I Always Wanted to Fly

by Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

  “I got a few drift readings over the Atlantic before it got dark. I tried a celestial fix with the old A-10 sextant. I centered the bubble on a star, made little marks on the ring covered with wax paper, and then averaged out the pencil marks I had made. Supposedly that was the altitude of the star. After shooting three stars I went into the books and calculated a line of position for each of the stars, which I then plotted on my chart. Of course, my fix was where we had been when I started the procedure an hour earlier. Come dawn the next morning, we flew in a broken overcast and undercast. No drift readings were possible. No way to shoot the sun. I was flying dead reckoning most of the time. The pilot turned around in the cockpit and yelled back at me, ‘Hey, when are we supposed to hit the Azores?’ Straight ahead, forty-five minutes, I said, with as much confidence as I could muster. Pretty soon the pilot yelled, ‘Hey, pretty good, pretty good, Nav!’ I crawled into the nose of the aircraft and there, sticking through the undercast, silhouetted against the rising sun, was Pico Alto. We were heading right for it. From then on I could do no wrong. I almost got lost going from the Azores to the coast of France. I was about fifty miles off. It didn’t matter to the crew.

  “In October 1947 we finally found our way into Giebelstadt, Germany. There hadn’t been much recovery. The hangars were still bombed out. The runway was in good shape, though. They had a GCA radar at Giebelstadt, but they were still practicing. We had a few hairy GCA-controlled approaches in bad weather, which I would just as soon forget. Both pilots and GCA operators needed much more practice. When we had good weather, which wasn’t often, the squadron flew in formation, nine or ten aircraft, over the capitals of Europe as a show of force. It was an education for me to see places I had only read about. We flew low, at about three thousand to four thousand feet. My crew was selected to fly to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, to demonstrate the reach of the B-29. Flying over the Arabian Desert was much like flying over the Atlantic: no landmarks, no navigational aids, no nothing. We got back to Rapid City in December 1947. I was assigned to my own crew, piloted by Lieutenant J. R. Wright. Our B-29s had the letter R in a black circle painted on their tails—the same letter that was painted on the tail of the Enola Gay in 1945, although she didn’t belong to the 28th Bomb Group. We had three squadrons in the group—the 77th, the 717th, and the 718th. In the months after returning from Giebelstadt, I checked myself out on the APQ-7 radar, which was installed in our B-29s. The radar had a sixty-degree sector scan over a range of two hundred miles. I also checked myself out on the Norden bombsight. We didn’t have a bombardier on the crew.

  “The air force became a separate service in 1947, and with that the Rapid City Army Airfield became Rapid City Air Force Base. We also changed our unit designation from 28th Bombardment Group to 28th Bombardment Wing. Names changed, but little else. We still didn’t have a bombardier on the crew. One Sunday afternoon in July 1948 I got a call to report to squadron operations immediately. When I got there, everybody was filling out papers. ‘We’re going on TDY,’ I was told. ‘Go home and pack a bag for a couple of weeks and come back and you’ll get briefed.’ When I did, however, things didn’t seem right. People were filling out forms like powers of attorney and last will and testament. I packed, and when I got back to the squadron, we were briefed that we were going to Goose Bay, Labrador, and then on to an undisclosed location. The navigators got together to discuss the route. Master Sergeant Nestor Velasco and I were the only enlisted navigators—the rest were lieutenants or captains. Naturally, we two didn’t have much to say about the route. Takeoff was scheduled for the following day.

  “The base was a flurry of activity. Engineers were running up aircraft engines, trucks full of equipment were crisscrossing the ramp. When I got to my airplane, I saw the maintenance men loading ammo in the gun turrets and filling extra ammo cans. What impressed me most was a bomb-bay kit that had been uploaded. I had never seen it before. I asked our crew chief, Master Sergeant Joe Pellerin, ‘What is that stuff?’ ‘Flak suits,’ he said, grinning knowingly. Flak suits! Well, I said goodbye to my wife and young daughter, and off we went to Goose Bay—all three of our squadrons, ten aircraft each. At Goose Bay, after crew rest, they briefed us that the wing was going to RAF Scampton in England. Evidently, the Russians were blockading Berlin, and we were going over in case something happened. The thing that amazed me most as a navigator was that the air force didn’t have any charts for us. We were given WAC charts (world aeronautical charts) of England, nearly useless for our purposes. The whole of England was on one of these charts. The briefers gave us the coordinates of RAF Scampton, near the little town of Lincoln. There was a small circle on the chart which was the base. But there were circles all over England. The place was covered with airfields. We were advised that the best way to find the base was to fly up the River Thames until we could see the big cathedral on the hill in the center of town, then turn north for five miles, and that was RAF Scampton.

  “We took off at night, flying at four thousand feet. Clouds below us, clouds above. No stars, no drift readings possible. Nothing. We were number five. The wing commander, Colonel John B. Henry, flying ship number 6-308, was first. He was flying with the top navigator in the wing, a captain. We were flying in a bomber stream. I did a lot of dead reckoning on the way over, and a lot of praying. After several hours I cranked up the APQ-7 sector scan radar with its two hundred–mile extended range and good land-water contrast. At about our estimated time of arrival for landfall, I picked up land. The land-water contrast was so stark I thought there were high mountains ahead of us. ‘Oh my God,’ was my next thought—we were heading into Norway, because I didn’t know of any sizable mountains in England. As we got closer, I realized it was just land-water contrast, not mountains. I breathed a deep sigh of relief. I tried to pick out the coastline, but with my little WAC chart, everything looked the same. There was nothing I could identify to help me determine precisely where we were. The pilots kept saying, ‘Where in the hell are we, Joe?’ I put them off and put them off until we came across what I thought was a distinctive bay and river just south of Scotland. ‘I must have drifted north,’ I thought. Authoritatively I said to the pilot, ‘Turn south.’ He turned south. I recognized the Wash on the radar, a prominent inlet off the coast of Norfolk, and I knew London had to be straight ahead. I picked up London. On the radar, London was a huge return. When we got near London, I told the pilot to start letting down. No clearance, no nothing. We flew at whatever altitude and wherever we wanted. We were down to about five hundred feet when we spotted a river running in the right direction and began following it. The pilot tried calling the control tower at Scampton but got no response. Sure enough, up ahead there was the cathedral. OK, turn north five miles, I told Lieutenant Wright when we got over the cathedral. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘we’re heading north. Now, which one of these fields is Scampton?’

  “I looked out the nose of the aircraft, and there was one airfield after another. Well, it had to be the airfield with the B-29s on it, I told R. J. We were number five on takeoff. There should be four B-29s lined up on one of those fields. We flew all over and saw no B-29s on any of those airfields. The briefers at Goose had told us there was a signal square in front of the control tower at Scampton, a square with painted white rocks in it which spelled out the letters SA. The other fields had other letters to identify them. From our altitude we couldn’t make out anything. R. J. Wright finally made contact with Scampton tower and told them we couldn’t locate the field.

  “The tower operator replied, ‘You just flew over us.’

  “ ‘But there are no B-29s on the ground,’ R. J. said.

  “ ‘No. No one else has arrived yet.’

  “ ‘Well, we’ll wait,’ R. J. replied. We circled and circled. Finally, the control tower called, ‘There are important people here waiting for you. You better land.’

  “R. J. Wright was a first lieutenant and strictly military. He wanted to do things right, and doing things right meant that the wing comm
ander should be the first one to land. But he had little choice in the matter and prepared to land. He tried to make a perfect landing for the occasion; instead, he slammed our bomber into the runway. He inadvertently depressed the mike button on the steering column when we hit the runway and said out loud, ‘Oh shit,’ a comment which was monitored by not only the tower but also the waiting guests. The tower operator made a curt remark about us using proper English while in the United Kingdom. We taxied in. There was the BBC, a big welcoming crowd, the air marshal of the Royal Air Force. All the big wheels had assembled for the occasion—the arrival of the first American B-29 bomber in England. Nobody else was there yet. R. J. Wright got out first. I finally got out, sweaty and dirty. I stayed out of the way while the pilot, the copilot and the bombardier, the only three officers on the crew, gave their interviews. R. J. was making a recording for the BBC. It was broadcast every thirty minutes, I believe, on the BBC for the rest of the day, announcing ‘The Yanks are back!’

  “It must have been an hour later when the next airplane came in. The wing commander, Colonel Henry, led by the wing navigator, had ended up several hundred miles too far north. Nobody mentioned anything about it. But R. J. was peeved at me because he was put in an embarrassing position by our early arrival. When Colonel Henry landed, the show was over. The brass had departed. Colonel Henry was met by the base commander and a few low-ranking types. R. J. got the publicity.

  “No one had made provisions for our arrival, and the RAF was a bit overwhelmed by such a large group of personnel and aircraft. As a senior noncommissioned officer I got to sleep in the NCO Club, which had little rooms upstairs. They put four of us in one room in double-decker bunks. The other enlisted men slept in Quonset huts. We ate in a common mess. The British fare was not great by our standards—stewed tomatoes for breakfast and meat pie for dinner. Every day was pretty much the same. We couldn’t buy anything because there was no base exchange. There were no stores on an English air base. The RAF did the best they could to provide for us, but the men complained continually about the food. After several weeks a C-54 arrived loaded with rations. I remember bully beef, fresh beef, chicken, butter, and eggs. But then what really embarrassed me and made me feel bad, they split the mess hall in half. We had gotten acquainted with many of the RAF troops by then and formed friendships. The RAF ate their standard fare on their side, while we ate fresh beef, chicken, and eggs on our side, and the RAF didn’t have any of that.

  “Because of our sudden departure, a lot of problems were cropping up at our home base. Nobody had allotments in those days. We got paid in cash and paid our bills as we got money in hand. We weren’t there, so there were no provisions made to pay the wives. The wives were running out of food, had no money to pay the rent or buy the necessities of life. There was a lot of complaining, and the morale of the troops was suffering. The problem was serious enough that one day we were called together in a hangar and were addressed by the senator from South Dakota, the Honorable Chan Gurney, and the 15th Air Force commander, Major General Leon Johnson. They gave a pep talk and assured us that every effort would be made to solve our problems. And they really did help. When they got back to the States the word was put out on the base for the wives to meet. Partial payments were made, and groups were formed in town for the wives to help each other. We didn’t have any clothes either because most of the guys packed only enough clothes for two weeks. They got a C-54 and put the word out to the women that they could send things to their husbands. My wife sent me cans of chicken, tuna, candy bars, and extra clothes.

  “Our B-29 bombers flew formation missions into Germany, something we had never done before at Rapid City. We also flew the Berlin corridors. We had never flown in a controlled situation such as this, but to fly in the Berlin corridors we had to file a flight plan and stay within this narrow, twenty-mile-wide corridor. It was something new to us. There were radio beacons, which were helpful, but we were warned that the Russians could distort the beams. As a navigator I had to put my skills to use. Our mission was to show ourselves to the Russians. I remember flying single ship into the southern corridor to Berlin and flying out the northern corridor and then back to England. Some other guy would do the same thing flying in on the northern corridor and out the southern corridor. I did that two or three times while I was there. We flew above the transports. They probably didn’t even know we were there. We were pressurized and could fly higher, while the heavily loaded transports flew below us, unpressurized. We encountered Russian fighters only once. Two Yak-9s came alongside and looked us over. Our gunners swung their gun turrets around. The Yaks sat out there a few minutes and then peeled off.

  “Something else scared us more than any Russian Yaks could have. We heard that somebody had proposed the use of B-29s to deliver coal to Berlin. The thought of loading up the bomb bay with bags of coal drove the maintenance people out of their minds. They heard that in the cargo airplanes the coal dust got into everything. The rumor was that since we couldn’t land on the runways in Berlin, we would jettison the coal bags into the Berlin Olympic Stadium. I heard the bombardiers talking about using their bombsights and worrying about the trajectory of a bag of coal. People actually came around and looked at our aircraft to see how they could load things into the bomb bays, but fortunately it never came to that.

  “The morale of the enlisted men in the wing remained shaky. They were probably getting letters from home saying that their families were hurting. The men would resort to nearly anything to get home. We had more high-level visitors to Scampton—General Hoyt S. Vandenberg accompanied the new secretary of the air force, Stuart Symington. I was really impressed by the young, handsome four-star who had recently taken over from General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz as air force chief of staff. Secretary Symington and General Vandenberg seemed genuinely concerned. General Vandenberg told the assembled enlisted men, ‘Don’t worry about things back home. We’re going to take care of your families. Your replacements back in the States are getting ready to relieve you. You are doing a fine job. Stick it out for a few more weeks, and you’ll be on your way home.’ It was late October 1948 when we came back to Rapid City. We had been at Scampton a little over three months. When we returned, the local community gave us a big welcome, including a picnic to show their appreciation. A B-29 outfit from Salina, Kansas, came over to England to replace us. They had three months to get ready; we had less than three days.

  Crew 603 at RAF Scampton, August 1948. Lieutenant R. J. Wright is standing at left with wheel hat; Master Sergeant Joe Gyulavics is third from left, standing. J. Gyulavics.

  28th Bomb Wing B-29s over the English Channel, passing the white cliffs of Dover, 1948. J. Gyulavics.

  “In 1949 I went to B-36 upgrade training. The 28th Wing got its first B-36 that August, and we were checking out in it when I applied for pilot training. My pilot at the time was a Captain Steffes, a West Pointer. He encouraged me to go to pilot training and gave me the push I needed to apply. It was a major decision because I had to give up my rank as master sergeant and revert back to cadet status. In January 1950 I left the 28th Bomb Wing to begin a new life. I sent my wife and daughter home to live with my mother. As an aviation cadet I had to live on seventy-five dollars a month, and I couldn’t support my family on that. I went to Goodfellow AFB first, then to Reese at Lubbock, both in Texas. When I graduated as a pilot, I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force—for the second time.”

  Colonel Richard Schulz, a young lieutenant bombardier, was a member of MacDill’s 307th Bomb Wing, the other B-29 wing that was shifted to England on short notice. “One afternoon in June 1948, the wing was on a flying training exercise when we were ordered to land immediately. We assembled in the wing briefing room and were told that we were on twelve-hour-alert status and would be departing shortly for RAF stations Marham and Waddington in the United Kingdom. Our mission was to provide support for the Berlin Airlift. We were to plan on a two-week deployment but to pack as if we were going
away for six. The mission was classified secret, and we were counseled that if we revealed our destination to anyone, including our wives, we would be subject to courts-martial. We headed out of MacDill for England the following week, stopping in the Azores for refueling and crew rest. In England we were quartered in World War II Quonset huts once occupied by air crews of the Eighth Air Force. Each of us had a small private room, in contrast to the open-bay arrangement the Eighth Air Force crews had to put up with. Each morning our batman, an RAF enlisted man assigned to take care of our needs, would bring us hot tea in bed. To say the least, this was much different from our customs.”

  Dick Schulz had applied for pilot training before leaving for England. While at RAF Marham his application for training was approved, and in early October 1948 he returned to the United States. At this time, SAC had little of the vaunted precision and power that it later acquired under the driving leadership of General LeMay. But SAC had the atomic bomb, or “gizmo,” as the air crews called it. And the gizmo counted for something. A fourth B-29 bomb wing, the 509th, was deployed to England. The 509th was the wing that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. It had the reputation of having the gizmo, while the other bomb wings didn’t. The 509th came from Walker AFB in New Mexico. The wing consisted not only of the usual three squadrons of bombers but also its own squadron of KB-29 refueling tankers. Air refueling significantly extended the bombers’ range and was an important asset in creating the global reach to which SAC aspired. The KB-29 tankers put the Soviets on notice that no place in the Soviet Union was unreachable.