Senior Master Sergeant Carl Anthony Koller, USAF (retired) 1912 - 1999
A memorial On March 1st. 1912, Carl A. Koller was born to German immigrant parents living quietly and working hard in the alien noise of New York City. Although he grew up to be a towering man who traveled widely, his booming voice never denied its New York origins, although his speech often was studded with succinct German phrases that somehow seemed to be more appropriate at the time they were uttered. His father was a respected and popular waiter who served several of the City's fashionable restaurants, eventually retiring as headwaiter of the New York Athletic Club. His mother was an old-fashioned German matriarch and a great believer in discipline and education, especially in English. During the long evenings while Carl's father was working the dining tables, Carl was working his mathematical tables and learning irregular verbs, all under the watchful and approving eye of his mother. The onset of the Depression found young Carl in the ever lengthening lines of men looking for work in New York City, so joined the New York National Guard for a three year stint. When he was discharged in 1932 he resolved to look much farther afield; into something entirely new; into something that had a future. The well-circulated pulp comic books that he read during his army time were full of daring-do, larger-than-life exploits of World War I air aces. There was Baron von Richtofen rolling his Red Fokker Triplane through the blue skies of France. The Baron was was Carl's favorite ace and the one person he admired most at the time; a quintessential young and slender German aviator, the Iron Cross dangling from the Mandarin collar of his double-breasted flying tunic. Vpn Richtofen also had a dueling scar on his cheek. But Carl also absorbed and relived the exploits of General "Billy" Mitchell who could make his Spad XIII sing in the crisp Flanders air, and American soldiers in the trenches would cheer if he flew over their lines. After refusing to accept the NO WORK signs in New York the young civilian Carl Koller headed down to the Florida headquarters of the newly formed Pan American World Airways and camped out on the door step. One day they invited him in. Pan Am recruiters just happened to be holding a drive, they said. But only smart, strong, single young men need apply. The expedition they were getting up meant months of privations living on tiny atolls in the Pacific as the chain of Clipper bases was to be gradually extended to link San Francisco by flying boat with Manila and beyond. It was hard work on low pay but the food and accommodation were free, even though the huts on Wake Island and Midway Islands were far from being exotic resorts. It was the sense of pioneering in civil aviation that appealed to the young Carl, he said later, and it made up for the hard life and poor pay. "Hey! It was a job! OK?" Carl Koller had a habit of winking wisely whenever he uttered an irrefutable truth. The first Trans-Pacific flight of the Pan Am four-engine China Clipper, a Martin M-130 flying boat, flew over the unfinished Golden Gate bridge and headed west on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1935. At the helm was Captain Edwin C. Musick. He carried no fare paying passengers, only mail and a few journalists. It would be another eleven months before passengers shared the breathtaking experience. By the time passengers were flying the Pacific a seasoned Carl A. Koller was already back in New York, job hunting. He had successfully circumvented the worst of the Depression and now he had valuable construction and administrative skills in the growing field of civil aviation. He again joined the New York National Guard, and sometime before the outbreak of war with Japan, Carl Koller transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers. His specialty? Airfield construction. But his skills were retained in the United States. Carl had a German grandmother still living in Nazi Germany, as well as cousins and uncles. One of these uncles was in the SS. A newly formed Aviation Engineers' branch of the Army Air Corps attracted Carl and he was in place as a fine experienced asset when General MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender and the war was over. The General lost no time in moving Carl and other seasoned men to Japan to help with the re-construction. It was just a staging point on the way to Korea where his regiment was involved in the building of Kimpo airfield. He left Korea just before the outbreak of that war and in 1947 had to decide whether to stay with the Army, or join the newly formed Air Force. He chose the latter, and that's how Sergeant Carl A. Koller found himself at Larsen AFB Moses Lake in Washington assigned to organizing the 81st Air Base Group for another marathon Expedition. Mixing his biblical metaphors, he once said it was his job to get raw airmen trained up and organized so he could "lead his tribes out of Egypt (Moses Lake) to the Promised Land." If he knew when and where the expedition was heading, he kept a good secret. Eventually, the 81st gathered up its equipment and aircraft, and the men of the several support squadrons, together with their supplies, and moved to England by their separate routes. Their objective was a former World War II base on a map of England known simply as Bentwaters. It turned out to be a spot too small to see on any tourist map, hidden further in deep forest woodland. The base was merely a gaggle of "Nissen" huts, semi-circular corrugated iron shelters with wooden clapboard ends, all gathered around a gaunt black water tower. The war-time classical triangular layout of three tarmac runways had become spalled and frost bitten from long neglect, the un-insulated huts had only rusting iron coal stoves for space heating, and to many of the men, it was very, very cold. First Sgt. Carl A. Koller quickly set up his orderly room (see picture above) and began getting his troops into an effective force. The civil engineering group, the fire department, mess halls staff, sergeants' and officers' messes. The 08-26 runway was the only one to be patched up with minimum expenditure when the silver winged F-86s arrived at Bentwaters, with hot-shot top-gun fighter jocks, the base took on the air of an active wing. As time went on many of the men of 81st explored the hinterland and found they quite enjoyed warm "bitter" beer and "fish and chips" served in, and eaten from newspaper. Maybe it was because the friendly natives spoke English, although with a strange intonation. To most, this sing-song accent was forever the sound of Suffolk. Sgt. Koller explored like the rest of them, and a few miles south of the base he found the quiet little waterside hamlet of Waldringfield, by the River Deben, and its solitary pub: The Maybush. It was here that Sgt. Koller met a myopic little man with a testy demeanor who went by the name of Carl Giles. At the time, Carl Koller had no idea that Carl Giles was the celebrated cartoonist of the London Daily Express, but their friendship flourished. Koller was attracted to the crusty manner of Giles, and Giles had found his cartoonist's prototype of the All-American Air Force sergeant, stripes and rockers, hash marks and rosettes, all the way up his arm. Giles was to gently lampoon Koller on a frequent basis until he quit drawing some years before he died in 1995. Carl Koller was a frequent visitor to Carl Giles' farm near Ipswich. Giles' wife Joan made a pet of Carl Koller, and baked cookies for him. Later when Sergeant Koller, the original left-handed loner with the thin Clark Gable moustache, met Grace Bunkell, a Felixstowe woman, a small coterie of English friends, including the Giles', embraced Carl Koller as one of their own. Carl Koller relaxed in their friendship, and because they went to out-of-the-way places in East Suffolk, he was comfortable in the knowledge that it was not likely that one of his troops would happen on the group as they all talked loudly and laughed at his jokes. But everyone in the squadron knew about Carl Koller's new liason, and they dubbed her Blondie, after the enduring cartoon character of the same name that appeared in newspapers across North American and also the Stars and Stripes in Europe. Over the years, Carl Koller had become an accomplished raconteur, his stories drawn from a lifetime of enduring and living in remote corners of the world, as well as observing the frailties of humans under such circumstances; it was all grist to his story mill. One of his favorites would begin, "Any way, this big guy comes over to me and stood in front of me, leaning with one hand against the wall behind me, like this. `You Koller?' I had to think quick. `No,' I said. `See that big guy over there? That's him.' When he turned away I was out the emergency door. And I don't mind telling you guys. I walked real fast." Carl Koller was a man of charm and compassion. In 1954 he married his Blondie, Grace Bunkell of Felixstowe (see picture above) and embraced as his own her seven year-old son by a previous marriage. Young Duncan was to adopt his new father's name, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Then Carl Koller was shipped to France, where he was made First Sergeant of the 322nd Air Division at Everuex AFB. His natural son by Grace was born in France. At regular intervals Sgt. Koller and his family moved along the Air Force conveyor belt toward retirement, passing through Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Vandenberg AFB, California, during the days of the Air Forces' ill-fated missile launches. When he was assigned to Thule Greenland to work on the construction of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS), Grace Koller returned for a year to Felixstowe with her sons. Sgt. Koller's subsequent tours of duty took him and his family to McGuire AFB and Travis AFB (where Duncan graduated from High School) and finally Hahn AFB in Germany, where Carl Anthony Koller retired from the Air Force in 1969. A few years later Carl and Grace returned to Felixstowe, where, in the words of an old Air Force acquaintance, "he went native," and he spent the rest of his time with Grace integrating with locals, and following with admiration his son's career in the Air Force. While Carl was in Germany, Duncan Koller went to Oregon state university, before joining the Air Force on graduation with a 2nd Lt.'s commission. During Duncan's own 28 years in the Air Force, he passed from a lowly Admin Officer at Bergstrom AFB Texas, to Security Police Officer at Rhan Rang AB Vietnam, Squadron Commander of the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing at Ubon AB Thailand, to becoming Adjutant, NATO Programming Centre Glons, Belgium, to Aid to the Deputy Chairman NATO Military Committee, Brussels, to return to Vandenberg AFB as Squadron Commander of the Space and Missile Test Center. Then to Site Commander, Canton Island in the Pacific, and on to Air Staff Training Officer of the Air Force Intelligence Staff at the Pentagon. Duncan's career took him to Norfolk Va., Korea, the Air War College, to Chief of Security Assistance Policy Division of the Pacific Command in Hawaii. It was there, in Hawaii, the younger Koller airman took his father to the Pacific to pursue a last sentimental journey to Wake Island. Together they found some of remains of facilities the father had helped build in the 1930s. Duncan finally retired a full Bird Colonel from the Air Force as Special Assistant to the Commander, Air Education and Training Command, Randolph AFB Texas in May 1997. Carl Anthony died peacefully on March 27th 1999 at the county hospital in Ipswich, England. He had staved off bouts of lung cancer with surgery and radiation for several years, but in the end, the indomitable Carl Koller finally ceded his stripes and passed on to his next assignment. Carl Anthony Koller's remains were cremated a few days later, and Duncan brought them back to the United States. Later in 1999 these ashes were interred by Grace and her sons at the Willamette National Cemetery in Portland, Oregon. Derrick Booth You are invited to append your personal anecdotes about Sgt. Carl A. Koller below: Written by Derrick Booth |
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