In the Winter 2023 issue of Voices of Laurel, I profiled Roy Gilmore, former Chief of the Laurel Police Department. His story was unusual in that few people in Laurel knew he was a decorated hero from the Vietnam War.
A similar story has surfaced about John Brady, another Laurel war hero. The similarity in the stories is that very few people in Laurel knew about his heroics, either. The difference is that Brady served in World War II as a bomber pilot. He was captured after a crash and spent time in a POW camp, and after the war settled in Laurel where he went on to serve on the City Council.
Brady is one of the true characters portrayed in the recent miniseries Masters of the Air, from producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks. Representatives from the production company interviewed Brady’s son, Jack (a 1966 Laurel High graduate), and his sister, Susan (class of 1964), for information about their father, who passed away on Dec. 31, 1999. I also interviewed Jack for this story.
Before the War
Brady grew up in Victor, NY, in the frigid upstate region, where his family owned a hardware store. Music was his passion and Brady became a professional saxophone player during high school, a talent that came in handy later during his internment as a prisoner of war. He also started dating his future wife, Esther, in high school.
He graduated from Ithaca College in 1941 and took a job as a high school music teacher. But after only a few months on the job, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Brady joined the thousands of young American men looking to join the military.
He wanted to fly and initially tried to enlist with the Navy, but he was rejected because of flat feet. As son Jack remembers the story, Brady was told by the Navy recruiter to try the Army Air Corps because, “The Army will take anybody.”
The Army did accept him, in part because he was a college graduate, and he underwent a rigorous selection process. Applicants were screened to determine whether they fit the profile for fighter pilots or bomber pilots. Jack told me the Army “got it right with my father. Because your crew was your family. You were responsible for nine other men on a ten-man B-17. A fighter pilot is by himself.”
Brady justified the Army’s faith in his responsibility before he even left for Europe. During a training exercise in April 1943, a large contingent of bombers bound for California became scattered across the country. Brady’s B-17 ran out of fuel somewhere over Utah, so he landed the plane in a potato field in the middle of nowhere. As Jack recounted the story: “He’s got his crew. He’s responsible for getting them back to base. He goes to the bank in this little town, meets with the bank president, and says ‘I need ‘X’ amount of money to get a bus back to our base.’” The bank paid for the bus.
WWII
Brady flew with the Eighth Air Force’s 100th Bomb Group, commonly referred to as the “Bloody Hundredth,” as they conducted bombing raids over Nazi-occupied Germany. In May 1943, after seven months of training, the 100th Bomb Group was sent to Thorpe Abbots Air Base in England.
Their nickname was earned right from the start. Just one month after arriving in England, the 100th flew its first combat mission, which resulted in the loss of three crews. By mid-October, 27 of the original 35 crews were lost.
The Army Air Corps’ strategy for bombing Germany centered on the B-17. The Army believed the B-17 could defend itself against enemy fighters while dropping bombs on precise targets. American fighter planes protected the bombers part of the way but lacked the range to accompany the bombers to their targets and back. Left unprotected, the bombers flew in large tight formations designed to ensure safety in numbers.
Even with heavy losses and questionable results early on, the Army sent more than 1,000 bombers to Germany over a seven-day period in October 1943, culminating in a bombing raid targeted for Munster, Germany.
Brady was the lead pilot for the Munster raid. But the bombers in formation encountered waves of attacks from the Luftwaffe, the German air force. In his book Masters of the Air, Donald L. Miller describes what happened:
Brady’s lead plane was hit first. Flying in the glass-enclosed nose [of the bomber directly behind Brady’s], Frank Murphy saw a horrendous fiery explosion directly underneath Brady’s plane, and watched in silent horror as the wounded Fortress went into a sickening dive, trailing black smoke and fuel. ... While Brady struggled to keep his ship level so the crew would have a “platform” from which to jump, [co-pilot] Egan supervised the “abandon ship” maneuver. As he began speaking on the interphone, the plane burst into flames. ... Then Egan and Brady put the bomber on automatic pilot and scrambled back to the open bomb bay. Standing on the precariously narrow catwalk that separated the two main compartments of the bomb bay, Egan looked down at the ground and shouted, “Go ahead, Brady. I’m the senior man on board.” But Brady wanted to be last; it was his ship and crew. “We prattled some more,” said Egan, “when the nicest spaced holes you ever did see, a row about six inches below our feet, appeared along the entire length of the bomb bay door. They were thirty caliber punctuation marks, and I say, ‘I’ll see you Brady,’ step out, count one, and pull the ripcord...
By the end of the week, the Eighth had lost 148 bombers and 1,500 men either killed or captured.
Prisoner of War
Brady and other survivors of the crashed bomber fleet were taken prisoner and sent to Stalag Luft III, a prisoner of war camp for Allied airmen run by the Luftwaffe.
Brady later told Jack about being interrogated at the camp. He recalled that if a prisoner declined to answer questions, the Nazi would say, “oh, you went to Victor Elementary School from the year ‘that-to-that’.” Brady told Jack, “They knew more about me than I knew about me.”
During the war, Brady’s future wife, Esther, volunteered with the Red Cross Motor Corps. She would meet the troop ships at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and take the injured to hospitals in an ambulance.
The POWs organized a band, called the Sagan Serenaders. Brady was first saxophone.
Stalag Luft III was the site of a mass escape through a tunnel dug by POWs, which was the basis of the 1963 film The Great Escape. In March 1944, 76 Allied airmen escaped. Hollywood’s version contained some fiction, but, as depicted in the movie, the Germans recaptured all but three of the escapees and shot 50 of them.
The escape happened through one of three tunnels that were dug by the POWs. The camp band, the Sagan Serenaders, would play certain songs to warn other buildings when the guards were coming. And they would increase the volume to drown out the digging underground.
The POWs at Stalag Luft III were liberated in January 1945.
For his service during World War II, Brady was awarded the Silver Star, Air Medal, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Three Oak Leaf Cluster.
Masters of the Air
The miniseries is based on Miller’s book of the same name. Brady figures prominently in a few episodes.
Episode 1 portrays one of Brady’s more harrowing—and true—moments as a bomber pilot. His B-17 gets separated from the rest of the bomber group heading to Thorpe Abbotts when his navigator gets airsick and neglects his duty. Brady and his copilot descend from the clouds in England (they thought) but quickly reverse course when anti-aircraft fire greets them.
“That’s France!” yells an exasperated Brady, portrayed by actor Ben Radcliffe.
The navigator recovers and sets them on the course to Thorpe Abbotts, but during their descent, one of the landing gears won’t deploy. Brady then orders the other landing gear to be pulled up and makes a belly crash landing on the grass next to the runway.
In an interview with Avenue magazine, Radcliffe said, “This story is incredible. It’s unfathomable, what these men went through.”
In episode 5, the Munster raid is depicted, with Brady and Egan parachuting out of the doomed B-17. It also explains why Major Egan was in the copilot’s seat.
In episode 6, Egan undergoes an interrogation at the POW camp that mirrors exactly what Brady described to his son.
Move to Laurel
Just six months after being liberated and leaving the Army, Brady and Esther were married.
But before that, Brady had one more responsibility for his former crew. According to Jack, one of his father’s crew died when the plane was shot down over Munster.
“Right after the war, when they got back, my father and his co-pilot got on a train and went to Oklahoma, where the gentleman’s family was from, to meet with them. That’s being the captain of the crew.”
Like thousands of other veterans, Brady came to Washington because that’s where most of the post-war jobs were. After working for IBM for a while (his business card reads “JD Brady, Electric Writing Division”), he left to return to his roots—hardware. He was a salesman for Barber and Ross Hardware, which was located on Rhode Island Avenue.
By 1948, Brady and Esther had moved to Laurel and bought a house on the corner of Carroll and Fifth Streets. Jack recalled that, while growing up, Carroll Street was all dirt.
In 1966, Brady ran successfully for a seat on Laurel’s City Council. In all of his campaigns for the City Council (he served three terms, one term as Council President), Brady never traded on his experiences and heroics during the war. Any reference to candidate Brady in the News Leader only mentioned (sometimes) “served in the Army Air Forces during World War two.”
According to Jack, his father got into local politics because: “He was a man of service. Because that was what he did in the war. He also experienced the International Red Cross. What they did for POWs was enormously significant. My sister has a wad of Air Posts, from my mother to my father. That’s how he found out that his father died.”
Jack’s sister Susan echoed this sentiment in a message to us while I was interviewing Jack: “He always signed up to be the vice something or the assistant something, and within a year, the number one person would retire and he got sucked in. He was head of the PTA and he was president of the Rotary Club.”
Brady was also the Headquarters Chairman of the Laurel Centennial Corporation, the corporate entity created to stage the elaborate, week-long Laurel celebration in 1970, as well as a past president of the Laurel Boys & Girls Club.
During his tenure, the City Council had to grapple with some serious situations in Laurel, such as damaging floods, increased Ku Klux Klan activity in the area, the opening of the Stanley Library, and unprecedented growth of the Laurel area. Brady was instrumental in creating Laurel’s Department of Parks and Rec.
The housing and roads situations that accompanied the expansive growth of Laurel at the time saw Brady push for mixed use as opposed to garden apartments. “We don’t want to be a bedroom community,” he told the News Leader. Similarly, when plans for the interchange between Route 198 and the new I-95 were unveiled in the mid-60s, Brady predicted the traffic through Laurel would create an “intolerable situation.” He faulted the State Roads Commission for ignoring the city’s initial proposal to route I-95 traffic down Contee Road and around Laurel completely.
“This is an example of government becoming so thick and so layered that things go on and nothing can be done about it,” he told the News Leader.
When he announced in 1972 that he would not run for reelection, Brady said, “I’ve served for three terms and it’s a good idea to have new people to come on the council on a regular basis. After a time, you lose your inspiration and so you should step aside to let others try their new ideas.”
His wartime experience also affected his attitude toward war itself. He went to anti-war demonstrations during the Vietnam War. When Jack considered enlisting in the mid-1960s, Brady told his son, “You don’t have to do this. I already did it.”
As Jack put it, “He was a thoughtful person who had an experience, who dropped bombs on civilians. That was never discussed. But what do you think was in his head? He was a good man. He had to do bad things and he did them well.”
Premiere at Andrews
This past January, Joint Base Andrews held a premiere of the miniseries’ first episode. Attending were the cast and production team of Masters of the Air, along with World War II veterans, Department of the Air Force senior leaders, and service men and women.
Jack and his family were invited to represent his father. Also attending was 101-year-old retired Air Force Maj. John “Lucky” Luckadoo, the only surviving B-17 pilot in the 100th Bomber Group.
Luckadoo brought tears to Jack’s eyes when he approached him at the reception and said, “You look just like Brady.”
“What a sweet thing to say to me,” said Jack.
Kirk Saduski, another producer for Masters of the Air, as well as Band of Brothers and The Pacific, addressed the reception and said, “It is too awful to contemplate a world in which the Allies didn’t win WWII.”
Kevin Leonard is a founding member of the Laurel History Boys and a two-time winner of the Maryland Delaware District of Columbia Press Association Journalism Award.