John Gillespie Magee
John Gillespie Magee, Junior (born June 9, 1922 in Shanghai , China , † December 11, 1941 in Lincolnshire , United Kingdom ) was an Anglo-American poet and fighter pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II . He died in an air collision over England a few weeks after he wrote the famous poem High Flight .
Life
John Gillespie Magee, Jr. was born in Shanghai to an American and a British woman who served as Anglican missionaries there. His father, John Gillespie Magee, was of Scottish - Irish descent from a wealthy and influential family from Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania who u. a. donated the Pittsburgh Magee Hospital and the Magee Building. Defying his family's wealth, Magee became an Episcopal priest and was sent to China, where he met his wife. Magee Junior's mother, Faith Emmeline Backhouse, was from Helmingham , Suffolk , England and was a member of the Church Missionary Society . John and Faith married in 1921 and had another son in addition to John Jr. Proud of their roots was the reason John and his older brother Hugh went to elementary school in the United Kingdom and then to college in the United States .
John Junior started school at the American School in Nanjing in 1929 and went to the United Kingdom with his mother in 1931. There he attended the St. Clare School in Walmer , Kent , and then the Rugby School (1935-1939) until 1935 , where he won the school's own poetry competition in 1938 . Then John went to his aunt in Pittsburgh and attended Avon Old Farms School in Avon , Connecticut . In July 1940 he got a scholarship from Yale University , where his father worked as a chaplain, which he did not take up. Due to the war raging in Europe since September 1939 , Magee joined the Royal Canadian Air Force the following October .
The following weeks he completed flight training in Toronto , Trenton , St. Catharines and Uplands before receiving his flight license in June 1941. Magee was then transferred to the United Kingdom, where he was assigned to No. 1 , based in Llandow , Wales . 53rd Spitfire Operational Training Unit (OTU) was assigned. Months later, he was assigned to No. 412 Fighter Squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force, based in Digby , England . The squadron, equipped with Spitfire fighters, had the Latin motto “Promptus ad vindictam” ( Eng . “Fast in revenge”).
John Gillespie Magee died on December 11, 1941 in a collision of his descending Spitfire (marking: VZ-H; serial number: AD-291) with an Oxford training aircraft flown by LAC Ernest Aubrey from the Cranwell Air Force Base . The two planes collided in a cloud at around 11:30 a.m. about 400 ft (~ 120 m) above the ground near the Lincolnshire town of Roxholm . During the subsequent aircraft accident investigation, an eyewitness testified that the Spitfire pilot (Magee) had tried desperately to open the canopy, which he succeeded. When attempting to jump off, the wreck hit the ground and killed the pilot on the spot. Magee's body was buried two days later in Scopwick Cemetery in Lincolnshire.
High flight
Magee's famous sound poem was written on August 18, 1941, when he made his seventh flight in a Spitfire in Llandow. As he climbed to an altitude of 33,000 ft (~ 10,000 m) in his Spitfire Mk. I, Magee was inspired to write the first lines of High Flight , which he completed after the training flight was over. He included a copy of the poem in a letter to his parents, who at the time were living in Washington, DC . Magee's father was a pastor of St. John's Episcopal Church in Lafayette Square and printed the poem in a copy of the parish letter. High Flight became better acquainted in February 1942 when the director of the Library of Congress Archibald MacLeish published it in an exhibition of poems entitled Faith and Freedom . The manuscript is still in the collections of the Library of Congress to this day .
Since then, High Flight has been a favorite poem of pilots , especially astronauts, and the official poem of the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Royal Air Force . At the United States Air Force Academy , cadets in their first year of training even have to be able to recite high flight by heart. Extracts of it also adorn numerous headstones at Arlington National Cemetery and other veterans cemeteries.
Magee's poem was set to music several times, including a. used by John Denver in his 1983 album It's About Time , and used by numerous US TV stations in short introductory films. Hight Flight also found its way into various books, such as Brigadier General Robert Lee Scott's autobiography God is My Co-Pilot and as an epigraph in Arthur Hailey's novel based on the famous film Airport . NASA astronaut Michael Collins took a copy with him on his first space flight and mentioned it in his autobiography Carrying The Fire . Long-time NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz ended the Apollo 11 chapter in the book Failure Is Not An Option with High Flight .
On January 28, 1986, US President Ronald Reagan ended his speech to the nation on the occasion of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger , in which all seven astronauts were killed, with the beginning and ending lines of the poem.
- High flight
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Biographies
- The Complete Works of John Magee, The Pilot Poet, including a short biography by Stephen Garnett . Cheltenham, Gloucestershire: This England Books, March 1989.
- Icarus: An anthology of the poetry of flight . Macmillan, London, 1938.
- Sunward I've climbed . Hermann Hagedorn , The Macmillan Company, New York, 1942.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b RAF Digby - John Gillespie Magee Jr. In: Royal Air Force. Retrieved May 7, 2008 .
- ^ Address to the Nation on the Explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, January 28, 1986. (No longer available online.) In: Ronald Reagan Presidential Library Foundation. Archived from the original on June 7, 2013 ; Retrieved January 28, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ High Flight. In: www.woodiescciclub.com. Retrieved May 7, 2008 .
- ↑ What is Thunder City? (German translation). (No longer available online.) In: www.ich-fliege-duesenjaeger.de. Archived from the original on April 30, 2008 ; Retrieved May 7, 2008 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Magee, John Gillespie |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | John Gillespie Magee, Junior |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Anglo-American poet and fighter pilot |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 9, 1922 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Shanghai |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 11, 1941 |
| Place of death | Lincolnshire , UK |