John Gillespie Magee, Jr.
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Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee, Junior (June 9, 1922 - December 11, 1941) was an American aviator and poet who died fighting in World War II while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he had joined before the United States had officially entered the war.
He was born in Shanghai, China of an American father and a British mother who were missionaries. In 1931 he moved with his mother to Great Britain. Before the outbreak of the World War II, in 1939 he went to the USA to study there. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force in October 1940. He was killed at the age of 19 when the Spitfire airplane he was flying (markings VZ-H) collided with another aircraft in a cloud over England. He is buried at Scopwick Cemetery in Lincolnshire, England. His fame is entirely posthumous, and rests only on his poem High Flight of 3 September 1940, which he wrote in a letter to his parents two weeks before his death. It is now the official poem of the RCAF and RAF and is widely known elsewhere as well:
- Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
- And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
- Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
- Of sun-split clouds -- and done a hundred things
- You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung.
- High in the sunlit silence, hov'ring there
- I've chased the shouting winds along and flung
- My eager craft through footless halls of air.
- Up, up the long delirious burning blue
- I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
- Where never lark or even eagle flew
- And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
- The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
- Put out my hand and touched the face of God.pl:John Gillespie Magee