D. Clarke Evans Photographer

Gerry Auerbach

Lieutenant Colonel, Army Air Corps, Ret.
1940–1963

Lt. Gerry Auerbach
Germany, 1948

In my 21 years I saw a lot of action. I dropped a lot of bombs on Japan…. But my best days in the Army Air Corps were the days I took part in the Berlin Air Lift, hauling life saving food and supplies, seeing the good we were doing, instead of destroying things.

I was born in Passaic, New Jersey in 1924—a Depression kid. We lived in a German neighborhood. Since my parents were German, I spoke German before I learned English. My dad was in the steamship business when the stock market crashed, and with the Depression, people stopped traveling. He lost the business. When I was 12, I started to do odd jobs for money to help out. 

I attended Stuyvesant High School in downtown Manhattan, and CCNY for two years. I was in advanced ROTC in the engineering school. I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. They were going to draft me, so I went down and enlisted as an aviation cadet. I got into the B-29 program and went to radar bombardier school to learn radar bombing. They kept me as a teacher for a while.

We went to Lincoln, Nebraska, got a B-29 crew and were ordered to Saipan in the South Pacific. My first mission was Christmas Day 1944, flying over Japan doing weather reconnaissance. The Japs knew what we were doing, but wouldn’t send any fighters up since we had good guns and they didn’t want to take a chance. 

After Christmas, we started running regular high-altitude bombing runs. We found out that we couldn’t bomb from high altitudes because of the jet stream. We didn’t know where the bombs would go, and LeMay told us we had to fly lower. 

In March, 1945 I took part in four of the five fire raids on Tokyo, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka. Tokyo was a wooden city, and the firebombing destroyed the light industries in homes that produced small parts for Japanese aircraft factories. There were over 300 aircraft in raids happening every other day. The raids burned around 15 square miles of Tokyo. I think they saw the end coming, but they weren’t going to give up. I went on 21 total raids, flew some search and rescue flights, and eventually flew two prisoner-of-war supply flights. In 1948, I applied for pilot training and went to school at Randolph Air Force Base, and got my wings in a B-17. 

I spent 6 ½ months with the Berlin Airlift. The crisis in Germany started on June 24, 1948 when the Soviet forces blockaded rail, road, and water access to Allied-controlled areas. I was a co-pilot making over 200 trips, flying from Frankfurt Rhein-Main to Berlin; we did three in a 12-hour shift. We flew a C-45. The pilot flew the heavy one in, and I flew the empty one out. We carried in mostly coal and flour, sometimes medicine—whatever they wanted. Two and a half million Berliners, spread between four zones of occupation, faced profound privations. At the height of the campaign, one plane landed every 45 seconds in Berlin. The crisis ended on May 12, 1949 when Soviet forces lifted the blockade. 

I sent an application to the Air Force Institute of Technology to work in the space program, got my college degree and went to California. I was involved with the Agena, which is the small rocket with the payload on top of the Thor and the Atlas Missiles. I retired from the military in 1963 when I was 39 years old. Later TWA contacted me to come over and set up Saudi Arabia Airlines—the whole operation. In 1966, I started flying for the Mohammad Bin Laden family. The father of the Bin Laden family was a fantastic individual; couldn’t read or write and built one of the largest corporations in the world. There was only one bad apple in the family.

I stayed busy consulting with various companies across the world. My wife, Lucille, and I eventually retired to San Antonio. We were married for 62 years. I enjoyed it all. {02-17-2016 • Cibolo, TX}