The bomb, the bombing and the bomber.
Watch the evolution of this piece from story to conclusion: we are all the same piece of wood.
I’m going to tell you two stories that take you to the same place. The stories are, in fact, one story, split into two.
The first story is longish, the other quite short. They are about the English city of Bath, a travel guide that cost more than 400 people their lives, a penitent bomber pilot and the man who broke what was then considered the most unassailable athletic record on earth.
Remember, I am taking you down two interconnected roads to the most important advice I can give you.
One last hint: the last tell is a doozy.
Story Number One; The The Bomb Story
On May 12, 2016, a backhoe operator in Bath, England, was excavating at the site of what had been, just a few years before, a busy schoolyard.
He felt something very hard scrape against his shovel. Luckily for all, he stopped.
It was a bomb, a 500-pound ordinance, found at the former Royal Junior High School. The bomb lay only three feet under the surface.
Police were called and the area cordoned off. Doors were knocked on, barriers were thrown up. People toddling back home from the pub and those just sitting down to dinner were relocated to the most viable refuge: the shelter of the local race course.
Thousands of tons of sand were carefully stacked around the bomb and one lucky volunteer defused it. The ordinance was then trucked to a local quarry and detonated.
The source of the bomb was no mystery to the older people in Bath - a city of 107,000 located 90 minutes by car from London. It fell to earth in April of 1942 when the German Luftwaffe temporarily shifted attention from the nightly bombing of London to rain down bombs on Bath.
The bombing, carried out over just two nights, killed 417 people and wounded more than 1,000 more. Bath was then a city of 68,000 people. Among the dead: nine Smiths, seven Fords and six people named Davis. The Luftwaffe never returned.
Why Bath?
The onslaught puzzled the British War Office. Bath had no military value. It is named after its intricate baths, a holdover from the days of the Romans.
Eager to discern a pattern, British Intelligence began to study similar bombings. The Germans also hit other non-military targets: Exeter, Canterbury and Norwich.
And then someone broke the riddle. Those four cities were listed as three-stars or higher attractions in the widely circulated Baedeker (pronounced BAY-decker) travel guide, a book published in Germany.
The Germans were retaliating for the Allied bombings of the culturally significant German city of Lubëck by diverting bombers to cities favored by the guidebook.
Someone, perhaps Hitler himself, had grabbed the guide, pointed to Bath and the others, and said: “There.” That decision cost 417 people their lives.
And that’s why the bombings were called the Baedeker Blitz.
The Pilot.
Will Schludecker conducted 127 missions, an astonishing number. The career (and usually the life) of a German pilot, on average, lasted seven missions. The raids on Bath would be among his last.
Schludecker was 87 when he visited Bath in 2008 and saw, first hand, the scars still left on the city. He met the families of some of the people he and his comrades killed and was read newspaper stories detailing the onslaught he helped unleash. Will Schludecker had no way of knowing, of course, that one last exploding memento of the raid would be found in a former schoolyard eight years later.
“I am deeply touched by the pictures I’ve seen that were taken from the ground after the attacks,” he said through a translator. “I realize that the war caused dreadful harm to your city and its people.”
“There is no other way for me than to ask you all for forgiveness for any pain that I might have caused or any damage that I might have inflicted in 1942,” he said. “Please accept my sincere apology.”
In the way of old soldiers, Schludecker found good company in the men who had set out to kill him.
One of those men was RAF airman Peter McMillan. A few months after bombing Bath, Schludecker was forced to crashland his plane near the Holland airstrip the Germans had built. McMillan had mangled the bomber with machine gun fire.
After five months in hospital, Will’s broken body would no longer fly and he was redeployed as an instructor. It was only through crashing that Schludecker outran the eventual annihilation of the Luftwaffe and the death of so many of its pilots. Nearly 300,000 members of the Luftwaffe were killed or declared missing in action.
“And so my friend Peter McMillan probably helped me to stay alive,” Schludecker told his new friends in Bath. “I have much to thank him for. When Peter and I first met, in the spring of 2000, we former adversaries found that despite all odds we were made from the same stem of wood; we had the same passion for flying. We hugged one another and became friends.“
The people of Bath were profoundly moved by the contrition brought to them by Will Schludecker. Many offered an embrace and reminded him that he was just doing his duty.
In 2010, with his daughter by his side, Will passed away of natural causes at the age of 90 in a Cologne hospital.
Thus died the last flying member of his unit, the Kampfgeschwader 2. Nearly 2,000 airmen from the unit were killed or listed as missing in action and his death prompted the final disbanding of the unit. The unit flag was tucked into the coffin beside him.
Story Number Two. The Four Minute Mile Story.
Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927. No one not named Babe Ruth had hit more in a season than 47.
Now imagine that since the first professional baseball game in 1871 not one player had ever hit a home run until Babe Ruth, in 1927, struck the first. In that fictional scenario, Major League Baseball had existed for 56 years without a home run.
That was the comparative significance of the sub-four minute mile.
The first timed race was run in Oxford England in 1850 and for 100 years the invincible nature of the sub Four Minute Mile grew in the minds of its pursuers. Newspapers speculated that the energy loss necessary to break the record could kill a man.
What else could explain a record that many could approach but never attain. The Telegraph newspaper compared the Four-Minute Mile to the supposedly unreachable summit at Mt. Everest.
On May 3, 1954, more than 100 years after that first clocking, 25-year old Roger Bannister arrived at Oxford to find high winds that he believed would keep him from an assault on the record.
The breeze on that Thursday afternoon died down and Bannister changed his mind. The stands, though full, held only 3,000 people.
He used two friends, Chris Brasher and Christopher Chataway to pace him. Bannister shouted for more speed in the first lap, so great was his energy, but Brasher wisely ignored him.
Chataway led him to the brink of the homestretch and Bannister lunged for the finish line, crossing it in a time of 3:59.4.
The irresistible force had conquered the immovable object.
The Connecting Tissue Between These Two Stories.
Roger Bannister’s record lasted just 46 days before it was broken by Australian John Landy.
Just three years later, it would be bettered by 15 other runners.
Five years after Bannister, the first American high school runner broke the four-minute mark.
At last count, about 1,500 people have glided past the standard.
It was the belief of its invincibility that made the sub-four minute mile so formidable. Once Bannister shredded that illusion, the standard showed itself for what it was … just a shadow.
That is the power, for good and for bad, of the mind.
So much of the tiny disclosures were deliberate and considered.
All the precautions, the rerouting of people, the sand piles, the transfer of residents to the racecourse, underscored the potential hazard of the bomb.
Nine Smiths, seven Fords, six people named Davis, those names spoke to the profound impact of the bombing on individuals and extended families.
Will Schludecker’s burial with the unit flag spoke to the death, not just of a man, but of a fighting force rendered irrelevant in a time of peace.
And now, ladies and gentlemen…
I told you those two stories to illustrate the power of permission.
If you need permission to do something you may have tried and given up on, something you nonetheless want to achieve, let me be the first to grant it. In this case, that something is writing your book.
It feels intimidating to consider writing your thoughts and beliefs and share the crucial experiences from which they were forged.
Your book doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be true.
Just because you can’t replicate Prince’s version of While My Guitar Gently Weeps doesn’t mean you can’t be a musician. It just means you can’t be Prince. Take a number.
People often tell me they can’t write a book.
I get won’t. We all have our priorities. Won’t is fine.
When you say can’t, you deny yourself one of the most beneficial, challenging experiences imaginable, something that could reshape your business and redirect your life … for nothing, for a false idea, a mirage.
As human beings we often need permission to soar past the untruths of our self-imposed limitations, to shatter supposedly invincible standards as Bannister did or, like Will Schludecker, seek forgiveness from those we have grievously wronged.
That’s what life is: falling short and seeking atonement, mustering our courage and achieving what we think we cannot manage or what, deep in our hearts, we wrongly believe we do not deserve.
Will Schludecker showed me. We are all made from the same stem of wood.
And, oh yes: Roger Bannister was from Bath. While the Luftwaffe were razing his city, 13-year-old Roger Bannister huddled in the basement of his home with his sister and parents. When the bombing stopped, the family exited to find the home half blown apart.