The Bomber Pilot at My Kitchen Table

I’d like to introduce you to my father, because he’s the reason I had the hubris to believe I could analyze American politics today against Germany a century ago and even ask the question: are we living in a Nazi state?

My father was Lt. Col. Graham Labin Bleiler. As a captain in World War II, he flew B‑17s and later B‑29s in the Pacific theater, notably over “the Hump”—the eastern end of the Himalayas, where American crews flew precarious missions from India into China to resupply Chinese and American soldiers. A commendation from the Chinese government for those flights hangs on my wall. Later, he took part in the fire raids over Tokyo, three nights of bombing meant to pummel Japan into surrender and avoid an Allied invasion. It didn’t work, and you likely know the rest. I explore that moment in more detail in the book, because it was pivotal in his life and, by extension, in mine.

After the war, he served several more years in what became the U.S. Air Force, including during the Korean conflict, and finished his career as a Strategic Air Command pilot in Roswell, New Mexico, where I was born (but to different parents). When he retired, he and my mother returned to Bozeman, Montana, where he had once taught ROTC. That’s where I grew up—and where we spent many evenings after supper with my globe and his photos spread across the kitchen table, talking about the war. I still have a scrapbook from when I was about ten: childish drawings of horses, dogs, and cats; notes my friends and I passed in class; and black‑and‑white photos from the war that he gave me, including one of a Buddhist monk in the act of self‑immolation.

As I got older, I wanted to understand more than the adventure stories. Even as a kid, I sensed that while he told those stories like scenes from an Indiana Jones movie (long before there was an Indiana Jones), there were shadows he wasn’t sharing. So I began what became a lifelong effort to understand the geopolitics of the war and how it swept up my German‑American father, who grew up in central Pennsylvania. I wanted to understand him. He was gone long before I felt I’d succeeded—but I did get there.

So when the current administration came along, I thought all I needed to do was dust off the books I’d collected about the rise of the National Socialist Party and answer the question of whether we were in danger of becoming a similar oppressive state.

What I found was more complex, and that’s the book I hope you will read. My father is a large part of why I believed I could write it—and why I felt I had to. He served this country in uniform for more than two decades to protect our democracy. I hope I’ve written with both our voices.

If this resonates with you and you want to follow along as I keep writing about American democracy, you can join the email list and be the first to know when new commentary and updates on Becoming the Blizzard are published.

Capt. Graham L. Bleiler during WWII