Alex Paul
There are defining moments in any life. For Ernie Pickett, one such moment came in 1936 when his brother, Gene, bought his 17-year-old brother a ride in a bright yellow biplane over the beach in Crescent City, Calif.
That single event kindled a burning passion in the young Pickett that would not die.
Eight years later, that passion for flying instilled in the now Air Corps lieutenant, would lead to a year in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. Those 12 months left physical and emotional scars which took decades to heal.
Pickett’s daughter, Kristi Pickett Burke has, through a labor of love, put her father’s story to paper letter by letter over a 10 year period. She sealed her work with the tears of those who survived their own personal torture at the hands of the enemy.
Burke’s, “Proof Through the Night” is an historical passage into the life of her father, former Sweet Home resident Ernest Pickett, who grew up roaming the Oregon forestlands barefoot and saw manhood forced upon him and millions of others like him with the outbreak of World War II.
Burke’s passage, built slowly and methodically, chronicles the year her father spent in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. It is, as journalist Jim Lehrer noted, “a stunningly important book about courage and suffering, heroism and humanity.”
U.S. Senator John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, called the book a “graceful tribute to a quiet hero who sought only to serve his country well and in doing so brought her glory.”
The author, now 45, remembers growing up in Florence where her family owned an auto parts store. She knew as a youth that her father had been a W.W.II pilot, was shot down over Japan, was badly burned and captured.
What Burke never knew until she began slowly weave together bits and pieces of his story, was that her father had endured a year of punishment at the hands of the Japanese that would shape his life for decades.
Some 5,000 copies of Proof Through the Night have been printed by Opal Creek Press. Burke has previously published a biography of Izzy Covalt of Albany, a homegrown pizza restaurateur.
Burke and her father labored over Proof Through the Night, often only writing one chapter per year. Burke, who lives in Salem, had lived in the Lake Oswego area during the time much of the book was being written. She would venture to Eugene each month for a weekend visit and chat with her father.
Her father never got to read the finished manuscript, losing a battle with cancer in 1999 at age 80.
His widow, Faye (Gedney), whom he met in Sweet Home, survives. When the two met, she worked in a local bank and he drove log truck.
The two married while he was stationed at a training base in Kansas, shortly before he was shipped overseas. Mrs. Pickett learned of her husband’s capture from a news report that included a photograph taken by Japanese soldiers of a downed pilot named “Bicket”.
Mrs. Pickett helped her daughter by providing memorabilia such as photographs, a leather aviator’s jacket, medals and telegrams. Burke’s research even took her to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum and the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
Unique in the book’s telling is the story of America’s involvement in the B-29 bomber program, and the bravery of flight crews whose paths took them over the “Hump” the Himalayas from India into China. Their goal was to supply airbases where planes could be launched to attack Japan. Often, the huge payloads they carried put the crew’s life in dangerous peril. Many crews sacrificed their lives to make the push toward Japan a reality.
It was August 20, 1944 when Pickett’s life and the lives of his 10 crewmen changed dramatically. They had trained for two years and were making their first daylight attack with the huge B-29s on Japan.
Pickett’s plane named the Reddy Teddy, was hit while it bombed a steel mill.
Four crew members died. Burke’s father and six others bailed out of the burning aircraft.
Pickett described his capture through the words of his daughter, “Below my feet was an alarmingly foreign-looking land. I was falling into a congested residential area. More than a hundred angry-looking shouting people were out in the street watching as I fell toward them. Except for a few soldiers in uniform, they all appeared to be civilians and were waving wooden sticks and clubs of all shapes and sizes.
“As I drew nearer, they formed a ring in the middle of the street. I could see that I was going to fall right into the middle of it.”
Pickett’s burns were so severe he couldn’t hold chopsticks. Weighing 170 pounds when captured, Pickett weighed just 97 pounds when the POW camp was liberated.
During the many conversations she had with her father, Burke learned that the scars on her father’s arms weren’t just from the burning plane but also from the lighted cigarettes of his captors. The book details Pickett’s battle with dysentary, starvation, lack of medical treatment and physical and mental abuse.
Pickett said of his treatment by the Japanese military police, “I evaded. I lied. I answered in vague generalities. They answered with rifle butts to the head, kicks to the stomach and groin and every other variety of beating one can imagine. They repeated the tortures I’d experienced before. I alternately passed out and revived.”
Proof Through the Night also tells of hope and healing.
Pickett was nursed back to health over time and moved to Florence where he and Faye reared three children.
Burke traces her father’s healing from a time when he buried his past and sought quiet solitude to a life of community service—including terms on the city council—and devotion to his children.
The book tells how Pickett, like many other W.W.II veterans carried a disdain for Asians for many years and yet came to grips with those feelings, evolving into empathy for how horrific the war was for the average Japanese person.
“I can’t say I wish the Japanese nation well,” Pickett said. “It bothered me when we began importing so many Japanese cars into this country and I had to sell the parts for them, but that is more of a political issue for me now, not an issue of race.”
In her author’s note, Burke says, “I’ve discovered that our world is peopled with quiet heroes. Not all of them are veterans of wars. Some might be immigrants, or volunteers, or people who have overcome disadvantage. We pass them every day on the street and don’t recognize them. Ernest Pickett was one of those heroes. In my eyes, he was a hero during the war, but even more, he was a hero after. He had every excuse to be less than he was. His challenges and faults were sometimes large. But to me, his heroism is that he continued to strive to become better, to love more, to give more, to have more grace for others. And he succeeded. When he had nothing else left physically, what was left was his love. That he gave freely.”
Book signing: Kristi Burke will sign copies of Proof Through the Night at the East Linn Museum from noon to 4 p.m. March 30. Copies of the book are available at the museum and Odyssey Book Store in Lebanon.