Having served as photographic editor of the Vanderbilt Commodore his senior year, Thompson also had a number of skills and habits that contributed to the lasting appeal of his images: not only did he have an eye for composition and recordable moments, he also kept detailed logbooks of all the shots and carefully preserved the negatives.
On Saturday, Thompson will discuss and sign copies of his book at the main public library as part of a program highlighting the library’s participation in the Library of Congress-sponsored Veteran’s History Project. An accompanying exhibition, “Tiger Joe: One Man’s Story of World War II in Photographs,” featuring highlights of the 600 negatives Thompson donated to the library’s Special Collections Division, will be on display in the Courtyard Gallery through July 3.
Since the Veteran’s History Project began in 2002, 300 veterans have contributed “photographs, letters, diaries, memoirs and similar types of items,” according to Linda Barnickel, coordinator of the program. Her staff and volunteers have conducted around 200 interviews.
Thompson began preserving his World War II legacy even before the Veteran’s History Project got off the ground, sitting down with a tape recorder during a vacation back in 1989 and then having the tapes transcribed. Those transcriptions became the basis of the book, says Tiger Joe co-writer Tom Delvaux: “Then of course I talked to Joe a whole bunch and got him to talk about the photographs.” Delvaux says he wanted to preserve the story-teller quality of Thompson’s memories, opting for a series of vignettes to complement large-scale photographs of Thompson’s fellow airmen, the liberation of Paris, various aircraft and even war orphans.
Thompson’s publishers chose most of the images in the book based on what would interest a wide audience, but Thompson chose his own favorites, too. “There’s a picture there of what we feared the most of the German planes,” he says. “It is a Focke-Wulf long-nosed 190. It was a deadly plane. It was powerful, it was maneuverable, it had heavy fire power; you did not want to meet it in the air.” Thompson took this photo, which includes the man who would replace him as squadron leader, when they came upon an airfield the Germans had abandoned without stopping to destroy the planes. The second of his favorite photos shows the fat contrails left by a fleet of B-17s, the so-called Flying Fortresses, and the thinner ones from their fighter plane escorts en route to a bombing mission over Germany.
Another special photograph for Thompson is an artistic shot of a woman walking through the shadows of a railway station, an engine on the tracks to the left, rays of light streaming down through the roof of the shelter. For Thompson, this is an especially emotional photograph, taken not long before he began reconnaissance missions for what became D-Day. It was “a picture of my girlfriend and the circumstances of Birmingham, England, in 1942.”
These pictures were all taken with Thompson’s own camera, which, ironically, was German-built. For one photograph in Tiger Joe, however, Thompson borrowed someone else’s. “As I came back to land on the airstrip there in France, I decided that I was going to make a picture or two that I wanted and use Uncle Sam’s film,” he says. “I felt I’d been over there getting shot at; at least I could do what I wanted to do.” The photograph, an aerial view of a D-Day landing site in Normandy in late June 1944, proves that, even as a young man trying to survive the war, Thompson sometimes did recognize the historical significance of his subjects.
Unsurprisingly, Thompson has a wealth of memories and stories, far too many to record in one book or to discuss in one session. “It’s kind of remarkable because every time I talk to Joe, he usually has a story that I’ve never heard before,” Delvaux says. “I [almost] wish we could have a second edition.”
Thompson just says, “I’m a little surprised, yet pleased, that a certain segment of the population, almost belatedly, is now saying, ‘Tell us again, what was it you did? Did you really do that?’ ” He’s happy to oblige.
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