Joe recalled one of those “milk runs” from the United States to North Africa. “We left Morrison Field, Florida, for Puerto Rico, British Guyana, Brazil, Ascension Islands, and then on to Monrovia on the African continent. We were three lonely aircraft over a big ocean, always looking out for each other. From Monrovia we flew to Dakar, and then we intended to go on to Marrakech. To get to Marrakech we had to cross the Atlas Mountains. The weather forecast called for only high clouds. We were tooling along for about an hour when, looking ahead, I saw big cumulus clouds shrouding the Atlas. I couldn’t climb over the clouds, so before we knew it, we were in the soup. I had picked up an excellent navigator in Philly. His name was Lash. Odd, how we never forget certain names. I said, ‘Lash, we have to go through that mountain pass.’ He gave me a heading, and I flew it. I don’t remember any more how long we flew, but then I got scared, and I said, ‘Lash, if we don’t break out pretty soon I’m going to make a 180 and get out of here.’ Suddenly we were in the clear. You could see the mountains on either side. He was a good navigator. Several planes were behind us. They didn’t make it through the pass. They flew parallel to the mountains westward to the coast and then doubled back. Of course, Lash and I were long on the ground having a drink in the club when they landed. They said in astonishment, ‘You came through the pass?’ I boasted, ‘Hell, it was wide open.’
“I got out at the end of the war for the sake of my mother. But I joined the reserves at O’Hare Field, and in 1947 the War Department recalled me and sent me to armaments school at Lowry Field, Colorado. After graduation I ended up at Pope AFB, near Fayetteville, North Carolina. I was assigned to a P-51 photo-recce outfit—with no guns. Never saw a gun again. Pope was the pits. The 82nd Airborne colocated with us was a really wild bunch. I went to Personnel to get out of there. They put me on the overseas list, and I ended up at Hamilton Field, near San Francisco, awaiting shipment to the Pacific. It was August 1948. Instead, they sent me to Great Falls, Montana, for six weeks of C-54 training. From there I flew a C-54 to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I was put on a military train to Fassberg. I had no idea where I was when I got there. I arrived in Fassberg at midnight. After a couple of hours of standing around and waiting, someone came and called my name. I was assigned to the 48th Troop Carrier Squadron. I grabbed my bag, and a weapons carrier took me to a barracks and a cold room. That night I was flying. It was two weeks before I saw the ground I was flying over because of the weather. I flew coal into Tegel. We shared Tegel with the Brits. Timing was always critical, so we were assigned block times. Fassberg planes would take off between sixteen minutes after the hour to forty-nine minutes after the hour, at three-minute intervals. If you got to the end of the runway at fifty minutes after the hour, you could not take off. Then you waited thirty minutes until the next block opened up. It happened to me a couple of times. If you had a block time of forty-nine, for instance, often you had to play beat the clock because of some problem. We’d jump in the plane, start the engines, and while we were taxiing, we would run through the engine checks, pressures, and temperatures. Normally we’d do this while sitting at the end of the runway. We’d taxi at high speed and check all four engines, and after that we’d run the before-takeoff checklist, hoping that by the time we did this and we got to the end of the runway, say at forty-nine, the tower would let us go. And if we weren’t quick enough, they’d say, ‘Hold position and wait.’ Then we sat there cooling our heels.
“I had the usual maintenance problems. One time at Tegel on one of the engines the starter wouldn’t work. They had a shoelike contraption that fit over the propeller blades and was attached to a rope. The rope was wrapped around the propeller hub; in turn, it was tied to a jeep. When the jeep gave the rope a pull, you had to have the ignition on and be ready to hit the mixture controls. It worked on the first try. One incident scared the crap out of me one night. As we went down the runway I discovered that the more speed we gained, the more aileron I had to crank in. Finally I broke ground. I flew to Berlin with the wheel cranked all the way to one side. The landing was tricky. As we decreased speed, I had to gradually decrease aileron control. It turned out that we had two hundred gallons of gas in the right-wing tank. It was supposed to be empty. We had nothing in the left. And we didn’t know it. Often the fuel gauges didn’t work properly in an airplane, and just as often we didn’t write them up. If we did, it grounded the plane. We were reluctant to red X an airplane. The airlift had to go on. As a result, many airplanes were in poor condition at the two hundred–hour point when we took them to Burtonwood for overhaul.
Block-time board at RAF Fassberg, 1949. Simple aids such as block-time boards controlled a complex operation. J. Laufer.
“Visibility was our major problem. One time the visibility was so poor I could not taxi to the unloading area. The plane behind me was sent back to Fassberg. There was a Russian airfield in the takeoff zone at Tegel. At about four hundred feet you had to make a steep turn to avoid flying over the Russian field. On one flight I saw Yaks lined up on the field. Later they were gone. They had these Yaks dispersing on different airdromes. Only two or three times was I buzzed by Russians. I could see them coming in the distance making a head-on approach, and then they would break off. I was never really concerned about them. After takeoff from Fassberg, it was our practice to check in over Dannenberg beacon with our time and altitude. I listened to the aircraft ahead of me to adjust my airspeed to maintain the three-minute interval between us. At the Berlin beacon, approach control would pick us up—Corkscrew and Zigzag. Corkscrew took us to near the field, and Zigzag took us in. Those radar guys were the best in the world. They could bring you in through the eye of a needle.”
C-54 pilots standing in front of Operation Vittles HOWGOZIT board, 1949. The 61st Group was number one when this picture was taken at Fassberg. J. Laufer.
Over a period of eight months, Joe Laufer thinks he flew 150 missions, “maybe a few more. I didn’t keep a log, nor did most of the pilots, to the best of my knowledge. We just did the job we were trained to do—fly airplanes. There wasn’t one pilot who thought it wasn’t going to work. Maybe there were some higher up in command who thought we weren’t going to cut it, but the pilots thought what they were doing was going to succeed.” In eight months of flying, Joe had three days of leave. He spent that time walking around Berlin. The city was mostly in ruins—block after block of crumbling walls and empty holes that once had been windows to a gentler world. “I never met any Berliners. I hardly ever saw any of them, except when they were unloading my plane, or the girls at the snack truck. I thought of them as ordinary people who needed our help, not as former enemies.” At RAF Fassberg, Joe’s home base, he experienced culture shock. “The German maids when they came to clean my room would open the windows, regardless of the temperature outside. They were the original fresh-air fiends. I would be trying to get some sleep after a night of flying, and they would come in, throw the windows open wide, and go about their business as if I wasn’t there. In time, I learned to sleep through it all.” After retirement from the Air Force, Joe went to work for the Civil Aeronautics Board in Washington. Today he resides in Annandale, Virginia.
Colonel Robert S. Hamill
Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal (11), Purple Heart
“I was born in 1918 in Hamill, South Dakota. My father, Gail Madison Hamill, after whom the small community was named, ran a trading post on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. In 1925 my family moved to southern California. I had a talent for football and qualified for the San Jose football team under Coach Dudley DeGroot, who later coached the Washington Redskins. By 1941 my coach was Glenn S. Warner, better known as “Pop” to us players. I didn’t come from a wealthy family. To be able to attend college, I had to cash in on my football skills. In addition I served as campus policeman, male model (with my clothes on), cleaned the stadium after games, and had my own Coke machines in fraternity, sorority, and other campus houses. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to earn an ext
ra nickel to stay in school. My mother taught me the value of education and never let me forget it.
Lieutenant Laufer picked up this C-54 at the Burtonwood maintenance depot in England. It was the one thousandth aircraft to go through a two hundred–flying–hour inspection and repair process. J. Laufer.
“In 1939 San Jose was the highest-scoring college football team in the nation. I was a sophomore. By 1941 I was a two-way lineman and cocaptained the team. I was voted Little All-American. On December 3, 1941, accompanied by our coach, Pop Warner, I led the San Jose Spartans to Honolulu, Hawaii, to participate in a series of charity games. Ben Winkleman was officially listed as our coach, but Pop Warner did all the coaching. We were having breakfast in the Moana Hotel on Waikiki Beach, the morning of December 7, when we saw a lot of stuff happening in the water. The Filipino waiters were yelling, ‘Whales! Whales!’—that’s what they thought it was. It must have been bombs or antiaircraft fire. We kept on eating. The night before, we had been told the army would be conducting maneuvers off the beaches and we would see tow targets. We kept looking for tow targets. It took a while to realize what was going on.
“Three weeks later we returned to the mainland aboard the President Coolidge. During the voyage, two players each were assigned a stateroom to tend to the wounded. It was horrible. They were burned all over their bodies and stank from the burned flesh and disinfectant. Every night bodies were taken on deck to the fantail and buried at sea. I never thought about going into the military before that, but as soon as we landed in San Francisco I led my football team to the navy recruiting office. They had a program which let you finish college before you went into flight training, and we all wanted to fly. I was the first in line. A dentist looked at my teeth and told me that I couldn’t fly for the navy. I had an underbite, and that wouldn’t do. I sat dejectedly on a bench, watching my teammates go through their exams. One finally came over and asked, ‘What’s the matter, Moe? You look down.’ I told him. Within five minutes, my team walked out of the navy recruiting office and we went next door to the air corps office, where we signed up. The navy lost a hell of good pilot,” Moe concluded with a twinkle in his eyes. “When I returned to the Varsity House, my home at the time, I found eight draft notices waiting for me. One notice was from the Chicago Bears offering me $150 a game. That was a fortune then. Another notice informed me that I had made Little All-American. The last notice I opened was from Uncle Sam. It was the most important.
“In early 1942 I reported for active duty and started air-crew training. I was sluiced through a number of bases. At Merced Field in advanced training I got to the point of my check ride. The commander of the squadron was Captain Edwards, he gave me my ride. After we landed, he got out and looked up at me and said, ‘Where did you learn to play football?’ I started telling him my whole life story. He walked away. I found out later that I was so rough on the controls that he thought I must have been a football player. He was trying to tell me how much I overcontrolled the airplane when he asked that question. He had no idea I ever played football. He made his point and walked away. At Williams Field in Arizona, in advanced twin-engined training, I flew plywood AT-10s. The Arizona heat made the AT-10s fall apart, and the planes were grounded. It was decided that anyone with over one hundred hours flying time would graduate. I graduated without a check ride and was appointed a second lieutenant. B-25 training followed at Columbia, South Carolina. I got checked out ahead of my class. My first solo mission was at night. I tried to be an eager pilot, being the first one checked out. At the end of the runway, my instrument lights didn’t come on. I was not about to abort my first solo mission and get the stigma pilots get for aborting. I was going to be a hotshot pilot. I had the engineer run his flashlight across the instrument panel, and we did the run up. As I started down the runway, I had runway lights, so I had no problem. When we got to the end of the runway, I pulled back on the stick, and it turned pitch black in the cockpit. I couldn’t see the instruments. I told the engineer to give me some light. He did, and that blinded me. From the seat of my pants I kept flying. Pretty soon I felt a slap on my face. The flight engineer was shaking a pine branch at me, ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I think you went through the trees.’
“The plane was pretty badly beaten up. The bombardier’s hatch was torn off, and the wind was rushing through the airplane. As I am making my approach to land I yelled to my copilot, ‘Flaps.’ He either didn’t hear me or was too scared to move, but I didn’t have flaps, I realized, as I was going down the runway like a son-of-a-bitch. I went around, got the flaps down, and made the landing. Two days later I met a flying evaluation board headed by the group commander. He read me the riot act. Then he grounded me. They made me a second lieutenant squadron commander of a processing squadron of active-duty people who had been accepted for pilot training. I didn’t even know how to set up a morning report. But the sergeants took care of me and made me look good. One Sunday the local Columbia paper did a story on my squadron. The group commander read about this second lieutenant and his great squadron and promptly called me into his office. He gave me two choices—be a permanent ground pounder squadron commander, or go overseas flying B-25s. I went back to flying.
“I was at Walterboro, South Carolina, for advanced training. One morning we were going on the range for bomb training. We had to go to Myrtle Beach to pick up the bombs first, real early in the morning. There had been a party at the club the night before, and my bombardier was a happy drunk. I couldn’t take him, but I wasn’t going to abort the mission. I took my bombardier to his room and told him to stay there. He went right to sleep. Six of us were flying formation up to Myrtle Beach to get the bombs. One by one, the guys dropped out, buzzing people in the cotton fields below. Finally there was only lead and me. I wanted to go down and buzz like the rest of them. Then I saw a fairly big river. It was wider than a B-25, with steep banks. In those days the epitome of being the greatest pilot was to fly close enough over the water to get water in the lower turret. Here I went. The guys in back were yelling, ‘We’re getting water, we’re getting water.’ I didn’t realize two things. First, the river wasn’t going to stay straight forever. Second, the migration of ducks in February. There was a major turn in the river, and thousands of ducks were on the near side, out of the wind, where I couldn’t see them. I thought, ‘Do I pull up, or shall I carefully turn and not hit my wing in the water?’ The banks looked pretty high to pull up, so I decided to turn. Well, the ducks heard the roar of that noisy B-25, and thousands of them came up right through me. The bombardier’s hatch was completely busted in. The rocker boxes were broken and dangling. The leading edges of the wings were dented. I didn’t land at Myrtle Beach. I knew that airplane wasn’t going to fly again.
“I was the only one landing at Walterboro. Everyone was there to meet me. We dropped the hatch and four of us got out. It was a fiveman crew. They looked into the bombardier’s compartment, and all they could see was blood and guts and feathers. The compartment was full of dead ducks. They thought the bombardier had been killed and was lying under that bunch of dead ducks. Well, the Lord was looking out for me that day and for my bombardier, Frank Snow, for if he had been along he would have been killed for sure. There went my flying career again, I thought. The only thing that saved me, I believe, was that at this period of the war in 1943 they desperately needed pilots. I completed the remainder of my training, and my crew and I went by train up to Kellogg Field, Michigan, where we picked up a new B-25 at the factory. Then we flew the long circuitous route from Michigan to Florida to South America to Ascension Island and on to North Africa.
“At a rear base near Cairo, Egypt, we were assigned to the 12th Bomb Group. We went into town to look around. Only the copilot stayed behind. Soon a half-track came after us, picked us up, and took us directly to our aircraft. The engines were running. The operations officer said to me, ‘The copilot has been briefed. Just don’t fly above four hundred feet.’ I taxied out into an open spot to take off—I did
n’t know where the runway was—when all at once they flagged me down. I had taxied into a minefield at the forward base. Then, carefully, they led us out of there, and I took off. The following day I checked the mission board in front of the operations tent and found that I was on the schedule to fly a night mission. I confronted the operations officer and said to him, ‘There must be some mistake. I just got here, and I am listed on the mission board to fly at night. I am not checked out yet.’ The ops officer turned to me and said, ‘Are you the pilot?’
“I responded, ‘Yes, Major. I haven’t been checked out day or night.’
“ ‘Didn’t you fly yesterday?’
“ ‘Yes, sir.’
“ ‘Was it daylight when you took off?’
“ ‘Yes, sir.’
“ ‘Did you land after dark?’
“ ‘Yes, sir.’
“ ‘You are checked out, Lieutenant.’ And with that comment I was dismissed.
“I remember that first mission against the Afrika Korps. The flak—it sounded like gravel hitting the aircraft. A couple weeks later, on May 6, 1943, just before the Germans surrendered, I was flying my sixth mission. The aircraft in front of me received a direct hit. It was the new group commander on his first mission. The airplane disintegrated. I was busy dodging debris. When I got back to base, I was pretty well shot up. We couldn’t get the gear down. I gave the crew the opportunity to bail out, but they opted to stay with me. I was going to belly in. The procedure was for the copilot to back up his seat and get out, then the pilot. Then there is room for the bombardier to exit, and so on. I was still sliding down the desert, props throwing up dust, when I felt a foot on my ear. My bombardier was standing on my shoulders, trying to get out. I don’t remember who got out first. Later on we tried to get out the way he did, but without that adrenaline we couldn’t do it. I popped three disks in my back. Otherwise, no one was hurt. After my muscle spasms died down, I went back to flying.
I Always Wanted to Fly Page 6