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Ivor Thord-Gray: The War Junkie by WILL DABBS

Some hard men covet war.

What makes men gravitate toward war? War is, after all, the most horrific of all human pursuits. Killing a lazy Saturday afternoon behind my favorite black rifle perforating paper or ringing steel is pure unfiltered recreation. By contrast, kicking in the door of a mud house dirty with tooled-up ISIS fanatics at three in the morning would be fairly horrifying. Given the obligatory terror, deprivation, physical pain, and emotional suffering concomitant with modern combat, why on earth would anyone do it willingly?

Foreigners have flocked to Ukraine by the thousands to fight.

That’s a thorny question. There are roughly 20,000 foreigners fighting in and for Ukraine as I type these words. They make up seven full battalions. I’m told most hail from the US, the UK, and Georgia (the country, not the state). Their respective nations warned these insanely brave adventurers not to do this. In the event of capture, they have literally zero support. Yet they went anyway.

The fight for Ukraine has most of the planet united against the Russian bully.

We humans do seem quick to embrace a proper crusade. In Ukraine, the Bad Guys are very, very bad, while the Good Guys seem pretty decent. We’re all going to die of something. It might as well be something that matters.

This is Tom Berenger as SSG Barnes from the Oliver Stone epic Platoon. I once served with a guy who was a bit like this. He was a force of nature.

On a certain visceral level, however, some folks are just addicted to the rush. SSG Barnes from the movie Platoon is the archetype. Once Barnes discovers that war is his calling he just cannot get enough.

I served with a guy like that back in the day. He did three combat tours in Vietnam and found it difficult to thrive away from a war zone. He was forced to retire with more than 30 years of service after beating the crap out of four MPs at once. He succumbed to a brain tumor shortly thereafter.

This dapper guy had more real-world combat cred than anyone I have ever heard of.

Today we will explore the extraordinary life of Ivor Thord-Gray. Thord-Gray was a combat addict. While history and his own memoires might have embellished his experiences somewhat, the places he went and the things he did are amply impressive even when viewed through that lens. His journey began in Stockholm, Sweden.

Origin Story

Ivor Thord-Gray was Swedish. His Viking ancestors would have been proud.

Ivor Thord-Gray was born Thord Ivar Hallström on April 17, 1878. The reasons he changed his name at some point have been lost to history. Ivor was the second son of a primary school teacher named August Hallström and his wife Hilda. He came from gifted stock.

Ivor’s older brother Gunnar was an artist of some renown.

Ivor’s older brother was the esteemed artist Gunnar August Hallström. His baby brother was an accomplished archaeologist named Gustaf. By all accounts, Ivor’s upbringing was typical for his geography and his era. However, from an early age, young Ivor was found to suffer from a most deplorable wanderlust.

Young Ivor saw the Merchant Marine as his ticket to adventure.

In 1893 at the age of fifteen Thord-Gray enlisted in the Merchant Marine in pursuit of adventure. For the next two years he sailed aboard three ships and explored the world. In 1895 at age seventeen he left the service to settle in Cape Town, South Africa.

Things Get Salty

Nelson Mandela served time at Robben Island. It is a tourist attraction today.

In 1896 at age 18 Ivor took a job as a prison guard at the South African prison on Robben Island. I obviously wasn’t there, but I rather suspect the young man got to meet some fascinating personalities in that job. While working at the prison Ivor became both a master fencer and a world-champion archer. The following year Ivor Thord-Gray thought he might try his hand at soldiering.

Ivor served a wide variety of causes. He tended to gravitate toward fighting regardless of the politics.

Over the course of the next decade, Ivor Thord-Gray fought in five conflicts. The first and last were under the Union Jack. One stint was served alongside the Germans.

In his prime, Ivor Thord-Gray cut quite the dashing figure.

Thord-Gray first fought as a Private soldier with the Cape Mounted Riflemen during the Boer War. As a native Swede, the argument could be made he really didn’t have a dog in that fight. However, this was his first taste of proper war, and he found he had a knack for it.

Along the way, Ivor Thord-Gray mastered the Maxim machine gun.

With the formalized violence abating, Thord-Gray found that the weight of a pistol on his belt suited him. He therefore signed on with the South African Constabulary and served as a policeman from 1902 through 1903. During his time in the Boer War and the South African Constabulary, Ivor served as an instructor in the care and feeding of the Maxim machine gun.

This is CPT Thord-Gray while a member of Royston’s Horse.

Following a brief period in the Transvaal Civil Service, Ivor joined the German Schutztruppe of European volunteers fighting in Africa. During this time he would have at least touched the Namaqua and Herero genocides, the first such travesties of the 20th century in which some 80,000 people perished.

He later joined the Lydenburg Militia, this time as an officer. He fought through the Bambatha Zulu Rebellion as a Lieutenant in Royston’s Horse. He battled the Zulus at Mome Gorge where between 3,000 and 4,000 African warriors fell in battle. During this gory fight, Thord-Gray commanded a battery of Maxim machine guns. The resulting contest between assegai spears and belt-fed machineguns was a proper slaughter.

Here we have Ivor Thord-Gray in the uniform of the paramilitary Philippine Constabulary.

There followed a year as a Captain of the Nairobi Mounted Police in Kenya before Thord-Gray grew dissatisfied with the available chaos on the African continent. After an unsuccessful effort to join the Kaiser’s forces fighting in Morocco, Thord-Gray migrated to the Philippines to become part of the US Foreign Legion. By now he was serving as a Captain with the Philippine Constabulary. He was at this point in our tale 30 years old and had already carried a gun under more flags than I can reasonably catalog. It turned out he was just getting started.

Sundry Bush Wars

In 1911 the Italians were fighting the Turks in Libya, so Thord-Gray made his way there looking for trouble.

Ivor tried his hand at farming in Malaya for a couple of years but soon grew bored with it. He joined the French Foreign Legion in the Tonkin Protectorate of North Vietnam in 1909 and fought in Hoang Hoa Tham’s rebellion. He spent 1911 fighting alongside the Italians as they forcibly evicted the Ottomans from Tripoli. By 1913 he was fighting in the Chinese Revolution.

Thord-Gray is second from the right alongside one of his Mexican gun crews. This picture was taken at Hermosillo, Mexico, in December 1913.

From China, Ivor sailed to Mexico to offer his now-extensive martial expertise to Pancho Villa. In short order, he had been appointed a Captain in Villa’s army in charge of the revolutionary’s artillery. At this time Villa and his rebels were supported by the United States against the Huerta political regime, though Uncle Sam obviously soured on Villa in fairly short order.

Ivor repaired disabled guns and smuggled weapons from the United States. Over the next twelve months, he quickly rose through the ranks to Colonel. He ultimately served as Chief of Staff of the 1st Mexican Army. However, it turned out all this was simply preparation for the Main Event. Back in Europe, things were heating up fast.

The First War to End All Wars

Ivor Thord-Gray served as a battalion commander in an esteemed British regiment in combat during WW1. This guy was an epic piece of work.

The British Army was a growth industry in 1914, so Ivor Thord-Gray signed up. His extensive military history secured him the rank of Major in the King’s service. You recall Thord-Gray was still technically Swedish.

Within a year he was the commander of the 11th Battalion Northumberland Fusiliers. In late August 1914, Thord-Gray and his Fusiliers landed in France ready to scrap. Two weeks later they were on the front line. Before the war finally wrapped up, Thord-Gray had grievously offended his British commanders but had also been awarded the 1914-15 Star, the British War Medal, and the Allied Victory Medal.

After the armistice he wrote the Military Secretary at the War Office as follows, “Would you kindly inform me whether you have any objection to my offering my sword to France, Belgium, or Serbia.” Throughout it all there was a persistent allegation that Ivor Thord-Gray was actually a German spy.

Here we see Ivor Thord-Gray (right) in his Canadian uniform during the war in Russia.

Thord-Gray tried and failed to join the American Army and settled for Canada instead. He served for a time as Inspector of the Imperial Munitions Board in Montreal. He eventually deployed as part of the Canadian Siberian Expeditionary Force to fight in the Russian Civil War.

This is Thord-Gray in his Russian uniform. You could make a decent career out of cataloging this guy’s multinational combat decorations.

Thord-Gray transferred to the Russian “White” Army in the winter of 1919 as a Colonel serving under Admiral Alexander Kolchak. Before the year was out he was a division commander of the 1st Siberian Assault Division.

Less than a year later he was a Major General serving in the Provisional Siberian Government. One of his tasks was to sell gold reserves to foreign banks. Ivor was captured by the Soviets in the winter of 1919 with the capitulation of Vladivostok but successfully concealed the gold receipts in his pocket. One was valued at $146,946, a king’s ransom at the time. With the Communists clearly in their ascendency, Thord-Gray thought he’d just hang onto the cash.

The Golden Years

By 1923 the world was getting smaller, so Ivor Thord-Gray thought he might give making money a whirl.

Finally in 1923 at the age of 45, Ivor Thord-Gray was ready for a break. He returned to Sweden, the country of his birth, and penned a popular tome on Mexican archaeology. Two years later he emigrated to the US and started an investment bank under the flag I.T. Gray and Co in New York City. He used the pilfered Russian gold money as a seed for his new banking endeavor.

This was but a portion of Ivor Thord-Gray’s chest salad.

Thord-Gray’s final mercenary foray saw him serving as a Lieutenant-General in the Army of Venezuela in 1928. While there he fought the dictator General Juan Vicente Gomez but lost. He then returned to Sweden yet again and, in his free time, earned his Ph.D. from Uppsala University.

Here we see Major General Ivor Thord-Gray in his American uniform.

Getting rich in America suited the man. By 1934 he was married and had two children. He settled with his family in Greenwich, Connecticut. In the summer of 1935 Thord-Gray was appointed Major General and Chief of Staff to Florida Governor David Scholtz. By 1942 his primary mission was counter-espionage in Florida.

In his declining years, Ivor Thord-Gray wrote fairly prolifically using his many-splendored exploits as grist for his typewriter. He was ultimately kind-of married five times and penned seven books.

His most popular work was titled Gringo Rebel: Mexico 1913-1914, a tome relating his experiences fighting in the Mexican-American War. Thord-Gray eventually established a winter home in Coral Gables, Florida.

By the end of his life, Thord-Gray had thrived through fully six careers as a sailor, soldier, ethnologist, linguist, investor, and commercial writer. He served in ten identifiable armies across sixteen wars. This remarkable man peacefully shuffled off this mortal coil in the summer of 1964 at the age of 88. His extraordinary life was that of the archetypal war junkie.

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SSG Alan Magee: The Luckiest Man in the World by WILL DABBS

In a bygone era, sneezing was understood to be the body’s involuntary effort at expelling evil spirits. Thus the admonition of “Bless you” with each iteration.

Luck. Now that’s a difficult concept to get your head around. Even this deep into the Information Age when most modern folks worship at the exalted altar of science, you can still find people who refuse to walk under a ladder, won’t open an umbrella indoors, or say “Bless you” when someone nearby sneezes. We humans are pretty darn strange.

This was an epic read.

However, what do you expect? Random chance is indeed a fickle mistress. In the superb book Bravo Two Zero by Andy McNab, two SAS operators are sitting side by side in a stolen car stopped at a roadblock on a black rainy night in the Iraqi desert during the First Gulf War. The two men are oriented shoulder-to-shoulder, and the car is stopped in a long line of vehicles rendered immobile by an Iraqi checkpoint.

In combat little things can become big things. Folks often live or die based upon the vagaries of fate.

When discovery was inevitable the two men bailed out of the car, one on the left and the other on the right. One man escaped to freedom, while the other was killed. They began in the same spot, yet each man’s ultimate fate was driven by the side of the car he exited. It’s hard not to get a little weirded out over stuff like that.

I’ve been through too much myself to put a great deal of credence in blind chance. In the dark places Jesus has always worked for me.

Personally, I attribute such stuff to Divine Providence. My faith that an all-powerful God loves and watches over me is a source of great comfort when life is going pear-shaped. God and I have gotten through some remarkable scrapes together. However, in the case of SSG Alan Magee, we find a tale that strains credulity. His story would be impossible to believe had it not been reliably verified.

The Man

The B17 Flying Fortress was one exceptionally pretty warplane. I’d likely feel differently were it dropping bombs on me.
While the B17 got most of the press, there were half again more Liberators in service. The B24 was the most-produced bomber aircraft in history.

Alan Eugene Magee was born on January 13, 1919, the youngest of six children. He grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey. When the war broke out Magee enlisted in the US Army Air Corps and trained to be a gunner on a heavy bomber. The heavies—the B17 Flying Fortress and the B24 Liberator—promised to revolutionize warfare. Through these expensive strategic assets, the Allies hoped to break the will of the German people to fight. Victory, however, would come at a terrible cost.

1LT Jacob Fredericks named this particular B17. 1LT Fredericks had been an engineer at Kellogg’s making Rice Krispies before the war. He originally picked the plane up at Kellogg Field in Battle Creek, MI, where both the cereal and the plane were made. Naming the machine after a breakfast cereal was a no-brainer.

SSG Magee’s mount, a B17F christened “Snap! Crackle Pop!,” carried a crew of ten. WW2-era fliers had a good deal more latitude to personalize their aircraft than we did when I flew for Uncle Sam. Part of that was because so many of these old planes were destroyed so quickly. Tactical aircraft fighting in WW2 frequently did not survive very long in combat. By contrast, our mounts operating without anybody actively shooting at us were expected to last essentially indefinitely.

I got to fly these things, but they were not my airplanes. The flight engineers and crew dogs owned the aircraft. We pilots just drove them from time to time.

For a time I flew an entirely different Boeing product. In my day the flight engineer and crew chief owned the airplane. It was their names that rightfully got stenciled on the sides. The pilots just borrowed them from time to time. We typically drew specific tail numbers for specific missions at the whim of the maintenance officers. When we deployed to some austere spaces we’d typically personalize our aircraft with chalk intending to wash it off when we got home.

You have to be careful what you scribble on the outside of a military aircraft. Sometimes sensitive eyes can see that stuff once you get back to the World.

One of my flight engineers returned from a desert deployment with something quite risqué scrawled on the belly of his aircraft. I never crawled underneath them, so I had no idea it was there. Apparently his pornographic expression was intended to entertain the infantry guys with whom we operated. That was all fine until we got back to home station and did a demo for the local press. The belly of his airplane replete with graphic anatomical references made the front page of the local newspaper. Steve, I bet you thought I had forgotten that. Those were some epically great times.

The Plane

The G-Model B17 Flying Fortress can be differentiated at a glance by the two-gun powered chin turret in the nose.

The B17G was the definitive late-war Fortress. The G-model included such upgrades as a motorized chin turret up front to help dissuade attacking enemy fighters from trying nose-on attacks. SSG Magee’s B17F lacked this particular system in favor of a brace of free fifties in ball mounts in the front Plexiglas.

A modified version of the Wright Cyclone radial engine that powered the B17 actually drove certain models of the M4 Sherman tank as well.

“Snap! Crackle! Pop!” was one of 12,726 of the heavy bombers that rolled out of two plants during World War 2. These planes were powered by four Wright R-1820-97 Cyclone supercharged radial engines each producing 1,200 horsepower. The Wright Cyclone was an iconic design also used in the P36 Hawk, the Douglas DC-3, the SBD Dauntless dive bomber, the Sikorsky H34 helicopter, and, in slightly modified form, certain variants of the M4 Sherman tank.

While obliterating strategic enemy targets was the stated mission of the B17 and B24 heavy bombers, attritting German fighter stocks was also an implicit goal.

The B17’s bomb load ranged from 4,500 to 8,000 pounds depending upon the required range and environmental conditions. The maximum takeoff weight was a whopping 65,500 pounds, and the plane cruised at 158 knots or 182 miles per hour. The B17’s service ceiling was 35,600 feet.

The B17 veritably bristled with AN/M2 .50-caliber machine-guns.

SSG Magee’s B17F packed eleven AN/M2 .50-caliber machineguns in a variety of handheld and powered mountings. These weapons and mounts were meticulously designed to provide optimal coverage all around the plane, particularly when flown as part of an extensive and coordinated formation with multiple aircraft. SSG Magee was a relatively short man, so he got tagged for the ball turret.

The Sperry Ball Turret

Though undeniably weird, the Sperry ball turret was an effective, combat-proven design.

Sperry and Emerson Electric both developed examples of powered ball turrets for use in ventral mounts on combat aircraft during World War 2. The Sperry design was deemed superior and placed into mass production. While the mounts were radically different, both the B17 and the B24 used the same gun turret.

Everything about the ball turret was cramped.

The tricycle landing gear design of the B24 necessitated a retractable mount for the ball turret. Were it not for the retractable mount the turret would strike the ground when the pilot rotated the aircraft for takeoff. By contrast, the conventional landing gear layout of the B17 allowed the ball turret to remain in place through all modes of flight.

You more wore the ball turret than crewed it. It would have been an awfully lonely place in combat.

The ball turret was unimaginably cramped. As a result, this position was typically relegated to the smallest member of the crew. To enter the turret the guns were swiveled straight down, and the gunner entered through a small metal hatch in the back. Once in place, the gunner sat in the fetal position flanked on each side by the ample breaches of his twin Browning fifty-caliber machineguns. There was an electronic reflex sight mounted between the gunner’s feet. Charging these weapons and clearing stoppages were incredible chores within the cramped confines of the ball turret. Ammunition fed from the belly of the plane through a pair of articulated feed chutes.

There wasn’t room in the ball turret for a parachute.

Because of the dearth of usable space, ball turret gunners flew without parachutes. Their chutes were stowed in the crew compartment nearby. However, to bail out, the ball turret gunner had to swivel the guns straight down, unlock and open the access panel, crawl backward out of the turret, attach the parachute, and exit the aircraft. As you might imagine, in a plane that might be gyrating wildly or on fire this could be quite the impressive feat.

The Event

Like many warplanes of its era, “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” didn’t last long in combat.

On January 3, 1943, SSG Magee strapped into “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” for his seventh combat mission while assigned to the 350th Bomb Squadron of the 303d Bomb Group. Their objective this fateful day was a daylight run over Saint-Nazaire, France. The submarines that sortied out of Saint-Nazaire caused no end of frustration to trans-Atlantic convoys. As a result, Allied planners invested tremendous effort in trying to take out the sub pens that housed and serviced them.

Flak is an abbreviation of the German word Flugabwehrkanone which means “Air Defense Cannon.”

Once near the target, SSG Magee’s aircraft encountered murderously thick flak. A nearby shell burst from a high-velocity 88mm flak gun disabled his ball turret and liberally ventilated both the fuselage of the airplane as well as SSG Magee. SSG Magee clambered out of the turret with difficulty only to find that his parachute had been shredded by the flak hit. As he tried to get his head around that revelation a second shell tore off part of the right-wing. Now uncontrollable, “Snap! Crackle! Pop!” entered a vicious spin.

SSG Magee’s B17 disintegrated in mid-air.

SSG Magee’s plane was at cruising altitude, and his quick egress from the ball turret left him without access to the plane’s oxygen supply. He somehow made it to the radio compartment before losing consciousness due to hypoxia. Soon thereafter his B17 disintegrated.

That SSG Alan Magee survived being thrown clear of his disabled B17 at more than 20,000 feet without a parachute was a legitimate miracle.

SSG Magee was miraculously thrown free of the crippled airplane and fell some four miles toward the French ground below. He ultimately ended up crashing through the glass roof of the Saint-Nazaire train station. Passersby found him unconscious but alive on the floor of the terminal.

Both SSG Magee and his aircraft were well and truly mangled.

SSG Magee had 28 different shrapnel wounds from the original flak attack. In addition, he suffered multiple broken bones, severe facial trauma, and damage to both his lungs and kidneys. His right arm was also nearly severed from tearing through the glass of the train station. However, he was inexplicably still alive.

The Rest of the Story

I’ve done this before. Trust me, you come screaming out of the sky at an impressive clip. I can’t imagine surviving such an event without a parachute.

Terminal velocity for a limp human is about 120 miles per hour. Nothing about SSG Magee’s ordeal should have been survivable. However, he was taken prisoner by the Germans and eventually recovered after some decent medical care. He spent more than two years in a German POW camp before being liberated in May of 1945. Once he was repatriated he was awarded the Air Medal along with a well-deserved Purple Heart.

SSG Alan Magee went on to enjoy a long full life. Here he is seen at a memorial for his downed B17 in Europe.

After the war, Alan Magee earned his pilot’s license and worked in the airline industry. He retired in 1979 and moved to New Mexico. SSG Magee died in January of 2003 of a stroke and kidney failure at the ripe age of 84, arguably the luckiest man alive.