I Always Wanted to Fly Read online

  “On the way back to my bunk, I ran into a couple of other airmen. We hadn’t eaten for twenty-four hours. When we got into the chow line, we discovered why the British were so thin. We had a cold piece of fish and a slice of burnt toast. That was it. No seconds. The Brits said it was because of the rationing. We learned that the Brits separated the messing by ranks. The privates, PFCs, lance corporals, and corporals ate in the cellar. The sergeants, the staff sergeants, and some technical sergeants ate upstairs. Master sergeants and the Crown’s sergeants ate in the NCO club. I was a corporal—the second time around. I wished I hadn’t been a wise guy, or I’d be a sergeant and wouldn’t have to eat in the cellar. Our first job that day was cleaning the hangar floor. Someone, probably the same crowd that had broken the windows and stolen the toilet seats, had chopped open fifty-five-gallon oil drums and rolled them across the hangar floor. In the couple of years the hangar was closed, bird shit and feathers, dead mice, and bugs had settled in the oil, which then turned to tar. We took a break for chow. The noon meal, supper, and midnight chow were the same—mutton with some sort of heavy flour and water mixture on top, plus tea. Those meals never varied for all the time I was in Celle. On Christmas Day at noon, I was standing in the chow line when the little Brit in front of me turned around and said, ‘We’re in luck today, Yank.’

  “I said, ‘How’s that?’

  “He replied, ‘It’s Christmas. We get double rations.’ For a moment I saw a picture of turkey with all the trimmings. The dream only lasted for a moment. As soon as I stepped inside, I knew what they were doubling up on, only this time most of the sheep still had their coats on.

  “Instead of working on the engines, I was assigned to the airplane general crew—checking hydraulic leaks, cleaning coal dust off the control cables, and because I was a wise guy from New York City, the guy who sat by the potbellied stove designated me as the number-one man for fuel-tank repairs. The C-54 was a wet-wing airplane, meaning the wing itself was a gas tank. When a leak exceeded a number of drips per minute, we had to open up the wing and find the leak. Dropping a wing-access plate was no easy task. I had to put a jack under the wings and take the studs off the access plates. Once the plate was removed, it had to be cleaned so it could be put back on. Also, before I could put the plate back I had to prepare a mixture of two compounds called stoner’s smudge. This required kneading these two compounds until they had the consistency of bread dough. The more I kneaded, the blacker it got, and the mixture stuck to my hands like another skin. If I was still stationed in Japan I could have gone to the hot baths, and maybe the stuff would come off. But there was only cold water in Celle.

  “Before I could put the goop inside the fuel tank, any residual fuel had to be removed with a garden hose, and someone, usually the German helpers, sucked on the hose to siphon it out. My man Rudi said, ‘It will ruin my teeth.’ I thought he could die from a mouth full of gas. But no ill effects were ever apparent in either of us. When we got to town, many of the girls didn’t want to have anything to do with the guys with the black hands. A lot of German civilians came by our table in the Gasthaus and asked us what kind of secret weapon we were working on. Then they walked away laughing. The German civilians who worked with us were great mechanics as well as great friends. They used our American tools. One wrench used to install sparkplug leads was a real knuckle buster. It took the Germans to figure out how to work the thing so it wouldn’t bust your hands. Every time I went to tighten a sparkplug, the front end of the wrench would slip. The Germans manufactured their own. I kept one for years and guarded it like it was gold. Another reason I will never forget our German workers was that they shared their food with me. In the evenings they were served at a soup kitchen as part of their pay. One man would pick up the soup cans for the entire crew and get the soup. They gave me a can, and I drew rations with them. Certainly it was better food than the slop served by the Brits. The poor Brits couldn’t help it—they had so little themselves. Overall, I must say we got along pretty well with the Brits.

  “Fassberg was up and running a couple of months by that time. Someone in the headquarters building decided that Celle should haul more tonnage than Fassberg. ‘Beat Fassberg’ was the battle cry around headquarters and other warm places where the coat holders hung out. Work, work, and more work for us guys out in the cold places. There was an eleven o’clock curfew for those of us under the rank of staff sergeant. The Brit MPs would come into the Gasthaus and say, ‘We’ll be back in ten minutes.’ The damn American MPs would start rounding us up immediately. There was no one to complain to. We worked a minimum of fourteen hours a day, seven days a week. By the time we got to town and settled down to a tall beer, it was time to pack it in. I still wonder today what kind of people came up with those curfew ideas. Some clown who was a reservist came over from New York and said there were werewolf gangs of German teenage kids who would attack GIs, and that’s why we had the curfew. The only teenage kids we ever saw were nice, and we gave them cigarettes, candy bars, or chewing gum.

  “I had fun tormenting the sergeant who never left his stove. We worked the entire winter in nothing heavier than a field jacket and a sweater. It was a cold winter. About the time of the Easter Parade—Easter Sunday, April 16, 1949, 1,398 flights delivered 12,940 tons of coal and food to Berlin, a one-day record—we were issued fleece-lined leather coats and jackets. A lot of German girls were walking around in them the next winter. The guy who sat behind the potbellied stove and a couple of other clowns at headquarters came outside and patted each other on the back for the great job they did. Originally, we went over to Germany for thirty days TDY from Japan. It wound up being sixty days, then ninety days. It didn’t bother any of us single men. But a lot of the flight engineers had families at Tachikawa. The morale got pretty bad. So they sent most of those guys home, and greasy mechanics like me who were supposed to know everything about the airplanes were suddenly made flight engineers. While we sat up there between the pilot and the copilot, we had no idea what to look for. I wouldn’t look out the window because it was too scary. If the instruments were in the green, I just sat back and smiled. Come to find out that most of the new guys flying the airplanes were TDY from the States and hadn’t had much time in the airplane either. What a crew we were. Things were different then. If a man said he could do the job, the retort from the boss was, ‘Have at it.’ I really think that all of us believed we could do anything.”

  Master Sergeant Martin Allin, who made his home in Tennessee after retirement, had previously served as a flight engineer, but he had not flown on the C-54. His experiences resembled Sergeant Etherson’s. “The standard crew configuration for a C-54 was two pilots, a navigator, and a crew chief/flight engineer. During the airlift there was no need for navigators, so the crew was reduced to three. I arrived at Rhein-Main Air Base on November 30, 1948. I was a so-called crew chief/flight engineer in the States. I was debriefed in the base operations building at Rhein-Main. They asked if I wanted to fly. I said yes. I was immediately assigned to a flight, and a check engineer was to check me out. Get this: I had never flown before on a C-54 except once as a passenger. Away I went to Berlin. The checker showed me this and that on my way there and back. When we got near Rhein-Main coming back, he said, ‘Sarge, you better hit the technical orders for the C-54 aircraft, ’cause I am going stateside tomorrow.’

  “ ‘OK, who will take your place?’ I asked.

  Budding C-54 flight engineers at RAF Celle, spring 1949. Tom Etherson is far right. T. Etherson.

  “He laughed and said, ‘You!’ So I became a flight engineer on the C-54. I slept the first three nights on a first-aid stretcher in the operations building. The weather was the worst in a century. A total fog bank across Germany. We flew anyway. We were covered with coal dust. The wings dripped aviation gas all the time. Our beards grew. We looked like rejects from hell. But what we did was outstanding and we saved the United States from World War III. It was the most important achievement of my twenty-five
-year military career. Those 130 flights from Rhein-Main to Berlin made me proud to be a part of that great operation.”

  In the spring of 1989 long-retired Master Sergeant Thomas Etherson and his wife, now residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, made a nostalgic visit to Celle, where forty years earlier he had served as aircraft mechanic and flight engineer. “I got to talking to a girl who was showing us around the castle in Celle, which was all painted and beautiful. I told her what Celle looked like when I first arrived in 1948. The castle was gray and the beautiful park that now surrounds it wasn’t there. I told her about the broken windows and the missing toilet seats in my barracks at the base. She laughed and said, ‘You have to have lunch with my husband.’ The next day we had lunch, and I met her husband, Dieter. Dieter was ten years old in 1945. After the Luftwaffe abandoned the base, he and his friends went out there and removed the toilet seats and anything else they thought they could trade on the black market. Because they were kids, they busted all the windows. And anything they couldn’t carry away, like the fifty-five-gallon drums filled with fuel oil, they broke and spilled over the floors of the hangars. There I’d been, back in ’48, cursing the Germans, and it was just a bunch of kids. Dieter and I had a good laugh.”

  Part 2

  Korea, 1950

  The outbreak of that war came to me as a complete surprise, as it did to all our military men—from Seoul to Washington.

  Matthew B. Ridgway

  Our combat aircraft losses for both the squadron and the wing were high. This was due primarily to the low-level mission we were flying. Out of the twenty flying-school classmates that went to Japan with me, only a handful returned home.

  Dick Schulz, B-26 pilot

  In early 1950, Americans were concerned with making a living and achieving their dreams of owning their own homes and cars. There was plenty of work, and the lean years before World War II were a fast-fading memory. The U.S. military was still downsizing, and the defense budget for the year was a mere $13.5 billion. Although the McCarthy hearings (accusations of communist penetration at the highest levels of government) troubled some, there was no war. Times were good.

  To those entrusted with national security, however, things looked much more worrisome. The Soviets exploded an atomic device in 1949, and Chiang Kai-shek fled the Chinese mainland for sanctuary on Formosa (Taiwan). The National Security Council issued NSC-68, a lengthy but seminal document that defined the communist world threat and recommended to President Harry S. Truman the end of demobilization and a significant strengthening of both armed forces and international alliances. NSC-68 reflected the deep concerns of a group of American policy makers led by the bright young political analyst Paul Nitze. But NSC-68 did not reach President Truman’s desk until April 1950, too late to affect the outcome of the North Korean People’s Army’s invasion of South Korea only ten weeks later, in June 1950. The invasion transformed NSC-68 into a national-planning document with immediate budget implications for the administration. To get to where the NSC-68 planners thought the United States needed to be to combat and contain the communist threat would take “about fifty billion dollars per annum. This was a very rough guess,” according to Secretary of State Dean Acheson (Present 377).

  The North Korean armed forces’ June 25, 1950, attack on South Korea was unexpected and quickly threatened to overwhelm the smaller and less well equipped South Korean army. The United Nations Security Council, acting quickly in the absence of the Soviet delegate, expressed its concern in a resolution calling for a cease-fire and the withdrawal of the North Korean Army (NKA) to north of the thirty-eighth parallel. It was absolutely clear that the North Korean attack was “an open, and undisguised challenge to our internationally accepted position as the protector of South Korea,” recalled Acheson in his memoir (Present 405).

  On June 26 President Truman directed U.S. air and naval forces to support the hard-pressed South Korean army south of the thirty-eighth parallel. The following day the United Nations Security Council adopted a U.S. resolution calling for U.N. members to provide help in repelling the North Korean attack and restoring peace. Seoul, the South Korean capital, fell to the NKA on June 28, and President Truman responded by authorizing U.S. air and naval forces to attack targets in North Korea. On June 30 General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Far East Command, reported to Washington that the intervention of U.S. ground forces would be necessary to prevent a total rout of the South Korean army. President Truman concurred with the request for ground troops, and on July 5 Task Force Smith, the first American ground combat unit hastily assembled and rushed into South Korea to stem the North Korean advance, made initial contact with the enemy near Osan. General MacArthur became commander of United Nations troops in South Korea on July 8. In just two weeks the United States had gone from a comfortable state of peace to war. The fast and furious tempo of military operations in Korea continued, and American ground forces were thrown into the fray as quickly as they arrived. American airpower slowed the invaders’ pace, bought precious time for the U.S. Army to build up a defensive perimeter around Pusan, and kept the invaders from quickly reaching their objective, the incorporation of the south into a greater Korea.

  On July 3 Major General William F. Dean, commander of the 24th Infantry Division, landed at Taejon and proceeded to hold the city against superior forces until July 20, giving Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, commander of the 8th U.S. Army, time to disembark and deploy arriving troops for the defense of the Naktong perimeter, protecting the port of Pusan. Walker told his troops to stand or die: there was to be no more retreat. (General Dean was captured by the North Koreans and subsequently was awarded the Medal of Honor for his defense of Taejon.) On September 15 the 1st Marine Division, under the leadership of the seventy-year-old MacArthur, threatened to cut off the North Korean invaders in a daring amphibious landing on the rocky tidal coast near Inchon. The Eighth Army initiated a near simultaneous counterattack, breaking out of the Pusan perimeter and driving back the weakened North Korean forces. After the U.S. trap was sprung, little remained of the North Korean attacking force: “Perhaps thirty thousand stragglers out of an army of approximately four hundred thousand men made their escape without equipment across the parallel,” wrote Acheson (Present 447).

  North Korean penetration of South Korea, June–September 1950, and the results of Chinese intervention, October 1950–January 1951. Acheson, Present 403, 470.

  On September 27 Seoul was recaptured. The Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed General MacArthur that “your military objective is the destruction of the North Korean Armed Forces. In attaining this objective you are authorized to conduct military operations, including amphibious and airborne landings or ground operations north of the 38th parallel in Korea, . . . support of your operations north or south of the 38th parallel will not include Air or Naval action against Manchuria or against USSR territory.” In line with his instructions, MacArthur drove north to destroy what remained of the North Korean People’s Army in a sweeping envelopment up the east and west coasts of North Korea. The U.S. Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, spearheaded the drive in the west toward Pyongyang and beyond. The U.S. X Corps, commanded by Lieutenant General Edward M. Almond, was sea lifted to Wonsan on the east coast of North Korea and began to drive north. Each attacking force split into several columns as it progressed into ever more mountainous terrain. MacArthur’s envelopment strategy was bold but risky—when viewed from another perspective, it represented a perilous division of his limited forces should the power equation change. A Chinese message delivered on October 3 to the Indian ambassador warning that China would send troops to defend North Korea seemed to gain no-one’s attention. To the contrary, General MacArthur at a meeting with President Truman on Wake Island on October 15, predicted the war would be over by Christmas and that China would not intervene.

  On October 26 a regiment of the Republic of Korea (ROK) 6th Division reached the Yalu River near Chosan. Chinese forces engag
ed the regiment the same day and destroyed it. The ROK II Corps near Unsan and the 5th and 8th U.S. Cavalry Regiments were attacked by Chinese forces the following day. The battles lasted several days, inflicting heavy casualties on both sides. Then the Chinese ground forces seemed to vanish from the scene as quickly as they had appeared. On November 1 the first Chinese MiG-15 jet fighters appeared over North Korea. The military situation had changed drastically. To Secretary of State Acheson, close adviser to the president, the gnawing question was, “What were the facts about [the] Chinese military presence in North Korea and what were their intentions?” (Present 466).

  The appearance of the Chinese should have given pause to General MacArthur, but instead he ordered a general offensive on November 24, but it stalled within twenty-four hours when Chinese forces reappeared and counterattacked on November 25. As November came to a close, both the Eighth Army in the west and X Corps in the east were in retreat. In the bitter cold of a Korean winter, many isolated U.S. Army and Marine Corps units fought stubbornly for their survival over treacherous mountain terrain. General Walker was killed in a jeep accident on an icy road on December 23, 1950, and Lieutenant General Ridgway assumed command of the U.S. Eighth Army three days later. The Chinese entry into the war had surprised both MacArthur and those in Washington. The military power equation had changed totally. MacArthur’s strategy to split his forces and attack in the cold of winter over difficult terrain had been a major miscalculation.