American Raiders: The Race to Capture the Luftwaffeâ??s Secrets

12. The Feudin’ 54th

[ 161 ] THE FEUDIN’ 54TH While the Air Technical Intelligence and CIOS/CAFT teams garnered most of the glory in their search and discovery of Nazi technological treasure, they would not have succeeded without the support provided by the disarmament squadrons. The disarmament squadrons provided everything the ATI teams didn’t have or couldn’t do for themselves— trucks, jeeps, food, tents, skilled and unskilled labor, any number of items and services required for large and small projects.Both teams and squadrons worked hand in glove to strip Nazi Germany of its technological treasure. The 54th Air Disarmament Squadron, one of ten such squadrons formed under the umbrella of the 9th Air Force Service Command Disarmament Division, came into being in December 1944. Other squadrons had been forming since October, when the conversion of aircrew replacement training squadrons into disarmament squadrons was first authorized by General Spaatz. The men of the newly designated 54th ADS struggled with their new identity, having no clear idea what the term disarmament implied. The men felt unprepared for a task they didn’t understand and had not been trained for. They wanted to continue training aircrew replacements, not knowing that those days were gone, never to return. Their new assignment, however , recognized and drew on their varied technical skills as well as 12 their language abilities, present in most American combat units. They were all young men in their teens or early twenties, whose backgrounds were as varied as the nation they came from. Their names spoke volumes as to their heritage—Freiburger, Berkowitz, Cummings , Kadansky, Maxwell, Smith, Brown, Jones, Fiedler, Hanclosky, Higgins, Ninneman, Harasmisz, Preston. Some had a high school education; most didn’t. Some spoke German, Polish, Hungarian, or another European language; some spoke more than one language, useful skills, as it would turn out, for their new and still ill-defined tasks. They were innovative and creative; they groused at the arbitrariness of Army life; they would in time lament the nonfraternization policies imposed by old men who didn’t seem to understand the needs of the young. The men of the 54th ADS all knew, though, why they had come to England. One of the first things nearly every one of them had done upon his initial assignment to a double-decker bunk stuffed into a crowded Quonset hut was to hang a calendar above his bed and begin marking off the days. Going home became the goal. (Actually, hanging a calendar may have been the second thing the new arrivals did. The first probably was to put up a picture of a bathing-suit-clad Esther Williams, a 1940s pinup girl.) Although they were airmen, they were in the Army Air Forces and wore brown uniforms like any “dogface ” in an infantry platoon. When they eventually deployed from England to France, they wore helmets, carried M1A1 carbines or M1 rifles, .45 caliber pistols for the officers, along with their A bags slung over their shoulders. When seen from a distance, they looked just like any other group of dogfaces. In December 1944 the 54th ADS historian, an additional duty levied on the most junior lieutenant in the squadron, was 1st Lieutenant Robert L. Smith. Smith did a commendable job of recording the human side of war.“The squadron received a new birth beginning with this month,” Lieutenant Smith noted.“Till that memorable The Feudin’ 54th [ 162 ] day we were the 3rd Replacement and Training Squadron, but now all our personnel in addition to the old designation are placed on duty with the 54th Air Disarmament Squadron (Provisional). This double identity causes difficulty to many of us in understanding exactly what we are, but our hands are tied until the ‘Provisional’ is removed from our name and we legally come into existence.”The lieutenant’s lament was all too understandable—the troops on the line often were never told about the little details which shaped the routines of their military existence. Lieutenant Smith also had no idea that the 54th would never again function as a replacement and training squadron, and that the PROVISIONAL appended to their new unit designator was a fact of life which provided for their squadron’s demise upon completion of their newly assigned task—the disarmament of the Luftwaffe. Personnel turnover in the 54th, as in nearly every other combat unit, whether fighter, bomber, or ground support, was constant and...