| Jonathan Moss | |
| Fictional Character | |
| Southern Victory POD: September 10, 1862 | |
| Appearance(s): | American Front through In at the Death |
| Type of Appearance: | Direct POV |
| Nationality: | United States |
| Date of Birth: | 1891 |
| Occupation: | Student, Lawyer, military pilot, guerrilla |
| Spouse: | Laura Secord Moss (d. 1941) |
| Children: | Dorothy Moss (daughter, d. 1941) |
| Military Branch: | United States Army Aviation Section (Great War, Second Great War) |
| Political Party: | Democratic Party |
Jonathan Moss (b. 1891) was an American fighter pilot, attorney, and guerrilla, serving during both the Great War and the Second Great War.
Moss grew up in a well-to-do Chicago family, and enlisted as a United States fighter pilot out of college. When the Great War began, Moss flew on the southern Ontario front. Moss started with a Curtiss Super Hudson pusher aeroplane,[1] then transitioned to two man tractor Wright-17 with Percy Stone as his observer.[2] After Stone was wounded during an aerial combat, Moss was grounded until a position in a Martin one-decker with an effective (although not perfect) interrupter gear became available.[3] Moss finished the war in a Wright two-decker and an ace, having shot down over five enemy aeroplanes.[4]
As the U.S. gained a strong foothold in Ontario, Moss came into contact with a Canadian farmer named Laura Secord (a proud descendant of the Canadian patriot of the same name). The two established an antagonistic but oddly strong relationship. Despite her fierce independence and vitriol for the United States, Moss became rather smitten with her.
After the Great War ended, and Canada became occupied territory, Moss studied law at Northwestern University near Chicago, pining after Secord all the while. He decided to take a gamble and moved to Berlin, Ontario to practice occupation law. He earned some fame as a defender of Canadians' rights, though Moss readily admitted this only meant he lost less often than most of his peers, as the legal system created by the occupiers was heavily weighted against the "Canucks".
By patient wooing Moss eventually won the love of Laura Secord and married her; they had a daughter, Dorothy, and had a happy married life. However, marrying an American, even a liberal one, made her a traitor in the eyes of Canadian nationalists, and she was suspected of having betrayed the rebellion of 1924. For that matter, Moss was still a target, despite his work for Canadians. He narrowly escaped a bomb planted in his car.
Fascinated by fighter planes in development, Moss persuaded the U.S. government to let him take up flying part-time. This act, widely publicized in the press, caught the attention of Mary McGregor Pomeroy, daughter of one of Canada's most notorious terrorists, Arthur McGregor, and a quietly successful bomber herself. Fiercely patriotic, Pomeroy sent a bomb in a package to the Mosses. Moss was at work when the bomb detonated, killing Laura and Dorothy.
Embittered, Moss turned his back upon Canada and rejoined the U.S. Army as a full-time fighter pilot, despite his age. When the Confederate States invaded in 1941, sparking the Second Great War, Moss flew for approximately a year on the Ohio and Virginia fronts, before he was shot down over Virginia, and sent to a prison camp in Andersonville, Georgia. While he was there, Mary Pomeroy was arrested by U.S. authorities and executed. A Confederate guard named Conley shared the news with Moss in an effort to mock the USA's callousness. Instead, Moss grimly informed Conley of what Pomeroy had done to him, and coldly announced he would have gladly been in the firing squad.
Moss escaped Andersonville during a tornado along with fellow POW Nick Cantarella. The two joined a band of black guerrillas, led by Spartacus, fighting a guerrilla war in the Georgia countryside against the Confederacy throughout 1942 and 1943, often peer pressured into using deplorably brutal and murderous tactics against unarmed civilians. In one such excursion to the town of Plains, Georgia, Moss killed a CS Navy cadet named Jimmy who led local resistance against the guerrillas. Eventually, an attempt to steal a plane led to band into an ambush in which it was badly mauled, although most of the group, including Moss, Cantarella, and Spartacus survived. The group kept moving, and Moss' hopes of escaping back to the U.S. in a plane were put on hold.
When U.S. forces began smashing through the Confederate positions in Georgia, Spartacus' band contacted an Army unit and were returned to U.S. territory. Moss learned he had been promoted to lieutenant colonel. He was trained on the Screaming Eagle, and took part in a few more flying missions before the end of the war, and found himself without direction after the war's end in 1944.
That changed when Moss was offered the job of defending Jefferson Pinkard as he faced charges of Crimes against Humanity. Moss believed Pinkard was guilty, but was diligent in defending his client. Despite Moss's best efforts, Pinkard condemned himself by boasting of his war crimes as proud accomplishments. He was convicted and executed. The judge and prosecutor praised Moss for his fortitude in the thankless Sisyphean task of defending the indefensible. Following the trial, Moss began to work as a military lawyer during the new phase of American occupation--this time in the former Confederacy, acting as an advocate for the rights of the surviving Negroes of the C.S. He brought a case of a black man who was lynched by a mob for supposedly raping a white woman to General Irving Morrell. This inspired Morrell to oversee the preparation of a pamphlet entitled Equality.
References
- ↑ American Front, pg. 94, HC.
- ↑ Ibid. pgs. 248-251.
- ↑ Ibid., pgs. 382-385.
- ↑ Walk in Hell, pgs. 193-194, HC.
