In Defense of Freedom: Stories of Courage and Sacrifice of World War II Army Air Forces Flyers

INTRODUCTION

I am a child of war—born in 1935 in a poverty-stricken village north of Berlin. My father, Willie, served in the 100,000-man post–World War I German army in a cavalry unit garrisoned in the town of Pasewalk, near the village of my birth. In 1936, Willie transferred to the newly created Luftwaffe. By the time World War II broke out, on September 1, 1939, my small family lived in government housing in the town of Sagan, in the province of Lower Silesia, now part of Poland. My father was briefly stationed at Sagan’s Kuepper Fliegerhorst, one of Hitler’s many newly created air bases. Our housing development was close enough to the airfield for him to be able to walk to work. After the war broke out, he soon was transferred. My mother, sister, and I remained behind until January 1945 when we fled approaching Russian tanks. I recall as a very young boy—I was probably four years old—playing in a sandbox outside our apartment house when a Junkers 52 transport from the nearby air base passed overhead. I saw the pilot looking down at me from a side window. I waved at him. And I believe he waved back. I never forgot that magic moment. From that day hence I fantasized about flying my own airplane.

I was four years old when World War II broke out in Europe. I knew nothing of it. Sagan, about ninety miles southeast of Berlin, with a population of less than twenty-five thousand, was a bucolic backwater of no interest to Allied aerial target planners. The town remained untouched by war until its very end. Spring of 1944 was sunny and bright. I turned nine that February—after a very cold winter. All the winters I can recall were very cold and snowy then. My friends and I built snow forts and we sledded and skied the nearby hills outside the air base. When the sun finally made its appearance, we had tired of snow and were happy to see the snow and ice turn to water and run into the nearby Bober river. It was April, I recall, the 11th of April to be precise, when the air raid sirens wailed for the first time—a scary sound I was to hear many, many times in days to come, and it was a sound that would haunt me for much of my life. Women air raid wardens donned their helmets and attempted to round up all of us children and get us to go into the basements of our apartment houses—which according to them had been built to withstand air attack. A claim that even we children doubted. We asked ourselves, how did they know there was going to be a war when they built our houses? Maybe they did—just we children didn’t know that. At the time the sound of the wailing sirens was exciting and I wanted to see what happened next. I hid behind some bushes in front of our apartment house. There was utter silence where only minutes before my friends and I had screamed at each other in playful ardor. What could the Americans possibly want to bomb in our little town, I thought? Probably the air base. But then I knew the base had a prisoner-of-war camp for British and American flyers shot down over Germany. So why would they want to bomb their own people? I knew it was American planes the warning was about, because I had heard that the British only attacked at night. I hid in the bushes and waited, and waited.

Then I heard a sound I had never heard before. It sounded like a huge swarm of bees was heading straight for me, although I knew it wasn’t bees, but that’s what it sounded like. Then, in the distance, up in the clear blue sky far above me, I saw a dark cloud approaching. The cloud had a faintly shimmering quality to it. It grew larger, and the sound grew louder. Minutes passed. I was sure the ominous sound came from that dark cloud up high in the blue sky above. Then I recognized that it wasn’t a cloud at all, but a huge formation of bombers, the sun reflecting brightly off their canopies and their many whirling propellers. The sound made by hundreds of aircraft engines churning through a cloudless spring sky was a deep, penetrating hummmmm, hummmmm, hummmmm…. With every minute the bombers came closer and the sound grew stronger. Windows in our apartment house began to vibrate. I could feel the vibrations in the ground below my feet penetrating my body. The huge bomber formation came closer and closer—heading straight for me. They were nearly overhead when I began to make out individual aircraft—it looked like maybe two hundred airplanes, maybe more. I had never seen so many airplanes together at one time in my life, and I lived near an air base and had seen many German war planes over the years. I knew they were B-17 bombers. I thought I knew every airplane there was—German, English, American. I was fascinated by the spectacle of the huge formation of American bombers overhead. Strangely, I wanted to be one of the unknown men high up in the sky, forgetting that they had come to bomb my country. I felt no hatred toward them, rather admiration and a deep sense of kinship. For me, a nine-year-old, it was all about the magic of flying. Then the formation made a slow, ponderous turn to the north, passing over the nearby town of Sorau. I couldn’t see the bombs fall and it was too far away to hear the explosions, but after the bombers passed out of sight, a huge black mushroom-like cloud rose into the blue spring sky, and since there was no or little wind, the black cloud hung over the wounded town of Sorau for the rest of the day, until it slowly drifted away to the northeast.¹

Years later I learned that the 303rd, 379th, and 384th Bomb Groups from the 1st Air Division of the 8th Air Force in England had fielded that force of over a hundred B-17 bombers. They were flying at an unusually low altitude of eleven thousand feet, dropping one-hundred-pound general purpose and five-hundred-pound incendiary bombs on the Focke Wulf 190 aircraft assembly plant at Sorau. As they passed, and before turning toward Sorau, they also photographed StalagLuft III, the prisoner-of-war camp at Sagan, where around eleven thousand Allied airmen, nearly all officers, were imprisoned.² Although living nearby at the time, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew as a nine-year-old boy was that there was a POW camp over the hills from us, and on occasion at night I could see the camp lights—that was all. Nor were we boys curious about the camp until that same year when seventy-six British officers escaped and we children were forced to help look for them. It happened in March, prior to the Sorau raid. Snow still covered the ground. The trees were without leaves, the days were short and the nights long. Nearly every day the skies were grey and overcast with a never-ending drizzle chilling us children and keeping us inside. But when the news of the escape from StalagLuft III became public, Hitler Youths came looking for us children and forced us down to the Bober river to help look for the escapees. We didn’t know who we were looking for, what they might look like if we ran into them or what they might do to us. We assumed the worst and were scared, and didn’t look very hard. We just wanted to go home to our mothers. The movie The Great Escape depicts part of my life as a young child: trying to grow up, learning to read and write, playing, and, like it or not, being forced to deal with war even if none of us children understood what it was all about, nor what war was really like—bloody, brutal, and unforgiving. I would learn all that soon enough.

On January 24, 1945, war caught up with my family when Russian tanks approached within ten miles of our housing area. My mother, Hedy, little sister, Ingrid, and I, loaded down with three suitcases, trekked to the Sagan train station where we waited in the bitter cold on the exposed platform for a promised train to Berlin—which didn’t arrive for another yweny-four hours. When the train did arrive, it was already full. Hedy and Ingrid managed to get on. I didn’t. When the train began to move out of the station, I knew I would never see them again, and I wanted to die rather than be left behind amongst an uncaring crowd of strangers. At the last possible moment, as I was running beside the train, unseen hands yanked me off the platform and onto the train. The nightmare of that experience, told in my earlier book German Boy, stayed with me well into my early forties, when the nightmares of my wartime experiences, too horrendous for a little boy to cope with, finally vanished from my sleep. Only three days later, on the 27th of January, the eleven thousand or so American and British prisoners of war at StalagLuft III began their brutal march to Moosburg, Bavaria, where they were finally liberated by a unit of Patton’s Third Army on April 29, 1945. The war ended on May 8, as beautiful a spring day as anyone could wish for. For the former prisoners of StalagLuft III an ordeal ended—mine was just beginning.³

Once the train delivered us to Berlin, bombings became a daily constant, something which each of us, young and old, dealt with in our own way. I recall turning ten in February 1945. My birthday turned out to be a dreary overcast day. There were no air raids. But the following day was a beautiful blue-sky day, and it was the day General Spaatz, the commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe, USSTAF, launched his first thousand-bomber raid against Berlin. As we sat in a basement shelter, feeling the carpet of bombs coming closer and closer, the terror of the situation hushed us all, young and old, huddled together in silence, pressing handkerchiefs, scarfs, whatever we could find, over mouths and noses to keep out the whitewash falling off the walls as the bombs burst. We survived that raid, but all of us—there were only women, children and old men in the basement shelter—knew that we would die soon, if not today, then tomorrow, or the day or night thereafter. I could not deal with the terror of those raids, and from then on, when entering the basement shelter, I forced my mind to escape into the ethereal world of the Leatherstocking series, including The Last of the Mohicans, books about America’s early years written by James Fenimore Cooper, or one of the many Karl May books I had read about the American West and its brave Apache and Sioux Indians. I may have been physically sitting in that basement shelter during an air raid, but my mind was somewhere else, and I never again mentally experienced another raid. When it was all over, my mother, thinking I was asleep, would tap me on the shoulder and say, Wolfgang, wake up, it’s over. Time to go up. She thought I was asleep, and in a way I was. I blanked out every air raid, and for all practical purposes my mind left my body and went somewhere else. The terror of a bombing raid is not something easily put into words, even this many years later.

The last days of the war were beyond anything my young mind could have imagined. Death was all around me. We three—Hedy, Ingrid, and I—survived Russian tanks, artillery, rockets, and strafing attacks by dive-bombers, not because of anything we did, but by the grace of God. The years passed and we survived life in the Russian Zone of Occupation, eventually fleeing to the British Zone, ending up in a wretched refugee camp off one end of the Fassberg air base runway, a former German bomber base put to use by the Royal Air Force. Life for us was all about surviving one day at a time, and focused on the very basics that sustain life—food of whatever kind, water, shelter and warmth. The winter of 1947 to 1948 was brutally cold. I would wake in the mornings with wind-driven snow covering my blanket, or whatever I was using to stay warm. The former German army barracks we lived in leaked when it rained, and the wind driven snow would find its way inside through a myriad of cracks and crevices. The bucket with our drinking water, after a cold night, would have a thin layer of ice on its surface. At age thirteen I began to lose all hope for a better life and it became my unspoken wish not to awake in the morning—just to die in my sleep. That’s what I, a thirteen-year-old boy, wished for. Then I grew angry with myself for being so selfish. Wasn’t I alive? So many of my young friends had died in the past three years. They no longer could feel hunger, cold, and pain. I could. How fortunate I was to still be able to experience life, no matter how difficult it seemed at times. Just as I had dealt with the terror of the bombing raids in Berlin, I found ways to create hope for myself, and once warmer spring days arrived everything began to look better—at least I wasn’t so cold anymore.

I recall the fear that gripped me when in early spring of 1948 I heard about the Russians blockading the city of Berlin. The men in our camp, nearly all unemployed, predicted that if the Americans didn’t stop the Russians, they would soon take over the rest of Europe. There was no one else who could stop their armies, they said. I was horrified at the thought. I had lived over two dreadful years in the Russian-occupied zone of Germany, and swore to myself that I would rather die than ever again live under a communist regime, regardless of its nationality. Then something truly wonderful happened—the first uplifting event I could recall since learning that my mother, Hedy, had not died from a Russian officer’s gunshot in the summer of 1945. Euphoria overtook me that morning on my way to school in Fassberg when I saw at the airfield my first American aircraft. I felt personally saved, rescued from a terrible fate. I believed in my childish innocence that the Americans had come to save me—a scared and hungry young German boy. The streets of Fassberg soon filled with American uniforms—men without guns, with smiles on their faces, always ready to share a piece of chewing gum or a candy bar with a German kid. Their huge four-engine C-54 transport planes turned over my wretched camp after takeoff on their way to Berlin. They flew so low, at times I thought I could touch them. They flew day and night, rain or shine, ice or snow. I would go to sleep at night to the comforting sound of aircraft engines droning overhead—the sound of freedom for me. One December night one of them crashed just beyond our camp as it was making its usual turn to the east. I went out to the crash site three days later, a site darkened with scattered coal, spilled engine oil and fuel. Aircraft parts and engines protruded from the soft, marshy ground. I nearly cried when I saw the terrible sight where three American airmen died. Standing at that crash site deeply affected me. I wondered, as only a young boy could wonder, Who are these Americans? Three years earlier, when I lived in Berlin, they bombed me in massive thousand-bomber raids. Now they were here saving that same city from hunger and cold—even dying to do so. I had no heroes in my world of death and darkness. But if I wanted to be like anyone, I wanted to be like these men in their brown, often rumpled uniforms, wearing their crushed 25 mission garrison hats, men who seemed not to know the meaning of hate. I didn’t know what made these Americans do what they did, but I wanted to be just like them, maybe wear their uniform, and if such miracles were possible, better yet, fly with them. Of course, being a child of war and a total realist, I understood that such musings were the dreams of people like me, the losers of the world, and such dreams would remain just that, and would never come to pass.

Well, I was wrong—my strange fantasy became a reality. In my air force career of thirty years I not only flew with some of the men of the Berlin airlift of 1948–1949, which set the limit to Soviet expansionism in Europe; I also flew and worked with many men who spent time in StalagLuft III, who survived the brutal march in January 1945 to Moosburg, and even some who bombed me while I was still a child in Berlin. None of these men I met and served with ever personalized their war experiences. A good friend of mine who went west only recently had three B-17 bombers shot out from under him—he landed them, but they never flew again—and was awarded the Silver Star and several Distinguished Flying Crosses. Carl Ousley never had an easy mission, he recalled for me. I used to joke with Carl that the only reason I was still around was because he told his bombardier on a Berlin mission to offset his target by a hundred yards: There is a German kid down there I intend to meet some years from now. I want him to stick around. We always got a good laugh out of that story. I miss Carl—my friend. I miss all of those men whose bravery gave me my freedom and a future that in my wildest dreams I could never have imagined. Most of them have gone west as we airmen describe the passing of our friends, but I feel a kinship with them, as if I’d been with them in their darkest hours over Germany when their machines faltered and they fell out of the sky into uncertainty. I understand their pain and marvel at the generosity toward their former enemy when it was all over.

I also know the sacrifices they made. In a little over three years of air war the 8th Air Force lost over 6,500 heavy bombers in combat and due to accidents. The latter case is frequently ignored in statistics of World War II. It didn’t really matter if one died as a result of enemy action or flying into each other while assembling over one’s air base—you were just as dead. Including the 3,214 B-17 and B-24 bombers lost in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations (MTO), the total loss of heavy bombers in the ETO/MTO due to enemy action and accident came to 9,714. A total of 94,565 men were killed, wounded, became POWs, or went missing in action by the 8th, 9th, 12th, 15th, and 1st Tactical Air Forces, according to the AAF’s Statistical Digest.⁴ The air war over Germany was as bloody as any ground battle one might choose to compare it to fought by Americans in World War II. In this book I will share with you the life stories of some of the many men I had the privilege to call my friends—men who flew B-17s and B-24s, P-47s and P-38s, Mosquitos and B-25s. They didn’t stop flying when World War II ended in 1945. Many of them went right on flying the Berlin airlift in 1948 to 1949, then found themselves involved in the Korean War, referred to at the time as a police action, which turned as bloody as anything airmen had experienced in World War II. It was the bravery of F-51 and B-26 flyers who saved the 8th US Army in the summer of 1950 from being thrown into the Sea of Japan by the North Korean invaders. They paid a very high price for their courage, losing over 350 F-51 fighters alone, but saving the men of the 8th Army.⁵ Some of them continued flying right into the early days of the Vietnam War. All said and done, it is an incredible testament to a generation of airmen who never quit their country when they were needed. They were always there, always willing to go one more time—regardless of the cost to themselves. And we, who flew combat over North Vietnam, stood on their shoulders and remembered that there was no such thing as turning back—such was and is our heritage. We all owe them a debt of gratitude for their courage and self-sacrifice, and for the example they set for every American airman of today and tomorrow. Clearly Tom Brokaw got it right when he called those who served in World War II the greatest generation; at least in my lifetime they were just that.

All of the men whose stories appear in this book in one way or another shaped and affected my life. Some I knew personally and flew with during my air force career, such as Joe Gyulavics, Bob Walker, and Sam Pizzo. Others were my commanders, such as Hack Mixson and David Jones. Some were incarcerated near where I lived in StalagLuft III, such as Art Exon, Chat Bowen, and Robert Slane, while so many others flew the Berlin airlift, which truly changed my life—among them Hal Austin, Dave Taylor, Barney Dobbs, Moe Hamill, and many others. I owe each one a debt of gratitude. When you have read their stories of commitment and sacrifice, of near death and imprisonment, of survival and just doing my job, as they tend to refer to even the most difficult situations, then you will understand the true legacy they left behind for us all. I wished I could shake the hand of each and every one I’ve written about in this book—unfortunately time has taken its toll. Yet we can honor them by recalling their deeds and passing them on to the next generation—the future leaders of America.

During the Berlin airlift, Captain Robert Walker flew coal from RAF Fassberg to Berlin. Shown is a Fassberg C-54 before the delivery of the final ton of coal to Berlin.

ROBERT P. WALKER

Mosquito/C-54/B-66/Test Pilot

Advice at Dawn

Soldier, put that picture down, the time is past for dreaming.

Those soft blue eyes and a silken gown won’t halt our battle scheming.

What if others win her grace—don’t look back or waver.

Someone home might take your place (no one truer, braver).

No use now to ask me why the fates sent you away.

Keep your eyes and carbine dry, there’s work to do today.

Regrets will get no battle won; let’s heed that bugle call.

You’ll come home a hero, son, or you won’t come home at all.

—Lieutenant Charles J. Hackett, WWII ETO

In the days of the Berlin airlift from 1948 to 1949, in a desolate refugee camp, I lay in my bed of straw every night listening to the reassuring sounds of C-54 engines droning overhead on their way to the beleaguered city of Berlin. One of those C-54 Skymaster pilots was a young captain by the name of Robert Patrick Walker. He knew not of me down below, nor I of him flying above. But as fate would have it, many years later, in a far-off land, in a war no one yet could foresee, Bob Walker and I would be comrades in arms, wearing the same flight suits, flying the same airplanes into combat. The war we shared was called the Vietnam War.

Robert Walker went by many names in his life. His younger sister, Silvia, called him Bud; the Canadians and the English would refer to him as either Pat or Paddy, and his fellow Americans called him Bob. Whatever name anyone chose to address him by, Robert Walker was a driven young man who—like so many of his generation—always wanted to fly. By the time Bob turned ten, on March 17, 1933, the sound of an airplane overhead made him turn his head skyward. Like most youngsters of his generation, he surely was fascinated by the exploits of daring barnstormers like Roscoe Turner. And everyone’s hero of heroes was, of course, the incredible and dashing Charles Lindbergh, the conqueror of the Atlantic in a flimsy single-engine aircraft named The Spirit of St. Louis, now prominently displayed in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC. Flying was a seemingly impossible dream for most, but it was to come true for many youngsters in a strange way—war. Bob graduated from high school in 1941 and had followed the war in Europe with great interest, especially the exploits of the German Luftwaffe and England’s desperate struggle for survival against high odds in the Battle of Britain. Bob’s country, America, appeared to be sitting on the sidelines. So, like many young Americans his age, he decided to do something about it. One day, without telling anyone of what he was about to do, Bob took a train from Austin, Texas, to Detroit, crossed over to Windsor, Ontario, and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). By the winter of 1942 Bob was a sergeant pilot and sailed from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for England aboard the Queen Elizabeth, along with eight thousand Canadian troops. Bob surely had no idea what challenges lay ahead. But he was a good pilot, a natural, as they say, and he would do all right.

Once in England, RCAF Sergeant Pilot Robert Walker, along with other American volunteers, was assigned to augment a British Mosquito squadron. The Mosquito, a very fast airplane for its day and mostly built of plywood, was affectionately known to its flyers as Mossie. Mossie bedeviled the German night skies throughout the war. With the United States entering the war against Germany in December 1941 after a seemingly delusional Adolf Hitler declared war on the United States soon after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, pilots suddenly were in great demand. Men who had joined the RAF Eagle squadron or its Canadian equivalent, such as Walker, were given the option by the United States government to either come home or lose their citizenship. Bob shed his RCAF uniform and put on American pinks and greens as a first lieutenant in the Army Air Forces. Bob, however, never returned to the ZI, the Zone of Interior, as the United States was commonly referred to, for any formal officer or flight training. All Bob did was change his uniform. He continued to wear his English leather flying helmet and a dashing mustache he had become quite fond of. What surely was a downer for a Mosquito pilot like Bob was his initial assignment to the 27th Air Transport Group which had the task of ferrying newly arrived aircraft to Army Air Forces combat units in the United Kingdom.

Lieutenant General Carl A. Tooey Spaatz, the commander of the United States Strategic Air Forces in Europe—redesignated USAFE in 1947 with its headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany, where I served from 1969 to 1973—was a great believer in reconnaissance operations. When first assigned to Europe by General Henry H. Hap Arnold in late 1942 as commanding general of the 12th Air Force in North Africa, Spaatz had Colonel Elliot Roosevelt build him a photo reconnaissance group, knowing the importance of having accurate and current battlefield information. Once Spaatz assumed command of USSTAF in January 1944, he had Elliot Roosevelt, recently promoted to brigadier general, do the same thing with the 8th Air Force as what he had done for him earlier when assigned to the 12th, form the 325th Photographic Wing, which included the 25th Bomb Group. The 25th formed at RAF Watton, County Norfolk, in February 1944. It was anything but a bomb group, its name a convenient wartime cover. The group’s three squadrons specialized in all types of reconnaissance operations including weather, day and night photographic and electronic reconnaissance. In addition, the wing flew pathfinder missions for bombing operations against the Third Reich. One of the more important tasks of the 25th Bomb Group, highly classified and seldom talked about, was to provide support to the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the predecessor organization to the present day Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, by flying agents into and out of German-occupied territories.

Of the three squadrons assigned to the 25th Bomb Group, the 652nd Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) flew B-17 and B-24 bombers equipped, however, with appropriate meteorological equipment, flying long-range weather reconnaissance missions over the North and South Atlantic. The 653rd Bomb Squadron (Light) flew the British DeHavilland Mosquito Mark III and Mark XVI also on weather reconnaissance missions, but over German-occupied territory. In addition, aircraft of the 653rd were used to drop chaff, aluminum strips cut to the radio frequencies of German radars, in support of the 8th Air Force and RAF Bomber Command operations. Along with the 654th Bomb Squadron, the 653rd flew a limited number of Frantic missions with its Mosquitos. Frantic was the code name for B-17 bombing missions launched from England, landing in Russia. Then, after refueling and rearming, they were to proceed to Italy, and finally return to their bases in England. It was a concept that enjoyed only limited success, principally due to a lack of support provided by a suspicious Russian ally. It was the 654th Bombardment Squadron (Heavy Special), however, which flew the most hazardous missions assigned to the 25th Bomb Group—night photography Joker missions, day photography PRU missions, and the missions no one talked about in support of the OSS. Because of the variety of missions assigned to this squadron, it not only flew the Mosquito Mark III and Mark XVI, like its sister squadron, the 653rd, but in addition had a collection of B-25, A-26, AT-23, VC-64, and P-38 aircraft assigned. The Mosquito and the A-26, painted black, flew a total of thirty-two of these very demanding and dangerous deep-penetration missions over enemy-held territory. If you were an airman’s airman, and Paddy Walker certainly was that, then that was the kind of flying you gave an arm and a leg for. Paddy, to the British, Bob, to his American fellow flyers, was thrilled with his reassignment to the 654th Squadron of the 25th Bomb Group, having been selected personally by General Roosevelt based on his extensive flying experience in the Mosquito.⁶

Bob’s early missions were relatively easy—weather reconnaissance over the Atlantic and shallow penetration photo reconnaissance missions over occupied France. By the time Operation Market Garden got itself into trouble in September 1944, the pace picked up for Walker and his navigator, Major Roy C. Conyers. Market Garden, an operation reluctantly agreed to by General Eisenhower, was an armored and airborne thrust through Holland aimed at the industrial Ruhr Valley of Germany. It was Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery’s brainchild. Holland was not tank country and the entire operation bogged down quickly, resulting in heavy Allied losses without showing any noteworthy gains. SHAEF, Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, did not know who controlled a particular bridge in Nijmegen, of A Bridge Too Far fame, and Walker and Conyers were to visually ascertain who held it—the Germans or the British. On September 22, Walker approached the bridge at five hundred feet above ground level (AGL), then went down to treetop level. As his Mossie passed over the bridge, he was fired on by German guns from both ends of the bridge—the bridge was in German hands. Walker recalled, The first hit was a direct strike by 20mm- or .50-caliber rounds that disintegrated the left drop tank. I immediately punched off both tanks. The right engine was soon in flames. I feathered it and shut off fuel to that engine. We then made for the coast flying on-the-deck, but soon ran into antiaircraft fire from the German coastal batteries. We were trying to get out of range of their guns while staying near water level. I remember the water spouts from rounds hitting the sea around us. When out of range of the shore batteries I climbed into the weather, still on only one engine, to establish radio contact. All England was socked in. There was no way to reach Manston, our emergency RAF base near Dover. Nearly out of fuel, Bob and Roy finally made it into Tangmere. It took about a week to fix the aircraft before Walker could fly it back to Watton. Sadly, upon returning from this flight Roy Conyers learned that his brother-in-law, Willard Hesketh, was killed during Operation Market Garden. Hesketh was flying a C-47 pulling a glider loaded with troopers from the 101st Airborne when hit by German antiaircraft fire.⁷

Walker and Conyers, and a second navigator, Lieutenant William G. Miskho, flew together every opportunity they got. Most of their missions were night photography in the Mossie, referred to as Joker missions. Daylight photo missions were nicknamed PRU. Grey Pea missions involved chaff drops ahead of the bombers, while Red Tail Missions required them to serve as the lead aircraft for RAF Bomber Command night raids to designate their targets. Sky Wave missions involved experimental flights over occupied France testing a long-range radar system called Loran, and Mickey missions involved radar photography of bomb-run approaches to important targets. There was no dearth of action for the men of the 25th Bomb Group, and Walker, Conyers, and Miskho flew every mission there was. While most returned from their combat missions with perhaps a few holes in their aircraft or a lost engine, over a period of less than two years, twenty-seven 25th Bomb Group aircraft did not make it home. Another five aircraft were lost to nonoperational causes. Some of the losses were especially tragic. On August 12, 1944, a Mosquito flying as a weather scout ahead of a bomber formation, returning from a Frantic mission, was misidentified by a P-51 and shot down. Fortunately, the crew of two survived. Another Mosquito was downed by a P-47 on March 24, 1945. That time the Mosquito pilot was killed. The navigator ended up in StalagLuft I, near Barth, Germany. And finally, just before war’s end in Europe, on April 4, 1945, a Mosquito was downed by the guns of a B-24 bomber which the Mosquito was escorting. It was not unusual for the Mosquito to be identified as an enemy aircraft, leading to many unfortunate losses. A total of eighty-four 25 Bomb Group flyers perished, and eleven more became prisoners of war.⁸

War always requires sacrifice, but it is doubtful that Paddy, or Bill, or Roy—his two navigators—dwelled on that fact of life. On November 25, 1944, Walker and Conyers departed RAF Watton on a night weather reconnaissance mission over central Germany, a Blue Stocking mission. It should have been a piece of cake as airmen refer to missions they consider especially easy and of low risk; but then one never knows. They took off at 01:53 hours for eastern Germany. While at flight level 270 their oxygen system failed. They dropped down to ten thousand feet, checked the equipment and thought they could chance it again. Back to altitude they went and Conyers promptly passed out. Walker came close to losing consciousness. Walker dropped down to ten thousand feet again and Conyers revived. Climbing back up to flight level 280, twenty-eight thousand feet, on emergency oxygen, they completed their mission and returned home. Of course, when they got to RAF Watton the base was weathered in, nothing unusual for England, and they diverted to another base. In war there are many ways of dying—and not always from enemy bullets.

In December of 1944 Walker began flying missions for the OSS as part of the Joan-Eleanor project (J-E). No flight plans were filed for these highly classified missions. No briefings or debriefings were recorded. There was no paper trail. For all practical purposes these missions never happened. When researching files at headquarters USAF, I found no record of any of the OSS missions flown by Robert Walker, or anyone else for that matter. The lone exception was a terse sentence in a Red Stocking post-mission navigation report of a routine mission flown on March 1, 1945, inadvertently giving an indication that maybe some missions flown by the 25th Bomb Group were at best unusual, if not very different. Noted Captain Lionel Prouly, the Assistant 25th Group navigator, in his report, Lt Walker as pilot and Major Walch and Lt Miskho as navigators were alerted for a special meteorological operation in A-26, 740. Why Captain Prouly included that sentence in an operational report must remain a mystery.⁹ The two A-26 aircraft assigned to the 654th squadron were exclusively used for deep-cover OSS missions, not special meteorological missions, if there even was such a thing.

Joan-Eleanor missions, those involving dropping agents behind enemy lines, were by definition dangerous. Others, involving listening to and recording the radio broadcasts of the inserted agents, were less so. But there was always the chance that they could be picked off by a German night fighter, a not uncommon occurrence. The Joan-Eleanor project was run by Lieutenant Commander Stephen H. Simpson, United States Navy, who was also the principal engineer and designer for the radio systems used by the agents. Steve Simpson started out as a lieutenant in the US Army Signal Corps, but since OSS support fell under the purview of the US Navy, Steve was transferred and in a flash became a naval officer with the rank of lieutenant commander—receiving a nice promotion in the bargain. The UHF broadcasts used by the J-E system, at 260MHZ, were short range and difficult, if not impossible, for the Germans to intercept. So the agents could speak in plain English, Dutch, or German without compromising themselves, and the aircraft would record their transmissions on a wire recorder. Since no encryption was required, and if an intelligence officer was on board the aircraft, the agents could even be questioned for clarification, if that became necessary. It was a responsive way to gather critical intelligence. Walker flew several Red Stocking missions, as they were later referred to, in support of an agent named Bobby, in Holland. Bobby had parachuted into Holland on November 22, 1944. These were all night missions of course, and flown at around thirty thousand feet over a designated area. In January and February 1945 Walker and Miskho flew several Red Stocking missions in support of an agent named Troy near Stuttgart, as well as several resupply missions to both agents in one of the two Douglas A-26 Invader aircraft assigned to the Group.¹⁰

On March 2, 1945, a very special mission came their way. Commander Simpson wanted Walker, Walch, and Miskho to take one of their A-26 Invaders and drop two agents within the Berlin city limits. Major John Walch, the 654th Bomb Squadron’s senior navigator who had been working on this project for some time, thought it chancy. He refused to guarantee the drop, and the drop zone was moved ten miles outside Berlin. The mission was to be flown at an altitude of five hundred feet or less to Berlin and back. Walch and Miskho carefully studied known flak sites and possible locations for aerial balloons and fighter bases. They evolved a zigzag route to avoid the danger areas. Joseph E. Persico, in Piercing the Reich, describes this mission in great detail: Major Walch spent two weeks plotting a detailed flight plan. He shaped the course along large bodies of water, the only reference points which would be visible on the night selected for the Hammer mission. The two native Berliners chosen for the Hammer mission were Paul Land and Toni Ruh, both Communists living in English exile…. The complex flight plan was rehearsed on four practice runs to Berlin, during which the navigator recorded each checkpoint with a stopwatch and compass. On March 1, the night set for the agents’ departure, a special precaution had been taken. They would not leave until a weather plane returned and declared conditions for the drop favorable over Berlin…. Ten minutes before midnight the weather aircraft returned. A light rain was falling at Watton, but over Berlin the weathermen reported the night clear and moonlit. Commander Simpson gave the order for the team to depart. A-26 #524 pulled up to within fifty feet of the operations hut. A fuel truck pulled up to the aircraft. The engine warm-up had consumed seventy-five to one hundred gallons of fuel, and the tanks were being filled again just before takeoff. The trip to Berlin and back was expected virtually to dry the tanks. Fuel was their biggest problem, again topping off their tanks at the end of the Watton runway to give them every chance to make it home.

The Hammer team of two agents sat in the rear behind the lead navigator, Major Walch. Once Sergeant Derr, the radio operator, tapped their helmets, writes Persico, they and their containers had eight seconds to clear the plane if they were to land close to the pinpoint. After they penetrated Holland, Walker went down to one hundred feet, hedgehopping across the countryside. From the air, Germany at night appeared like an endless crossword puzzle. Miskho lay in the nose of the aircraft peering at the countryside below looking for landmarks to determine their exact position. He called out checkpoints to Major John Walch, who plotted their position, also using Gee and Loran as navigation aides whenever that was possible. They located the drop zone, a near miracle, opened the bomb bay doors and dropped supplies and the two agents. On the way back Walker flew the shortest route, made a straight-in approach to Watton, and landed with less than a hundred gallons of fuel remaining. Talk about a hair-raising mission—this was it. But it paid off. By March 12 a Mosquito sat over Berlin at thirty thousand feet altitude and recorded the findings of the Hammer team.¹¹

Not all such missions were crowned by success, especially when they were not thoroughly planned and executed on a whim. As fate would have it, Major John W. Walch, who flew on that very successful March 2, 1945, mission with Paddy Walker, was assigned as the lead navigator on a similar mission after Walker returned to the United States. Walch’s pilot that time was a young and inexperienced lieutenant named Oliver Emmel. Their mission was to drop an OSS agent near Hamm, Germany. The squadron and their Mosquito and A-26 aircraft, for unknown reasons, had been reassigned from RAF Watton to RAF Harrington, a B-24 bomber base. The new hosts provided little support to the newcomers, and seemed to have little understanding of their unique mission requirements, nor cared to get involved. The A-26 scheduled to fly the mission, according to Joseph Persico, was #524, the same aircraft that had deposited the Hammer team in Berlin. Its navigation gear badly needed calibrating. The engines were overdue for their hundred hour check. The weather on the day of the mission began ugly and overcast. The crew assigned to the Chisel mission had never flown together; Lieutenant Emmel had not yet completed A-26 training. The weather report showed a heavy front moving across Harrington and foul conditions on the Continent as well. Flak was said to be heavy along their route. Simpson objected strenuously; he didn’t want to fly the mission. Things just weren’t right for this mission to succeed. He was overruled. At ten-thirty that evening the aircraft departed from RAF Harrington. Stiff winds drove sheets of rain across her black fuselage. Simpson watched the plane disappear into the blackness. The aircraft never returned. When they arrived north of Osnabrueck, skirting the German Me 262 fighter base of Achmer, something went tragically wrong—for whatever reason, the A-26 crashed, killing all four of its occupants. This mission should never have been flown.¹²

Dropping the Hammer team near Berlin was Robert Walker’s last mission with the 25th Bomb Group. He had flown a total of twenty-one OSS-related missions by the time his combat tour ended. He received orders to report to Westover Field in Massachusetts to fly C-54s, the principal AAF transport at the time. What a comedown for a man like Walker who had flown nothing but hair-raising combat since joining the RCAF. He was to fly C-54s for years to come, including the Berlin airlift of 1948 to 1949, as a member of the 11th Troop Carrier Squadron, flying coal out of RAF Fassberg to Gatow airfield in Berlin. The airlift missions were important, but none incorporated the type of danger, nor required the daring, that was Bob’s bread and butter during the war years. After liftoff and gaining a couple of hundred feet of altitude Bob would initiate his turn to the east over a small refugee camp adjacent to a pine forest. He never noticed the camp below and never knew that his flights and those of his fellow airmen, brought hope for a better life to me, a young German boy, down below. Bob Walker continued to fly C-54s during the Korean War, his efforts to get reassigned to fighters proving unsuccessful. So, Bob decided to apply for test pilot school at famed Muroc Field in southern California—later renamed Edwards Air Force Base after Glen W. Edwards, one of the pilots who perished flight-testing the YB-49 flying wing. To his great delight Bob was accepted, graduating in Class 54C. The B-66 program was just getting under way and Bob was assigned to the nearby Douglas facility as acceptance test pilot. Cliff Parrott, Douglas program manager for the B-66 reconnaissance program, in later years earning the moniker of B-66 doctor of Shaw Air Force Base, recalls: Bob was the first jet qualified air force officer to be assigned to Douglas–Long Beach as acceptance test pilot, and he was a breath of fresh air to the B-66 program. Bob looked like the proverbial fighter pilot—cocky, with a let’s go fly something attitude. He never talked much about his World War II experience. In 1955 Bob was reassigned to our Tucson facility from where all but the RB-66C models were delivered to their respective squadrons.¹³

While I was writing my book Glory Days, the only book written about the B-66 and the men who flew it, Bob Walker wrote me to let me know that they used JATO/RATO when delivering aircraft from the Douglas plant in California to Tucson, Arizona, where he and Fred Borman flew the final acceptance tests before releasing aircraft to crews from receiving squadrons at Shaw AFB in South Carolina. Bob had no idea, while serving as acceptance test pilot, that he was in fact married to the B-66 for the remainder of his flying career. After the last B-66 aircraft came off the Douglas production line, Bob was assigned to the 10th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron at Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany. Later on he transferred to the 30th TRS at RAF Alconbury in England. Lieutenant General George D. Miller, for whom I worked as an action officer at one time while assigned to the Pentagon, and who flew the RB-66B photo-reconnaissance aircraft with the 30th TRS in the early ’60s, recalled that Bob Walker was his squadron operations officer—the man who was responsible for all that involved flying in a squadron. I always considered Bob a very fair and decent man. It was an honor to have known and worked for him, recalled General Miller. Neither General Miller nor I, nor any of the men Bob flew with, knew of his World War II flying record. For one thing, much of it was highly classified; for another, Bob was not a man to talk much about himself.

His time in Europe over, Bob transferred to Shaw AFB, then the home of USAF tactical reconnaissance. It was flying reconnaissance of every stripe that truly defined Bob’s flying career. He was getting on in years and had more experience in B-66 operations than nearly anyone else around. It was natural for him to be appointed the chief of B-66 maintenance at Shaw. That was Bob’s position when the 363rd Tactical Reconnaissance Wing began deploying its aircraft to Southeast Asia (SEA)—RB-66s and RF-101s. The first to leave Shaw AFB for Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam, were four infrared-equipped RB-66Bs. The B-models were nuclear bombers reconfigured as electronic warfare aircraft with the job of jamming enemy radars. Their IR equipment was used to locate Viet Cong campfires in the nearby jungle when they were preparing their evening meals. Once located, the B-66s would direct artillery fire against those locations. Bob went along as their maintenance officer. As RB-66 deployments to SEA increased, Major Walker was assigned as chief of B-66 maintenance at Clark Air Base, near Manila in the Philippines. Clark was where the heavy maintenance was done that could not be accomplished at Tan Son Nhut, South Vietnam, or Takhli, Thailand, where the bulk of the B-66 force was based. Bob was a flyer, and he wanted to fly, not be relegated to a desk and aircraft maintenance. Bob, of course, had lots of contacts in the B-66 community and before one could say pack your bags Bob was out of Clark and headed for the 6460th TRS, later redesignated the 42nd Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron (TEWS) at Takhli Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, about a hundred miles north of Bangkok, flying what he liked most—combat. I later on flew with the 41st TEWS, also equipped with the EB-66 and based at Takhli.

On February 25, 1966, Major Walker and his crew were assigned RB-66C 54-0457—an electronic reconnaissance aircraft with a crew of six: pilot, navigator, and four electronic warfare officers. They were tasked to fly a surveillance mission over the Gulf of Tonkin, crossing over to the water side near Vinh, North Vietnam, an area that was designated as Route Pack 3. Bob’s navigator was Captain John Kodlick. Lieutenant Beatty flew as Raven 1, with the principal task of picking up the BG06 missile guidance signal for the Soviet designed and built SA-2 surface to air missile system, should a missile be launched against them. Captain Wayne Smith flew as Raven 2; Captain Jim Thomson was the Raven 3, and Captain John Causey was Raven crew commander and flew in position 4. The Ravens, as the electronic warfare officers were referred to, sat in what used to be the bomb bay of the aircraft which had been reequipped with appropriate reconnaissance gear and downward ejection seats. The weather was lousy, it being the monsoon season. Smith was the first to hear the faint sound of an SA-2 Fansong tracking radar as they passed Vinh, and he alerted the crew leader, Captain Causey. Captain Causey looked, but couldn’t locate the radar on his scope. After our return down the coast, I heard the Fansong radar come up again, Smith recalled, and I called Causey’s attention to it. When he intercepted the signal, it was very strong and he told the pilot to turn. Then the Raven 1 intercepted the BG06, and Captain Causey, the chief Raven, told the pilot to start a steep SAM break. SAM breaks were flown to cause the missile to exceed its turning capability and lose track. I heard a loud pop. When Major Walker was finally able to level off, he discovered that he had little control over the aircraft.

Walker recalled that the plane wanted to pitch up. He had no rudder, but seemed to have enough aileron to keep the wings level. Both engines were still operating. The aircraft began going nose up, as though about to start a loop. By chopping off the power, the plane began to free-fall, nose down. Then as it fell through the horizon, keeping the wings level, I applied power to bring the nose up. Throttles on, throttles off—the only way I could fly the plane. When the SA-2 missile exploded near the rear of the aircraft, it damaged the stabilizer to the point that it was either locked in place, or became a floating slab, accounting for the pitching of the aircraft. The yoke, the control column, remained locked in the extreme pitch up position and Walker, as much as he tried, could not move the column forward and stow it when he needed to. Walker had no intention of ejecting his crew over land while the airplane was still flying, and, using all the skills a pilot acquires over years of flying, he nursed the broken EB-66 for 130 miles out over Gulf waters. Then, and only then, fearing the aircraft was about to break up, he gave the order to eject. He motioned to his navigator to go—the intercom was inoperable—then jettisoned both escape hatches. Kodlick was the first to go. The crew in the rear compartment, without communication with the front end, heard Kodlick eject, the aft compartment depressurized, and the four Ravens prepared to follow suit—Raven 1, then 2, then 3, then 4, in that order. Ravens 1, 2, and 3 ejected. Captain Causey did not. Walker was having problems in the cockpit—as he pulled the preejection handles the control column did not stow forward and his seat did not move aft. He moved the seat aft manually, then squeezed the ejection trigger—nothing happened. He squeezed the trigger again—still nothing happened. Bob contemplated a manual egress, which surely would have killed him had he done so. Then he decided to give the seat one more chance—strapped down, squeezed the trigger, and that time the system worked. He broke both ankles and a kneecap on egress. Cliff Parrott, the Douglas Aircraft Company B-66 expert, believes that Walker’s and Causey’s seats were misrigged, that there was too much slack in the cable of the handles and trigger mechanisms. Causey, being number four in the ejection sequence, had the least time to get out of the stricken aircraft and just couldn’t make it.

The navigator, Captain Kodlick, had made a Mayday call over the radio before ejecting, not knowing if anyone heard him. Someone did. Seventh Air Force, headquartered in Saigon, launched a recovery effort, but the precise location of the crash site was unknown. A US Navy A-1H Skyraider from the USS Ranger was participating in a practice search and rescue exercise when its pilot picked up several emergency beepers from an area where none were supposed to be. He established voice contact with one of the EB-66 crew members and vectored two navy helicopters to the pickup. Walker’s efforts surely saved his crew from a terrible fate had they ejected over land. Becoming a prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese was something every flyer wanted to avoid, their methods of torture being well known and reminiscent of the middle ages. For saving his crew Major Walker was awarded the Silver Star. Walker’s crew could not know that the Vinh SAM site was staffed by Russian missile experts, there to train North Vietnamese missile crews. The Russians were highly skilled operators and most likely used data derived from their Flat Face or Spoonrest acquisition radars to track Gull 1, the call sign of Walker’s aircraft, and launch two SA-2 Guideline missiles when the opportunity offered itself, only turning on the Fansong tracking radar and BG06 missile guidance transmitter when the missiles were already in midflight. Although Captain Causey’s warning allowed Walker to initiate a SAM break, Walker didn’t have enough time to get far enough away from the first missile, which exploded near the aft section of the aircraft and ultimately brought it down. And of course Major Walker had no chance to observe the missile launches because of layered cloud decks—ideal conditions for the SA-2 SAM system to succeed. Seventh Air Force chose not to publicize the loss of Gull 1. Few knew of its loss at the time, other than those involved.

L–R: Robert Walker, Sergeant Scott, combat artist for Yank Magazine, and Roy Conyers, Walker’s navigator, in front of Walker’s Mosquito at RAF Watton, June 1944.

Walker at the controls of his Mosquito aircraft. Even after transfer from the RCAF to the AAF Bob continued to wear his British leather flying helmet, and never shaved off his mustache.

A B-66B bomber using JATO on takeoff on March 18, 1957, flown by either Bob Walker or Fred Borman, both of whom acted as acceptance test pilots from the Douglas plant at Long Beach, California, for all but the C-model of the B-66, which was produced in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Robert Walker was transferred to Letterman Hospital in California for recuperation. Upon his discharge from the hospital, he had six months remaining before retiring. Bob went back to test piloting, as acceptance test pilot for the Northrop T-38 Talon and the F-5 Freedom Fighter programs, testing each aircraft as it came off the production line. After retiring in the rank of lieutenant colonel, Bob flew a number of years for Delta Airlines, and come age sixty he had to hang up his flying suit for the last time. He then moved to Merritt Island, Florida, where he died on January 7, 2010, at age eighty-six. I believe Bob could fly any aircraft, even if he had never seen it before, says his friend and admirer Cliff Parrott. He would have it all figured out on the takeoff roll. There was only one like him.¹⁴ Walker’s and my paths crossed many times without either of us knowing about the other. He dropped OSS agents near Berlin when I lived there as a ten-year-old, and flew only feet above the wretched refugee camp I called home during the days of the Berlin airlift. And I flew many missions in the EB-66C reconnaissance aircraft out of Takhli RTAFB, Thailand, from where Bob flew his last combat mission. We talked and corresponded in later years after his retirement from the air force—but we never met in person. Robert Walker was the kind of pilot one wanted to fly with—a superb airman, and a great American patriot. Robert Patrick Walker served his country from age eighteen to his last breath. We flyers are honored to have flown in such great company. An airman’s airman—that was my friend Robert Paddy Walker.

DAVID M. TAYLOR

B-17/C-54/C-47

When a Soldier Dies

Does he hear the sound of bugles, does he hear the high-toned fife?

Is there a muffled drum-beat, as a soldier gives his life?

I’ll not ask you for an answer, I’ll not ask you if you care;

But I’ll tell you, if you listen, and I’ll ask you for a prayer.

There is no sound of bugles, there is no high-toned fife,

And there is not a drum-beat, as a soldier gives his life.

The sound he hears is gunfire, or a bomb from out the skies,

These mark the ebbing hours as slow the soldier dies.

The flag he sees is bloody, his shirt, mud-stained and red.

With his own blood it’s colored, and now the soldier’s dead.

He meets his death in honor, not to a hero be.

But that life and freedom might be left to you and me.

—P.B. Holmes, WWII ETO

In May 1998 I received a