Jkhawkins Blogs – jkhawkins

Before The Sky Broke — Oliver departure, pains and ashes

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:05:33 +0000

1939 had barely begun.
London was enduring one of its coldest afternoons. A low ceiling of cloud pressed down on the city,
flattening the light against the windows. Standing before the suitcase open on his bed, Oliver folded the last
shirt with meticulous care, smoothing every crease with the palm of his hand.
He looked around the room, searching for something he might have forgotten.
That’s it. Everything’s here.
He went into the bathroom, shaved, and took a bath. It would be more than a day before he enjoyed that
kind of comfort again. He took out his Imperial Airways ticket and slipped it into the pocket of his jacket.
Last came the small framed photograph of his mother.
Holding it, he sat down on the edge of the bed. The smile captured in that picture had always been his
anchor whenever life revealed its harsher side.
Sixteen years have passed, yet it doesn’t feel like that long. I can still smell the sharp scent of camphor
mixed with lavender.
The image of his mother, Mary, lying in bed emerged with startling clarity. Every breath demanded an
effort she could no longer sustain. Her shoulders jerked upward with each attempt, and her flared nostrils
searched desperately for air the room, for some reason, refused to provide.
Father never left her bedside. Even now, I cannot understand how he managed to stay awake for so long.
Thomas had returned from the Great War three years earlier. Naively, he had believed the horrors he had
witnessed would be the last of his life.
Then the memory struck Oliver with the force of a torpedo.
Mary, her hands outstretched, holding Oliver with one hand and Thomas with the other.
She knew. I don’t know how it was possible, but she knew.
Her fever-hot fingers wrapped around his. The pallor of her face. The dark bluish outline of her lips.
And her final words, whispered so softly that only an eight-year-old boy could have heard them.
“Oliver, never leave your father. He needs you.”
Then silence.
The room dim in the gathering shadows. The warmth draining from the hand still resting in his own.
A tear slipped down his cheek. His head turned slightly, and his eyes drifted to the window, then the
dresser, and finally the door.
Forgive me, Mother, but I can’t stay here anymore. I tried…
He rose abruptly. If he remained seated, he would lose his resolve.
In the sitting room, Thomas was waiting for him on the sofa.
At the sight of his son—suitcase in hand, overcoat half-buttoned—he stood. Slowly he crossed the room,
raised his hands, and fastened Oliver’s coat all the way to the top button without saying a word.
At the door, he extended his hand.
The grip was firm: a soldier trying to adapt to a world without war.
“Oliver, take care of yourself. You have a mission—I know that. But you matter more than it does, more
than any mission ever could. I’m proud of the man you’ve become.”
“I’ll take care of myself, Father. I know how difficult this is for you, but it’s a summons I can’t refuse.”
Oliver lowered his eyes and felt warmth rise to his face, a faint blush spreading across his cheeks.
They said their goodbyes.
He strode toward the street and looked up at London’s darkened sky. Ahead of him lay a road he would
travel for the last time, and every step along it reminded him of a loss too deep to overcome.
Paris is only a diplomatic assignment.
At least, that was what he tried to believe.
He stopped at the gate and turned around.
His father was still standing in the doorway, shoulders curved forward as though protecting something
fragile within himself. For the first time, he seemed smaller than Oliver had always imagined. His head was
bowed slightly, but his eyes never left his son—as if he wanted to preserve every last second of him in
memory.
Oliver drew a deep breath. Cold air flooded his lungs.

He was running away.
He could fool anyone but himself.
As he walked toward the station, his pace quickened with every step, as though he were late for something
he could not name.
He was running from grief.
Running from memory.
Running from himself.
And it was that flight—on the far side of the Channel, along the banks of the Seine—that would shape his
future.

The Morning MacArthur Froze. And America Paid the Price

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 23:03:48 +0000

There’s a question that military historians have been arguing about for over eighty years, and it still
doesn’t have a fully satisfying answer: How do you get caught by surprise twice in the same morning?
On December 7, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The news reached the Philippines—where General
Douglas MacArthur commanded all U.S. Army forces in the region—at roughly 3:40 a.m. local time.
Nine hours later, Japanese bombers appeared over Clark Field, the main American air base on Luzon, and
destroyed most of the Far East Air Force while it sat on the ground. Nearly half of MacArthur’s 35 precious
B-17 Flying Fortresses were wiped out.
The scene was almost identical to what had just happened in Hawaii, except that in the Philippines,
everyone knew it was coming.
That’s the part that makes this story so hard to let go of.

A Warning Nobody Acted On

When MacArthur’s chief of staff woke him with the Pearl Harbor news in the small hours of December 8,
the general’s first move was to rush to his headquarters. His air commander, Major General Lewis Brereton,
was already there with an urgent request: let me launch the B-17s against Japanese airfields in Formosa
before they can hit us.
His logic was straightforward. The American bombers had the range to reach Formosa. All the Japanese
planes that would eventually attack Clark Field were based there. A preemptive strike might catch them on
the ground—the same devastating tactic Japan had just used at Pearl Harbor.
MacArthur said no. Or more precisely, he said nothing, which in military terms amounts to the same thing.
Brereton was turned away by MacArthur’s chief of staff. He tried repeatedly throughout the morning.
Authorization never came. When MacArthur finally gave the green light for a strike at around 10:14 a.m., it
was too late—the planes needed to be refueled and armed, and by 12:35 p.m., the Japanese had arrived.
The bombers that had just landed to refuel were sitting in rows on the tarmac at Clark Field when 53
Japanese aircraft appeared overhead at high altitude. All fighters sent to intercept them found nothing and
came back down. The radar station that detected the incoming raid sent a warning by teletype … but the
operator had gone to lunch. And then the bombs started falling.
It lasted about an hour. When it was over, Clark Field was rubble, and the Far East Air Force had
essentially ceased to exist as a fighting force.

The Question That Never Got a Good Answer

General “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force, called Brereton that afternoon and reportedly
asked how in hell an experienced airman could get caught with his planes on the ground nine hours after
Pearl Harbor. It was a fair question.
MacArthur gave several explanations after the war, and none of them held up. He claimed he’d been
ordered not to initiate hostilities, but Washington had told him that Pearl Harbor constituted the “first overt
act” required to authorize offensive action. Japan hadn’t needed to bomb the Philippines specifically before
MacArthur could respond.
He also maintained that he’d already ordered the B-17s dispersed to the safer airfield at Del Monte in
Mindanao, but no records from 1941 support this.
Finally, he insisted he had no knowledge of Brereton’s proposal to strike Formosa—a statement that
conflicts with nearly every other account of that morning.
What historians have pieced together points to something more complicated and, in some ways, more
human than simple deception: a commander paralyzed at a moment of maximum crisis, unable to commit to
a decision, waiting for clarity that never came.
Some of it was genuine confusion about orders. Some of it may have been MacArthur’s instinct to wait
and see. A defensive posture as if he believed that Japan might not strike the Philippines at all, or might not
do so as quickly as it did.
And some of it, frankly, appears to have been overconfidence. MacArthur had spent years building up the
Philippine military. He’d told Washington that the islands could be defended. He may have believed his own assurances more than the situation warranted.

Whatever the reason, the result was catastrophic.

The Asymmetry of Consequence

Here’s the part of this story that still has the power to make you stop and stare: the commanders at Pearl
Harbor lost their careers over what happened on December 7. Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter
Short were relieved of command, forced into retirement, and spent the rest of their lives under a cloud.
MacArthur, whose forces suffered a nearly identical disaster nine hours later with the benefit of full warning,
received a promotion eleven days after the attack. He was made a full general on December 19. A few
months later, he received the Medal of Honor.
The disparity wasn’t lost on people at the time. General Marshall, the Army chief of staff, told a reporter
he simply didn’t know how MacArthur had let his planes get caught on the ground. No formal investigation
was ever launched.
The political calculus was too complicated. MacArthur was already being positioned as a symbol of
American resistance in the Pacific, and the fall of the Philippines was going to be ugly enough without
adding a public reckoning over command failures at the top.
The men who paid the real price were the ones on the ground. The Filipino and American troops who
fought for months on the Bataan Peninsula without adequate air cover, without reinforcements, without
enough food—the men who became the Battling Bastards of Bataan—they inherited the consequences of
those nine hours of indecision. On April 9, 1942, about 78,000 of them surrendered to Japan. What followed
was the Bataan Death March.

What History Actually Concludes.

The honest historical verdict is nuanced, but it doesn’t let MacArthur off easily. The Philippines were
probably going to fall regardless. Japan’s strategic position, its air superiority, and the impossibility of
resupply from the American mainland made the long-term outcome nearly inevitable.
Even if Brereton’s B-17s had struck Formosa at dawn on December 8, they likely wouldn’t have changed
the ultimate result—though they might have imposed real costs and delayed Japan’s timetable.
But “probably would have lost anyway” is a very different thing from “the destruction of the Far East Air
Force was unavoidable.” It wasn’t. MacArthur had time. He had options. He had a subordinate commander
actively pleading to use them. The planes that burned on the runway at Clark Field didn’t have to be there,
wingtip to wingtip, waiting.
What the historical record shows most clearly is a man who, at the worst possible moment, failed to
decide. Whether that failure came from confusion, overconfidence, paralysis, or something more deliberate,
the effect was the same: a force that should have been in the air was on the ground when the Japanese
arrived.
It remains one of the most significant command failures in American military history. And unlike Pearl
Harbor, which became a synonym for surprise and shock, the disaster at Clark Field remains strangely
underexamined—a second catastrophe that happened in the shadow of the first, nine hours after there was
any excuse for surprise at all.

The Engineer Who Chose to Write

admin — Sat, 04 Jul 2026 17:47:38 +0000

I grew up in a modest home—my father worked as a factory hand. That didn’t stop me from being a happy
kid. I remember waiting all week for Fridays, because that was the day my dad brought home comic books,
and I’d tear through them before Saturday was even over. Superboy and Superman were my favorites.
It didn’t take long for comic books to give way to novels, and one title that stuck with me was The Twelve
Labors of Hercules. Still, even with all that love for reading, I was good at math in school, and that’s what
pushed me toward engineering.
Years went by, but the love of reading never left. When the chance finally came, I wrote my first book, set
in the business world—a safe choice. More books followed, and to my surprise, they found an audience.
But something kept nagging at me. I wanted to write about people who took charge of their own lives,
who took risks, who refused to back down. I’d always loved History—capital H—even its darkest chapters.
Eventually I decided it was time to take a bigger swing: a novel set during wartime. The only question left
was which war—the First or the Second? I went with the Second, and that’s how the Broken Sky Saga came
to be.
Here’s a little behind-the-scenes spoiler, for anyone following along: the next saga is headed to the
trenches of World War I.
But that’s a story for another day.