On “a lovely Sunday afternoon” in October 1943, Frank Murphy, Atlanta native and product of Marist School and Emory University, was flying high above Munster, Germany. His B-17 had dropped its load of bombs on the factories below during yet another dangerous daylight bombing mission and was turning back toward its base in the English countryside.
As usual, Luftwaffe fighters had scrambled and swarmed the cumbersome American bombers, trying to shoot them out of the sky. The Americans fired back.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
“The fighters came on with complete disregard for our guns,” he wrote in his 2001 memoir “Luck of the Draw.” One of them scored a direct hit on Murphy’s aircraft, there was an explosion, and it felt to him like they had slammed into a brick wall. As smoke filled the aircraft, the 22-year-old Murphy knew his war had changed completely.
“It was all over,” he wrote. “We were going down.” As he descended in his parachute, “Suddenly, it seemed deathly quiet. There was no more battle noise, no guns firing, no smell of cordite, no engines straining and groaning, no intercom chatter.”
On the ground, he was captured and sent to Stalag Luft III, the same Nazi prisoner of war camp that was the setting for the 1963 movie “The Great Escape,” a mostly accurate movie, except for the addition of Steve McQueen on a motorcycle.
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
Capt. Frank Murphy would be a Nazi prisoner until the end of World War II, losing 50 pounds during his nearly two years of captivity. Those prisoners in “The Great Escape” who smuggled dirt out of the tunnels and dropped it surreptitiously down their pants in the prison yard? Murphy was one of those guys.
“When I first met Frank, I wouldn’t have even known he’d been in the war,” his widow, Ann Murphy, says 80 years later in her Buckhead apartment. “He never talked about it. The only reason I knew he was a prisoner of war is that his mother told me. It didn’t seem to bother him.”
Frank Murphy married Ann in 1949 and for years was not particularly interested in talking about his war years. When his four children got to be older and started asking questions, he decided to write a memoir, just to share with his family.
About eight years of intensive research and writing later, the memoir had grown enormously in scope, telling both his story and that of the overall role of the 100th Bomber Group. Known as the “Bloody Hundredth” because of its high casualty rate, it was part of the Eighth Air Force that helped win the European Theater in World War II. The odds against an airman in the 100th BG returning safely at the time were 3-to-1 against.
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
In 2001, a small press published “Luck of the Draw.” The book is now being reissued on Feb. 28 in a new, heavily promoted edition by St. Martin’s Press with a blurb on the cover from Tom Hanks. Later this year, the book and Murphy will be part of the historical foundation of “Masters of the Air,” a miniseries co-produced by Hanks and Steven Spielberg for Apple TV+ using some of the creative team of HBO’s “Band of Brothers.” No release date has been announced.
The miniseries has been in the works for a long time. When Ann Murphy turned 90 almost three years ago, Hanks called her in Atlanta to wish her a happy birthday. You’ve got to stick around until the miniseries comes out, he told her.
Overlooking the starting line of the Peachtree Road Race, Ann Murphy’s Buckhead apartment is filled with art and antiques she and Frank collected during their long marriage. After the war he became a lawyer for Lockheed Corp. and traveled the world negotiating contracts with foreign governments.
When he retired, his home office was full of memorabilia from the war and an eventful life: His Purple Heart, a football award from Marist, a bar from a British pub just like the ones he drank in as a young man and framed black-and-white photos of the twisted wreckage of his B-17 laying in a German field.
Frank Murphy died in 2007 at the age of 85, but his office looks as if he just stepped away.
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
Credit: Natrice Miller / Natrice.Miller@ajc.com
Murphy was born in 1921 in an Atlanta unimaginably different from today’s city. Early chapters of “Luck of the Draw” recount him riding the streetcars down McLendon Avenue, watching the Atlanta Crackers play at Ponce de Leon Park and seeing propeller planes take off and land at Candler Field, the site that eventually became Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.
A few weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Force, as it was then called, and became a bomber navigator in Europe. It was too difficult to accurately bomb strategic targets at night, the brass decided, so the bombers flew over enemy territory in broad daylight, making them easy targets for Luftwaffe fighters and anti-aircraft guns.
“Why some of us survived and others did not was a complete mystery,” Murphy wrote in his memoir. “Though some suggest otherwise, courage and skill played little part in an airman’s likelihood of survival in the great air battles over Europe in the Second World War. One was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, or he was not. A bullet had your name on it, or it didn’t. It was the luck of the draw. It was as simple as that.”
After the war, when some of the veterans started having reunions, Frank showed no interest. But then he read Len Deighton’s novel “Goodbye, Mickey Mouse,” a fictionalized version of the Eighth Air Force’s time in England.
“Dad read that book, and he started attending reunions and reconnecting with people,” says his daughter Elizabeth Murphy, an author of children’s books. “Guys from the crew started coming to visit.”
Credit: St. Martin's Press
Credit: St. Martin's Press
She gave him some guidance on writing and steered him to a small publisher who was also connected to the Eighth. Murphy frequently gave away copies of “Luck of the Draw,” and what little sales it generated went to the 100th Bomb Group Foundation and the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler.
Frank Murphy had a lifelong love of music, and played saxophone and clarinet, including in a makeshift jazz band in the prisoner of war camp. He travelled extensively, collected antiques, regularly rooted in person for the Atlanta Braves and Falcons.
“My grandfather loved life and loved having people all around him,” says his granddaughter Chloe Melas, an entertainment reporter for CNN. “My grandparents always had a lot of friends, always had big dinners. He made a mean Bloody Mary.”
“Nothing got on his nerves,” Ann Murphy says.
“His whole life he was even-tempered,” Melas agrees. “Easy going, very calm. In hindsight, looking at what he went through during the war, that’s probably why after daylight combat missions, everything else seemed like small potatoes.
“I just feel like people aren’t made that way anymore.”
BOOK EVENT
‘Luck of the Draw.’ Featuring Frank Murphy’s daughter, Elizabeth Murphy, and granddaughter, Chloe Melas. 7 p.m. Monday, March 6. $23. McElreath Hall, Atlanta History Center, 130 W. Paces Ferry Road, Atlanta. 404-814-4000, www.atlantahistorycenter.com
“Luck of the Draw: My Story of the Air War in Europe.” By Frank Murphy. St. Martin’s Griffin. 480 pages, $30.99.
“Masters of the Air.” Miniseries on Apple TV+. Coming in 2023.
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