I Always Wanted to Fly: America's Cold War Airmen

Preface and Acknowledgments

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 xv Preface and Acknowledgments 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 fourengine 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 xvi Preface and Acknowledgments 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...