I Always Wanted to Fly Read online

  I Always Wanted to Fly

  I Always Wanted to Fly

  America’s Cold War Airmen

  Colonel Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  With a foreword by Ken Hechler

  www.upress.state.ms.us

  Copyright © 2001 by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Painting on pages ii and iii by George Back. A 1965 MiG-17 attack on an RB-47H

  reconnaissance aircraft off the east coast of North Korea.

  09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Samuel, Wolfgang W. E.

  I always wanted to fly : America’s Cold War airmen / Wolfgang W. E. Samuel.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-57806-399-X (cloth : alk. paper)

  1. Air pilots, Military—United States—Biography. 2. Cold War. 3. United States Air

  Force—Officers—Biography. I. Title.

  UG626.S26 2001

  358.4′0092—dc21

  [B]

  2001026039

  British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  To the flyers who gave their lives

  during the Cold War from 1945 to

  1991 in the service of their country.

  In memory of the friends I served

  with who did not return from their

  last flights.

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  Part 1: The Berlin Airlift, 1948

  1. Men of the Airlift

  Colonel Howard S. “Sam” Myers Jr. First Lieutenant Leonard W. Sweet First Lieutenant Marshall M. Balfe Colonel Harold R. Austin Lieutenant Colonel Edward Gorski Lieutenant Colonel Joseph F. Laufer Colonel Robert S. Hamill

  2. The Bomber Boys

  Colonel Joseph J. Gyulavics

  3. “Ramp Rats”: The Men Who Kept Them Flying

  Master Sergeant Thomas W. Etherson

  Part 2: Korea, 1950

  4. The F-51 Mustangs from Dogpatch

  Colonel Charles E. Schreffler

  5. Night Interdiction in the B-26 Invader

  Lieutenant Colonel Byron A. Dobbs Jr. Colonel Richard G. “Dick” Schulz

  6. The B-29 Bomber War

  Colonel Joseph J. Gyulavics

  7. B-Flight out of Kimpo: Special Operations

  Colonel David M. Taylor

  Part 3: Strategic Reconnaissance

  8. Taming the RB-45C Tornado

  Colonel Harold R. Austin

  9. Recon to the Yalu and Beyond

  Colonel Howard S. “Sam” Myers Jr. Master Sergeant Arthur E. Lidard

  10. More Secret Than the Manhattan Project

  Colonel Marion C. Mixson Lieutenant Colonel Francis T. Martin Jr.

  11. Challenging the Russian Bear

  Colonel Harold R. Austin

  12. Flying the Top of the World

  Colonel Charles L. Phillips Jr.

  13. The Last Flight of 3-4290

  Major George V. Back Captain Henry E. Dubuy Lieutenant Colonel Joel J. Lutkenhouse Lieutenant Colonel Robert J. Rogers

  Part 4: Vietnam, 1965

  14. Hambone 02

  Colonel Ralph L. Kuster Jr.

  15. Lincoln Flight

  Colonel Kevin A. “Mike” Gilroy

  16. Yellowbird

  Major Fred E. “Ed” Rider

  The Magic of Flying: Concluding Thoughts

  Glossary

  Bibliography

  Interviews, Letters, and Tapes

  Index

  Foreword

  I Always Wanted to Fly is a comprehensive collection of first-person narratives depicting the heroism of young men who grew up with a compelling desire to fly airplanes as well as of the changing nature of the U.S. Air Force during the Cold War. The author is a veteran of many reconnaissance missions against the Soviet Union and of air combat in the Vietnam War. I found this book to be a series of gripping stories, told in such remarkable detail that I felt I was alongside the pilots and crew members, living with them through every thrilling moment in the sky.

  On March 7, 1945, I served as combat historian with III Corps, part of General Omar N. Bradley’s 12th Army Group, as it advanced toward the Rhine River near the little town of Remagen, just a few miles south of Bonn. That afternoon I learned that the Remagen Bridge had been captured by U.S. forces before the Germans had a chance to blow it up. Second Lieutenant Karl H. Timmermann, the commander of A Company, 27th Armored Infantry Battalion, 9th Armored Division, had led his men in a death-defying charge across the bridge and gained a foothold on the east bank of the Rhine River, securing the bridge in the process. For his leadership and extraordinary heroism, Lieutenant Timmermann was subsequently awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. When I found the lieutenant, he was calmly shaving in the shell of a bombed-out house. His reaction to my probing historian’s questions? He wondered what all the excitement was about.

  While reading I Always Wanted to Fly, I encountered Lieutenant Timmermann’s selfless courage and uncommon ability in the individual flyers who tell their stories. These are the men who flew the Berlin Airlift, who stopped the North Korean People’s Army in Korea, who probed the Soviet Union in secret reconnaissance flights, and who fought an air war over North Vietnam under incredibly confining restrictions. These flyers never hesitated to act when their country asked them to protect its vital interests. If I were to question them about their contributions, I am certain they too would ask me what all the excitement was about.

  The reader will find that it is all about nerves-of-steel flyers like Sam Myers, who stole a city from the grasp of the Russians by carrying life-giving coal and food around the clock into a freezing and hungry Berlin. And it is all about Barney Dobbs, a veteran of the forgotten war in Korea, who spent nineteen months in a Chinese prisoner-of-war camp after his B-26 was shot down on a night-interdiction mission.

  Author Samuel takes you to Thule, Greenland, a strategic reconnaissance base during the Cold War, to let you experience at that remote and unforgiving air base the bone-chilling forty degree below zero temperatures, the ice-fog obscured visibility, and the raging winds that meant near instant death to any air crew caught unprepared. As a historian, I find it remarkable that although there were many losses of aircraft—both U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy—while flying the periphery of the Soviet Union and during shallow penetrations of their territory, in the many major overflights by both American and British military aircraft, not one aircraft was lost. The author not only presents the extent of our significant losses over the years in the secret war of reconnaissance but also lets the reader experience the near shootdown of a lone RB-47H reconnaissance aircraft by North Korean MiGs.

  I found Ralph Kuster’s narrative particularly riveting as I remember quite well the anguish of the Vietnam War, having served as a member of the U.S. Congress during that period. Kuster flew an F-105 Thunder-chief over North Vietnam, experiencing the helplessness and loneliness that engulfs a pilot when his aircraft is hit and he is forced to eject over enemy territory. The story of his rescue is a graphic account of courage and determination, underlining the importance and value of training in meeting emergencies.

  Author Samuel gives his readers a framing section for the Vietnam period, as he does for all of the other segments of the Cold War he presents—the Berlin Airlift, Korea, and strategic reconnaissance—providing enough historical detail to illuminate the issues of the time and providing critical context for the airmen’s stories that follow. He also depicts for us a changing air force, moving from slow, propeller-driven aircraft to jets, from youthful volunteers and citi
zen soldiers (Stephen Ambrose’s characterization) to the largely professional, college-educated air force of the Vietnam era. The well-integrated coverage of the major conflicts of the Cold War period is presented logically and in a neutral style. Samuel acknowledges that there were varying opinions and divisions about the conduct of the Vietnam air war but remains personally neutral on the subject.

  Most importantly for me, though, throughout my reading of I Always Wanted to Fly, I felt that I was listening to the conversations and vivid memories of real individuals, of human beings exposed to the immense stresses of armed conflict. I frequently felt I was sitting right in the cockpit with these remarkable flyers, and I understood clearly that they really had “always wanted to fly.” Samuel has produced a well-integrated package of excitement and courage and aviation history.

  Ken Hechler

  Author of The Bridge at Remagen

  Preface and Acknowledgments

  I became aware of my first airplane on a sunny spring morning in 1940. I was five years old, a German child playing in my sandbox. The quiet of my world was suddenly shattered by a strange-looking machine flying noisily toward me. It had three engines and was flying very low and coming directly at me. I watched not in fear but in fascination. The airplane thundered by, no more than a hundred meters above me, disappearing beyond the Bober River. I imagined I saw the pilot looking down at me. That evening when my father, Willi, came home from work at the Sagan Flugplatz and took off his Luftwaffe tunic, I excitedly told him about what I had seen. “I know what I want to be when I grow up, Papa,” I said. He laughed at my enthusiasm and replied, “You want to be a pilot, Ja?” “Ja, Papa, I want to fly airplanes when I grow up.” And nothing ever changed that wish.

  That airplane was a Junkers-52 trimotor transport. As the years passed my dream became more specific—first I wanted to be a Stuka pilot after seeing a war movie, and then I wanted to be a jet pilot after observing an Me-262 jet fighter passing overhead. Huge formations of B-17 bombers left me wondering as I watched them attack a nearby town. I tried to imagine what it was like to fly such a large airplane and what those men from America who were flying them were like. In 1945 my family fled from the advancing Red Army. We eventually ended up near the small town of Fassberg, south of Hamburg. Hundreds of abandoned airplanes stood at Fassberg, a former Luftwaffe base. On my way to school I often stopped at my favorite Junkers-88 bomber, climbed into the pilot’s seat, and played at flying. In 1948, when the Soviets blockaded Berlin, a new airplane arrived—an American four-engine transport, the C-54 Skymaster. For more than a year I watched the American planes carrying coal to Berlin. Day after day they passed over the rotting former German army barracks I called home. For me, the men who flew those airplanes did not just fly coal to Berlin but represented all my hope for a better future. I admired the American flyers, and I wanted to be just like them.

  In 1955, only four years after immigrating to the United States, I found myself as an American airman at RAF Sculthorpe in England, an air base from which RB-45 four-engine jets, manned by American and British airmen, flew night reconnaissance over the Soviet Union. In July 1960 I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force and soon left for flight training at bases in Texas and Mississippi. I ended up in a reconnaissance wing at Forbes Air Force Base near Topeka, Kansas, just in time for the Cuban Missile Crisis. There I flew with men who had flown the B-17 bombers I watched as a child. And I met some of the men who in 1948 saved the city of Berlin with their unarmed C-54 transports.

  As I got to know those and other flyers, I learned that many of them once had childhood dreams just like mine. They were inspired by passing barnstormers, by World War I fighter legends about whom they read, by the legendary Charles Lindbergh, and some, just like me, by airplanes flying overhead. With the advent of World War II, many of these dreamers found themselves in cockpits soon after high school. They could not believe their good luck. Of those who survived World War II, some chose to continue to fly. In 1998 I met one of these men, a former 8th Air Force B-17 pilot who later flew in the Berlin Airlift, flew combat in Korea, and continued flying into the early days of the Vietnam War. I found his story so inspiring that I decided to write this book. Over a two-year period, I interviewed many men who went to war as teenagers against Nazi Germany and then stayed around to fly for their country. I heard a common refrain: “I always wanted to fly,” they said again and again, “I always wanted to fly.”

  I believe these men are a unique generation. Inspired to fly as children by the mystique and aura of adventure surrounding the airplane, they followed their dreams with tenacity and dedication for much of their adult lives. I did not meet one who said he wished he had done something else. Their only regret was that their flying careers ended all too soon: they loved military flying and all the dangers they survived. In our talks, if I referred to them as anything other than “average” men, they raised their eyebrows. Maybe in their own minds they were average, but I know they did extraordinary things when called upon to do so. They certainly inspired those of us who followed.

  The first overt Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Berlin blockade, was not the beginning of the Cold War but rather was the first manifestation of long-standing conflict between East and West. The Cold War likely began as early as April 1945, before World War II in Europe had ended, when Marshal Konstantin K. Rokossovski’s second Belorussian front swept across the north German plain and made a grab for Denmark. American and British Intelligence intercepted Russian communications revealing their intentions, and troops of General Matthew B. Ridgway’s XVIII Corps cut the Russians off. On May 2, 1945, on the shore of the Baltic Sea east of Wismar, Ridgway’s troops made contact with the Russians. Ridgway and one of his division commanders, General James M. Gavin, met their first Russian general on May 3. The Russian seemed displeased. The furtive attempt to grab Denmark had failed. As World War II in Europe came to an end on May 7, 1945, a new conflict between former allies had begun. It would be called the Cold War. The Berlin Airlift, Korea, and Vietnam were some of the most salient hot spots of this protracted conflict. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 signaled its end. Only two years later the USSR ceased to exist when the communist giant fell as a result of economic exhaustion and intellectual sterility. The contribution of America’s flyers to the downfall of the Soviet Union was pivotal. The boys who always wanted to fly got all the flying they ever imagined they would—and more. Many of them were there not only for World War II but also for the Berlin crisis of 1948, for the war in Korea in 1950, for the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. A few of the old warriors were even still around in the early days of the Vietnam War, but by then, a younger generation of flyers had largely taken over to fly America’s warplanes.

  Although the Cuban Missile Crisis was an encounter between the two nuclear superpowers with the potential for a world-embracing nuclear holocaust, the conflict resulted in a mutually agreed-upon standoff. No direct combat or engagement between American and Soviet forces took place. I therefore did not include that episode in this book, recognizing that the Cuban Missile Crisis was a Cold War watershed. Although the confrontation was exceedingly brief and no shots were fired in anger by either side, there were losses. Cuban SA-2 missile batteries shot down a U-2 photo-reconnaissance plane from the 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing, and two RB-47H electronic-reconnaissance aircraft from the 55th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing crashed while attempting to perform reconnaissance missions. The flyers of the three aircraft died. They, like so many others who perished in various large and small Cold War encounters, are part of the price we paid to preserve our way of life.

  Included with each major section of the book—the Berlin Airlift, Korea, strategic reconnaissance, and Vietnam—is a brief summary of how the conflicts came about to assist the reader contextually and to provide compelling historical background. For each flyer I show the highest rank held at the time of retirement or discharge from
the U.S. Air Force as well as combat decorations earned. The highest recognition, the Medal of Honor, is most often given posthumously. The Medal of Honor is followed in order by the Air Force Cross, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Air Medal, all awarded in recognition of risks taken while flying. The Bronze Star may be awarded for nonflying activities in direct support of combat operations. And the Purple Heart is earned for wounds sustained in wartime combat. If I collected the medals of all the men I wrote about, I would hold in my hands every one of these decorations, in many instances awarded more than once. Behind these small pieces of metal dangling from colorful ribbons lie the stories of the boys who always wanted to fly.

  I thank all of the men who so openly and generously shared with me events in their lives. At times, our conversations forced them to reach deep into recesses of the past. It was not easy for some to talk to me, but they did, as one flyer to another. They freely shared documentation and personal photographs and allowed me unencumbered access to the precious records of their ever more distant pasts. I offer special recognition to Colonel David M. Taylor, whose experiences as a B-17 pilot over Europe originally inspired me to write this book, and to Colonel Howard S. “Sam” Myers Jr., who so generously supported me with background material, gave freely of his time and knowledge of reconnaissance operations, and provided support to me in many other areas. Without Sam’s generous help, locating the men who fought the Cold War from the sky would have been immensely more difficult. My thanks also go to Dr. Ken Hechler, a soldier, statesman, author, and longtime public servant in both the U.S. Congress and the state of West Virginia, for writing the foreword to I Always Wanted to Fly. I thank my wife, Joan Powers, for her dispassionate and critical review of the manuscript; and Craig Gill, editor in chief of the University Press of Mississippi, for his continuing and enthusiastic support; and Stephen E. Ambrose, whose writings of the courage and sacrifices of America’s fighting men are a continuing inspiration to me.