I Always Wanted to Fly Read online

  “It felt good to be back in uniform,” Hal confessed, sitting in his comfortable home in Riverside, California, a popular retirement location for air force flyers. “Soon after reporting to Luke Field, I was assigned to attend communications school at Scott AFB in Illinois. Once I graduated, in January 1948, I regained my former rank of lieutenant. As a trained communications officer, I was assigned to Mc-Chord AFB in Washington state. There I was promptly put in the right seat of a C-82 transport as copilot, flying support missions for the U.S. Army. I never got a chance to work as a communicator. Six months later I received orders to report to Hamilton AFB, near San Francisco, to await shipment to somewhere in the Pacific. I sat around at Hamilton for several days, waiting for my orders to arrive. When they finally arrived, I didn’t go to the Pacific; instead, I was sent to Great Falls, Montana, to check out in the C-54 to fly the Berlin Airlift. On November 30 I arrived at Rhein-Main Air Base. On December 1 I flew my first mission to Berlin in the right seat. After that it was fly, fly, fly—ease the power back, ease the nose up, touch down. Unload. Back to Rhein-Main for more coal.

  “We flew Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Of course, we acted up when we arrived at Tempelhof on Christmas Eve. We announced our arrival as Santa and his reindeers. We were promptly told to shut up. The C-54 was a fantastic airplane to fly. They only fixed the engines, things which we absolutely had to have to fly. Other malfunctions were ignored. I had a working autopilot on only one aircraft I flew, but that time I nearly got into big trouble. It was night, and we were on our second run to Berlin, me and my copilot, Darrel Lamb. We had taken off at two in the morning. Both of us were sleepy. We didn’t call in over the Berlin beacon. When I awoke I saw Darrel was sound asleep. The bird dog, our radio compass, was pointing toward the tail. There were not many lights on the ground below us—everything was pitch black. I really got scared. I awoke Darrel, who was as startled as I was. He cranked in Berlin radio. It was weak. We had no idea how long we had been asleep, but we promptly did a 180. It took us thirty minutes to get back to Berlin, about ninety or so miles. We were probably near Stettin, somewhere over the Baltic Sea, when we made our turn. The corridor wasn’t always full of aircraft, so we waited until we heard someone call in over the Berlin beacon. Six minutes later, someone else called in his hardstand number. We waited three minutes and then called in our own number and rejoined the stream of aircraft into Berlin. We sweated blood for a couple of days, expecting the hammer to come down on us at any time. Nothing ever happened.”

  Fatigue was one of the greatest hazards during the Berlin Airlift. Hal Austin’s dangerous incursion into Poland, although rare, is an example. Fatigue combined with a night, zero-visibility landing could be a deadly combination. Ice on wings, propellers, and on the runway also did not help. As a result of the frequent landings while loaded to maximum capacity, many of the aircraft badly needed maintenance before their scheduled two hundred–hour inspections. In such an assembly-line flying environment, where crews flew day and night regardless of weather conditions with marginally maintained aircraft, a price had to be paid: thirty-one Americans died carrying food and coal to a hungry and cold Berlin. In addition, thirty-nine Royal Air Force personnel and British civilian employees performing airlift duties lost their lives, as did thirteen Germans.

  While Hal Austin still looked over his shoulder after his inadvertent penetration into Poland, he was hatching another way to get himself into trouble. He had met Rosemary, the stepdaughter of an army warrant officer who was stationed near Frankfurt. Hal thought he could impress the young lady if he took her on a flight to Berlin. Rosemary agreed to go, thinking it would be fun. “Hal told me I would have to come on short notice,” Rosemary, who later became his wife, said, “and it would be at night. He found a parka for me, with a hood that had a fur lining to hide my face, and a pair of men’s overalls. When he called, I put that on. ‘Keep your hands in your pockets,’ he said to me when he picked me up. ‘Your hands will give you away, not being a man.’ Well, to get into the GI truck, a weapons carrier, to take us out to the plane, I swear, the stairs into the truck were this high.” Rosemary held her left hand up to the middle of her waist. “All the guys were yelling, ‘Hurry up. Hurry up.’ Hal whispered to me, ‘Look down and go to the end of the truck and sit in a corner.’ No way could I get on that truck on my own. The guy in front of me finally turned around and held out his hand. I had to take my hands out of my pocket and take his. He had this expression on his face, like, what am I holding? He pulled me up and kept watching me. He didn’t say a word. But he kept watching me as I sat in the far corner of the truck. Hal in the meantime acted like I wasn’t there. We got on the plane. It was supposed to be ready. And lo and behold, two GIs were working on something in the cockpit. Hal quickly grabbed me and shoved me into one of two bunks behind the cockpit and shut the curtains. ‘How much longer?’ I heard him say to the maintenance men. ‘I have a window to make.’ The maintenance men responded in the usual colorful language, followed by a “Sir,” and suggested to Hal he take the blankety-blank spare on the next hardstand. Hal didn’t want to do that because the plane was loaded and the rear door was already closed. He kept stalling. Finally, when he realized the maintenance men were not about to move, he opened the curtains, said, ‘Come on Honey,’ and reached in and grabbed me. Off we went out the door behind the copilot’s seat. The two maintenance men stood there looking like, what have we got here?”

  “That was the first time after three months of flying that I had an airplane that wasn’t ready to take off,” Hal interrupted Rosemary. “The next airplane we went to was ready.”

  “Some airplanes were crashing,” Rosemary continued her story. “They didn’t publicize it. But after his first plane wasn’t ready, Hal thought it wise to give me a safety briefing. ‘If anything happens, crawl away from the airplane as far as you can,’ he said.” Rosemary laughed loudly, recalling the incident. “I would probably be dead by then. How could I crawl then? In Berlin they unloaded the plane. I stayed in the bunk behind the curtain. Once we got back to Rhein-Main, it was light, and Hal worried the entire time someone would see me and recognize I was a woman.”

  Hal Austin apparently was not a fast learner when it came to taking young women along for rides. Two weeks later he took not only Rosemary but also her friend to Berlin. “On the way back from Berlin the girlfriend sat between and behind us, in the flight engineer’s position,” Hal recalled. “It’s night, and the weather is rough. Her eyes are as big as saucers. I tell her not to worry, but if she should get scared, please, not to scream. St. Elmo’s fire was on the props and the wings, and number four engine suddenly began to cough, and I had to shut it down. Rosemary’s girlfriend started to scream like a wounded banshee and wouldn’t quit. She thought we were going to crash. That was the last time I took any of them along.”

  Hal and Rosemary were married on July 2, 1949, in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. With the end of the airlift in September 1949, Hal and Rosemary Austin transferred to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana, near Shreveport, where Hal would learn to fly the new and fast RB-45C Tornado reconnaissance jet.

  Lieutenant Colonel Edward Gorski

  Air Medal

  Any pilot who flew in Germany through the terrible winter months of 1948–49 will readily acknowledge that without the competence and professionalism of the ground controllers, the airlift would not have succeeded. Ed Gorski, who in retirement lives in Riverside, California, like many of his fellow airlifters, was one of the ground controllers at Frankfurt Airport during the airlift. Ed’s parents immigrated to the United States from Poland and settled in Milwaukee, where Ed was born in 1921. He was one day from being drafted in 1942 when he looked at the newspaper and saw ads reading, “Join the Navy,” “Join the Marines,” “Join the Army Air Corps.” He went to the Army Air Corps recruiting office, took the exam, passed, and got his name taken off the next day’s draft list. Ed went through aviation cadet training at various bases and in 1944 received his win
gs as a multiengine pilot at Stockton, California. He was assigned to B-17s. Upon completion of B-17 training and crew formation at Lincoln, Nebraska, he expected to leave for England as part of a replacement crew. Ed and his fellow fliers knew what the term replacement crew meant. “Then a miracle happened, I was not assigned to the Eighth Air Force but instead went to Salina, Kansas, to train B-17 Mickey Operators. Mickey Operators were airborne radar operators.

  “After the war I chose to stay in the air force. I liked flying. It grew on me. They didn’t need pilots at the time, so I attended air-traffic-control school in Oklahoma City—that way I stayed around airplanes. In late 1945 I got on an airplane at Langley AFB in Virginia and with several other controllers headed for Europe. The plane stopped in Munich, then Prague, and finally in Frankfurt, dropping off controllers in each place. In Frankfurt I set up a traffic control center for Germany, located on top of the IG Farben Building. I prepared the flight plans, and a radio operator talked to the pilots giving them their air-traffic-control (ATC) clearances. I then helped establish ATC centers in Munich and Berlin. The ATC center in Berlin was manned by members of the four occupying powers—Americans, English, French, and Russians. Throughout the airlift, the center functioned, and its members continued to cooperate. The Americans, English, and French controlled aircraft and coordinated with the Russians if there was a need for it. The Russians always thought we might be doing something funny in the corridors, and on occasion aircraft deviated and the Russians scrambled their fighters. But they cooperated. Aircraft in the corridors at all times were controlled by American GCA radar at either end of the trip.

  “I was sitting at the control board when the airlift started in June 1948. I sat there for a number of hours straight without interruption. My relief man didn’t understand what was going on when he showed up, because we had airplanes coming and going. Until then, it was unusual to have that much traffic. Initially it was a real close thing, hit and miss. When the generals came over to set up the airlift system, General Smith at first, then Tunner, they wanted five altitudes out of Rhein-Main at three thousand, four thousand, five thousand, six thousand, seven thousand, and eight thousand feet. Well, after a number of days we found because of wind conditions the aircraft at the top would overtake the aircraft at the bottom. Things were out of sequence sometimes when the aircraft arrived in Berlin. Fulda was the checkpoint when coming out of Berlin. That was where the aircraft were picked up by air-traffic control in Frankfurt. We would have to hold out-of-sequence aircraft at that point if the wind at the lower or higher altitudes differed substantially. At Fulda we ended up with stacks of airplanes. Of course, the same thing happened on the other end in Berlin.”

  Joint Air Traffic Control Center in Berlin, 1948. H. Myers.

  C-47 pilot Lieutenant Harold Hendler knew about stacking up over Fulda. “I usually only had thirty minutes of fuel remaining at that point. To avoid declaring an emergency, although I was still in IFR conditions, I would declare VFR. In other words, I was saying I could see where I was flying when I really couldn’t, at least not much. I could see the lights of Frankfurt shining through the undercast, and that was enough for me to proceed on my own to Rhein-Main or Wiesbaden and land. Risks were taken by everyone to make the airlift work. We just didn’t talk about it.”

  “The problem over Fulda got so bad,” Ed Gorski recalled, “that some of us convinced our bosses to talk to General Tunner to go to three altitudes. Five altitudes made things too problematic, especially for the C-47s—they overtook each other or fell behind. It was a mess, a cowboy operation. With three altitudes approved, we flew at three thousand, four thousand, and five thousand feet. From then on things worked out beautifully. Once the C-54s came, everything worked smoothly. It ran like clockwork. But initially it was a scary thing, no question about it. We also had a lot of people flying out of a desk. When they got into weather, they weren’t really qualified. They did the job, but it was scary. I was one of them. When I got off my shift, I flew one up and back. That was my indoctrination to understand what was going on. Overall, it was panicky initially with the C-47s. After a while it got organized as the pilots got more experience.

  “I had one interesting flight to Berlin. My copilot and I wondered why we couldn’t get to our assigned altitude. We finally got there after an hour’s laborious flight time. We were hauling perforated-steel planks to Tempelhof on our C-47. These perforated steel planks also came in a lightweight aluminum version. Our log said that’s what we were hauling. But they had loaded the steel planks instead, which were of course nearly twice as heavy as the aluminum planks. It is a wonder that we made it to Berlin at all.

  “We had a lot of people at USAFE headquarters who had airlift experience flying the hump in World War II, and we incorporated their knowledge into our operation. We also mimicked the FAA. We had attended their school in Oklahoma City, and they came over and watched us. They were amazed how we had managed to pick it up as junior officers. At that time our traffic load was the highest anywhere in the world. After a week of watching, the FAA representatives offered us jobs when we got out of the service. Everyone stayed. No one took an FAA job. Flying was still glamorous.”

  An article in the November 16, 1948, Airways and Air Communications Service newspaper features a picture of Lieutenant Gorski sitting behind a large traffic-control board in the Frankfurt center. The article mentions that in November 1948, Berlin ATC controllers averaged a radio contact with an aircraft every fifteen seconds. At Tempelhof, then the busiest airport in the world, the tower averaged better than one radio contact per minute. The air-traffic controllers were not unappreciated by the flyers. Lieutenant Leonard Sweet wrote, “I’m proud of the 176 trips I flew from Wiesbaden to Tempelhof. We often read of the accomplishments of the pilots, ground crew, logistics folks and even the thousands of DPs who could load and unload ten tons of cargo in ten or twelve minutes. There’s no doubt that all of these people working together did a tremendous job. But there was one group of men that was absolutely essential to our success, the GCA radar operators who guided us to the runway. During winter in Germany the days are pretty short. Much of our flying was done at night. Also, my first impression when I got to Wiesbaden was that no one paid any attention to the weather. Rain, snow, sleet or fog, everybody kept on flying. I found it hard to believe at first, but it didn’t take me long to learn. The cool, confident voice of the GCA final controller would guide us in every time. If we happened to drift a little off the glide path, he would calmly give us the correction needed to get us back on course. Then, as soon as we were safely on the ground, he would almost immediately pick up the next plane turning on final approach. This was because the next plane was only three minutes behind me.

  “I remember one day that brought home to me how really great these men were. If it hadn’t happened to me I would probably find it hard to believe. Sometime during the month of February 1949 a dense fog settled over most of Germany. This was too much even for the airlift. The fog became so dense that in the afternoon they stopped vehicular traffic on the base. All flights were grounded. But many of us were in the air, somewhere between Berlin and our home bases. There were no alternate bases open within reach of our fuel reserves. We had no choice but to return to our home base and put our faith in the GCA controllers. When I started my approach to Wiesbaden it was 7 P.M. and the fog was incredibly thick. About halfway down the final approach, I made the biggest mistake I could possibly have made. I called to the copilot to turn on the landing lights. As soon as they came on, I realized my mistake and told him to turn them off. The damage was done. The brilliant glare of the lights reflecting off the fog destroyed my night vision and temporarily blinded me. About that time I heard the GCA controller come on the air: ‘You are now over the end of the runway. Take over visually and land.’ Although I couldn’t see anything, I flared back, and the next thing I knew I was on the ground. My first thought was to find out where we were. If we had one set of runway lights on each side,
we were OK. If we had two sets on one side, we were in trouble. We were right in the middle of the runway, and GCA had landed us safely before I had seen the ground or any lights. All I had to do was bring the plane to a stop and try to find my way through the fog to the parking area. The fog lasted for three days. When it cleared, we went right back to flying every day. Looking back, I wonder how many other lives were saved by these dedicated men who sat in front of those little radar screens for hours at a time and served as the eyes for those of us doing the flying. Without them there could never have been a Berlin Airlift.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Joseph F. Laufer

  Air Medal

  Like most pilots who flew the airlift, Joe Laufer received his training during World War II. Joe was born in Chicago in 1923, an only child. He was four years old when Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, and that experience captured him for life. His mother read the Lindbergh newspaper coverage to him at the breakfast table, and from then on he wanted to be a pilot. Joe read every aviation book he could lay his hands on. He knew about the Lafayette Escadrille, about Richthofen, and of course about Lindbergh. At his first opportunity, in 1942, Joe joined the Army Air Corps, with his parents having to sign their consent because he was only nineteen. The army kept him in limbo because there were not enough slots available, but finally in 1943 he was assigned to a pilot training class. One day while in training at Kelly Field near San Antonio, Texas, Joe was asked to report to headquarters. “It scared the living daylights out of me. I put on my uniform and made sure I looked perfect. Sitting quietly and apprehensively in a room with several others, a colonel finally entered to tell us we had been selected to train with the Royal Air Force. Yippee! I immediately departed for Terrel, Texas, a British pilot training base, where instead of flying aging Stearmans I flew the new and hot T-6 Texan. Upon graduation I hoped to go into fighters but instead ended up ferrying airplanes from the United States to North Africa, England, and Italy—B-26s from the Martin plant in Omaha, B-24s from Willow Run in Michigan, Douglas A-26s and B-25s from plants throughout the United States to wherever they were needed.”