Tom’s Years in the Air Force (1951-1955)

Enlistment in the U.S. Air force (USAF)

I was sad to see my parents leave but knew that the move was in their best interest. A couple of months later it was even more difficult to say good-by to Suzy even though we knew that we would have to part soon anyway because my being drafted in the military was becoming more likely. The Korean War was a full-blown affair by 1951 and a precondition of my admittance to the U.S. had been that I would register for the draft and agree to serve if called upon to do so. As long as I had to serve anyway I thought that volunteering would give me a choice as to which branch of the military service to join. Thus, after having passed a battery of tests in late August I signed up for four years in the Air Force and was sworn in on September 5, 1951. That same evening about 20 of us were put on a commercial plane bound for San Antonio, Texas. Our final destination was Lackland Air Force Base (AFB), a huge basic training site just outside of San Antonio. It was close to midnight when we arrived to the base, hungry and miserably hot since the temperature even at that late hour hovered around 85 degrees. We were marched to a mess hall which, as it turned out, had no dinner left for us so we were given breakfast instead. After eating a few bites we marched to the barracks and practically collapsed on bare mattresses without even removing our clothing. It was obvious that we had fallen through the cracks somehow; nobody expected 20 guys to arrive at midnight.

In the fall of 1951 Lackland was overcrowded with about 80,000 airmen, mostly basic trainees. The Korean War needed troops in a hurry and many of the newly arrived trainees, ourselves included, had to be housed in huge temporary tents set up on several parade grounds. After the first night in transit barracks we were assigned to a training squadron and moved into one of these tents, where we remained for the next three weeks. Beginning with the fourth week we were moved into permanent barracks that had just been vacated by graduating trainees.

The training lasted eight weeks and I can say without any reservation that those eight weeks were the most miserable times in my life. Physical exertion and constant harassment by drill instructors were the order of the day. This was done on purpose, mainly to break us into the military mold. We were well into the second week of training before they issued us underwear, fatigues and other items of clothing. Until then we marched, crawled on our bellies and slept in the same underwear and clothing we had worn since we had left Denver. When we received our uniforms we had to mail our civilian clothing, such as it was, back to our homes. In my case, Anyu unceremoniously dumped the whole package in the trash.

During the latter part of training we had to take a battery of aptitude tests to determine which Air Force career field we were most suited for. I passed these tests with flying colors and though I was asked for my preference the need of the Air Force came first. As a result, I was assigned to the supply career field and told that my next assignment was to a supply technical school at Francis A. Warren AFB in Cheyenne, Wyoming. I was somewhat instrumental in being assigned to

this base. After the test scores were in each of us had to report to a career guidance counselor to learn the results and our next assignment. My counselor happened to be a black sergeant named J. Owens. He seemed like a rather pleasant fellow but there was not much discussion about either the test results or the assignment. He told me in no uncertain terms what my specialty is going to be and where I had to report for further training upon graduation from Lackland. The original training base I was assigned to was located somewhere east of Texas nowhere near Denver, close to Suzy. I had but a few minutes to devise a strategy to help me get transferred to another base closer to her. First I had to flatter the sergeant somehow then ask him for a training assignment as close to Denver as possible. My career field was set, there was no chance of changing it, but I hoped the decision regarding the place of initial training could be altered.

As I was contemplating my next move I suddenly remembered that the famous black athlete in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin had the same last name as my sergeant. With an incredulous smile I asked him if by any chance he was the famous Jesse Owens of 15 years ago. He seemed mighty pleased as he looked at me and said “yes” which, of course, was not true. Nevertheless, I reacted with pleasure at the opportunity of meeting such a famous person and congratulated him. He was even more pleased and I figured, rightly, that the solution of my problem was going to be a “piece of cake.” In five minutes and a couple of phone calls later my reassignment to Warren AFB, only about 100 miles from Denver, was a done deal. Accordingly, upon graduation in early November I was put on a military transport plane and flown to Cheyenne. We left Lackland in 80 degree heat but when we arrived to Cheyenne it was snowing, with temperature in the thirties. Everybody there was already wearing winter uniforms as we stepped out of the airplane shivering in khakis.

The supply technician course I was supposed to attend was delayed almost a month for some reason. Thus I had the first opportunity since enlistment to relax and get acquainted with the new surroundings. After the miserable eight weeks at Lackland, Warren was a distinct change for the better. In the school environment people were more relaxed and the course itself was easy for me. More importantly, the weekends were free and I had the opportunity to take the bus to Denver and look up Suzy I had left behind.

A couple of weeks before I was to start the course, a German measles epidemic broke out at the base. I was not particularly concerned because I had had measles as a child. Nevertheless, I contracted this so-called “three-day measles”. A very high fever hit me so fast that I barely made it to the infirmary building where I promptly passed out. Fortunately, the whole thing was over in about four days.

As I started the supply course I felt the lack of a high school diploma quite acutely so I decided to do something about it. The base education office had an arrangement with the Cheyenne High School whereby airmen were able to take courses there and complete the work required for a diploma. My case was somewhat more complicated because I had finished only the 10th grade in Passau and had only limited background in English, civics and U.S. history. Through the education office, however, I was able to take an equivalency test at the Cheyenne High School and started two evening courses in English and U.S. history. After the

final examinations in March 1952 I received my high school diploma, which was quite an accomplishment considering that the work was done in addition to the regular Air Force course load.

The supply course was over just about the time the high school final exams were held and in addition to those results I was eagerly awaiting my next assignment. It turned out that the assignment orders for our graduating class were quite arbitrary: airmen whose names started with the letters A through K were transferred to Europe while people from L through Z were sent to Korea. I was uneasy about having to go to Korea and requested an appointment with the base Inspector General (IG). The IG was a colonel who listened thoughtfully to my explanation, why I preferred to be assigned to the European theater of operations rather than to the Far East. I argued that as a Hungarian refugee from communism who was not even a U.S. citizen yet I might be in a real dangerous situation if captured by the Korean communists. The fact that my father was considered a war criminal by the communists would put me in double jeopardy. I reasoned that even the provisions of the Geneva Convention would not apply to me, a stateless person. The colonel agreed and my orders were changed to a three year tour of duty in England.

Three Years in England

All airmen who had received overseas assignments were granted an advance leave of 25 days before having to report for embarkation. The military had a very generous leave policy in those days but even so, one normally had to have a year of service before accumulating 30 days of leave, hence the advance. Not having seen my parents for over six months, I wasted no time to catch the first bus to San Francisco. Bus travel was the cheapest mode of public transportation then as it is today. As I recall, the trip took almost two days with intermediate stops in Salt Lake City, Utah and Reno, Nevada. I boarded the bus with about $100 in my pocket, all the money I had after six months of service, and a month’s pay in advance. Most of the advance was spent on the bus ticket. I spent some $30 on meals by the time we arrived to Reno, where within an hour I gambled away the rest. The Mount Vernon Country Club had a few slot machines, even though they were illegal in Colorado, but nothing I had seen before could compare with the casinos in Reno. We had a two-hour dinner stop there and after a greasy hamburger I decided to try my luck. It took the “one-armed bandit” only about ten minutes to swallow the fistful of loose change I had. That should have been sufficient warning but I decided to go for broke. I had about $60 of paper money left which I turned in for silver dollars and started to play one of the dollar machines. The psychology of gambling is fairly simple: people seldom quit while they are ahead. Greed takes over and an eventual loss is almost inevitable. Even though I had as much as seventy or eighty dollars at one time or another, I kept pushing the cartwheels in the slot until I was down to my last few dollars. I could have kicked myself but it was too late. A lady who had been watching my slow demise could hardly wait for her turn as I headed out the door with a few silver dollars left in my pocket. She could not have put in more than two or three dollars when she hit the jackpot. I turned around and saw her trying to catch the coins in her skirt as they were pouring out of the machine. That added insult to injury and I felt quite miserable as I boarded the darkened bus.

I arrived in San Francisco shortly after midnight. There were only a few people lingering around the terminal and the last bus had left for Burlingame an hour earlier. I had no choice but to wait for the first bus in the morning. An uncomfortable six hours later I finally arrived to Burlingame. My parents were still asleep when a taxi deposited me in front of their employers’ house. Fortunately, Apu had some cash so I was able to pay the taxi driver. It was great to see Anyu and Apu again. We had a lot to talk about and I was glad to find that they had adjusted to their new environment quite well. Their employers, the McLeans, had been good to them and were quite nice to me as well during the short time I spent at their home.

The San Francisco peninsula was a beautiful place in the 1950s, lush vegetation everywhere and not nearly as crowded as it is today. Burlingame was only a few miles south of San Francisco and the city was easily accessible by train or bus so I visited there at every opportunity. Unfortunately, the four weeks of leave came to an end much too soon and after borrowing some money I had to say good-bye to my parents again knowing that this time I would be gone for three years.

The cross-country bus ride to New York lasted three days and four nights, as I recall. By the time we reached Chicago I was quite tired, not having been able to sleep much on the bus. I decided, therefore, to interrupt the trip for one night and get a good night’s rest in a hotel near the bus depot. It turned out that Johnny Ray, who was a very popular singer in those days, was giving a concert in a nearby auditorium. Although I was rather exhausted, I could not resist the opportunity to see the phenomenon of the day. It was quite an experience as hundreds of screaming teenagers tried to rush the fellow on the stage. The music, such as it was, left me cold. We arrived to New York on March 26, 1952. The bus depot was a huge place and I had no idea how to get to Camp Kilmer from there. It seemed the closest bus terminal was in New Brunswick, NJ, but there was some schedule complication to get even that far. Fortunately, I found three fellows at the information counter who also had to report to Camp Kilmer and were similarly at a loss as to how to get there. We decided finally to share a cab which took us door to door for not much more than the bus fare would have cost.

After eleven days at Camp Kilmer we boarded the USS Goethals in New York and sailed off for Southampton, England. The ship was a WW II troop carrier, similar to the one that had brought us to the U.S. a year earlier. It was small, overcrowded and uncomfortable. The crossing took about eight days in the stormy north Atlantic and everybody was more than happy to step onto solid ground at Southampton on April 15. Several trains were waiting for us at dockside and took us to a large U.S. air base at Brize Norton, some 40 miles east of Oxford.

The early 1950s saw the heating up of the “cold war” in Europe as the Korean War or “police action”, as it was called, dragged on. Under the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) agreement, large U.S. military contingents were stationed all over non-communist Europe. For the U.S. Air Force the United Kingdom was ideal for forward placement because the country was full of largely abandoned air fields and facilities built during WW II. From these aerodromes, as the British called them, U.S. and British air forces had flown extensive raids against targets throughout the continent. After the war most of these fields were left abandoned

but by 1950 the NATO Command decided to reactivate several of the larger ones.

My job was to work at this reactivation effort. At that time there were two major USAF components in Britain, the Tactical Air Command’s (TAC) Third Air Force, consisting mainly of fighter aircraft, and the Seventh Air Division, a Strategic Air Command (SAC) component of intercontinental bombers. There were also some Army engineer units whose job was to help with the construction effort.

I spent about a month at Brize Norton, longer than expected because I was assigned to a newly activated unit, the 7523rd Air Base Squadron, which had to be fully staffed before its final deployment. The squadron was at full strength by the end of May and assigned the task of rebuilding and expanding the Royal Air Force (RAF) Station at Chelveston, Northamptonshire. Chelveston was located about 15 miles southeast of Kettering in the English midlands, a small village next to a large abandoned air base with an RAF skeleton crew whose job was mainly to raise and lower the Union Jack. Our squadron was first quartered in some empty British army barracks at Desborough, about 20 miles from Chelveston and we shuttled daily to our work station. The first order of business was to construct housing for the troops. We erected Quonset huts made of corrugated heavy gage sheet metal.

Each of these huts housed about a dozen airmen. Next, utility lines had to be brought in or extended and water and sewage pipes put underground. In short, all the construction necessary to house about 1,000 military personnel. As soon as a sufficient number of Quonset huts were built, we moved the whole squadron, as well as the engineers, from Desborough. Living conditions in the beginning were quite primitive; roads were not yet constructed and there was ankle-deep mud everywhere. Huts were connected with narrow board-walks and one wrong step in the dark meant mud all over.

Although we all worked very hard during the first year at Chelveston, I still found time for relaxation. Having lived in Europe before, it was natural to grab the first opportunity to get to know England and travel to the Continent. I spent many weekends in London, went to the theater and opera, and was even fortunate to witness the Queen’s coronation in 1952 which was indeed an historic event. I also got involved with the local Hungarian community. The Hiesz family, in particular, became such close friends that they asked me to be the godfather of their second daughter Agnes, born in January 1954. This friendship has lasted over 40 years and we still keep in touch and visit whenever the opportunity arises. Apart from the visits to London, I also traveled to Paris, Brussels, Bern, Rome and other cities on the Continent. Several of these trips were by military aircraft on a “space available” basis. Paris had become my favorite destination and by 1954 I had been there on several occasions. It was relatively easy to do so because there was always an empty seat or two on the weekend courier aircraft which flew from Blackbush airport near London to LaBourget in Paris. The same plane returned on Sunday evenings. There were several other fellows from Chelveston who also visited Paris from time to time, so four of us got together and found a one room efficiency apartment on Avenue Kleber, close to the Trocadero, which was available for about $60.00 per month. The rent included a maid who cleaned the place once a week. The $15 per person share of the rent was a bargain and, as a result, we had our own place in Paris for about a year, between 1954 and 1955. We worked out a schedule whereby two of us went to the apartment every other weekend or sometimes longer, if time permitted.

Chelveston became fully operational by 1954. Although our squadron remained there to run the base, operational duties were transferred to the 7th Air Division of

Chelveston became fully operational by 1954. Although our squadron remained there to run the base, operational duties were transferred to the 7th Air Division of