Sonoma Stories: A World War II vet, nearly 99, speaks for all the warriors who can’t

Given his druthers, World War II combat pilot Del Tiedeman would stand down for Memorial Day.

The gracious, contemplative relative newcomer to Healdsburg would be happy for one or another of the men he flew alongside in the D-Day invasion, the Battle of the Bulge and other historic, monstrously deadly engagements against Nazi Germany 75 years ago to speak of the sacrifices made. But all of the airborne soldiers Tiedeman knew were killed liberating Europe or have since died.

“I’m the last one in the group,” said Tiedeman, who turns 99 next month. “All of the rest are gone.”

So he agrees to speak, for them.

“I have memory slippage,” conceded Tiedeman, who as an Army Air Corps transport pilot dropped paratroopers into the invasion of France on June 6, 1944, towed gliders carrying troops and equipment, and evacuated load after load of casualties.

“But with the war, very little has slipped,” he said.

The widowed former liquid-gas and construction executive said in his room at the Healdsburg Senior Living retirement community that he often wakes up with one particular memory looping in his mind.

One day during the airborne invasion of Holland late in ’44, pilots with the 442nd Troop Carrier Group towed in gliders behind two-engine Douglas C-47 Skytrains, a military adaption of the hardy DC-3 airliner. After the gliders released, Tiedeman and his three-man crew were flying above a second C-47 piloted by a man Tiedeman knew well as his former co-pilot.

Tiedeman saw the second plane had taken enemy fire and was going down. “There was smoke coming out of the engines, black smoke,” he said.

He watched as three crewmen bailed out beneath parachutes. Tiedeman said it was clear to him that his former cockpit mate was struggling at the controls to stabilize the doomed C-47. “He held the plane steady so that the other guys could get out,” he said.

Once the crew was clear of the aircraft, its nose pitched down.

“The plane was in a dive,” Tiedeman said. “There was no way you can crawl out of an airplane in a dive.”

His friend and former co-pilot, Lt. John Corsetti, died in the crash.

Tiedeman, who grew up in North Dakota and entered the Army as an officer upon completing ROTC training at the University of North Dakota, often relives another scene of sacrifice from the Holland invasion.

From the controls of his C-47, a model of which adorns his living room table, he saw a large American glider descend toward a landing. “It was loaded with four guys and a Jeep,” he said.

He remembers the ground fire from German troops was intense. Suddenly, a hit tore off one of the glider’s wings, and it flailed into the ground.

Tiedeman’s service during the liberation of Europe and the march on Germany also involved ferrying large numbers of wounded soldiers to hospitals in England.

For 75 years the father of three and grandfather of four has thought often of an especially harrowing medical-evacuation mission that he led amid the Battle of the Bulge and that involved five C-47s. More than 100 wounded soldiers needed to be flown out of the battle zone, but the day was late and foul weather was gathering over England. It was up to Tiedeman to make the call on whether to scrub or go ahead with the flight. He took in the scene of dozens of wounded soldiers lying cold on the ground.

Load them up, he ordered.

Not long after he and the other weary pilots took off, his crew chief told him, “We have a problem. We have a GI who’s screaming to beat the band.”

Tiedeman was told the soldier was in great pain from wounds to his legs, and his howling was maddening to the other injured GIs. Tiedeman called out to a medic to do something to ease the pain from the soldier’s legs.

Tiedeman clenched his lips and seemed to come near to tears. “It’s a little tough to say this one,” he said.

He then recounted what the medic told him: “Captain, he doesn’t have any legs.”

When the five transport planes reached England, heavy clouds concealed the ground. Tiedeman searched desperately for breaks, and for an airfield. Through a gap in the clouds, he spotted a flash of light. It was a rural airport. He would learn later that a worker just happened at that moment to test the landing strip lights.

“God was good that night, to all of us,” Tiedeman said.

All five C-47s landed. Tiedeman recalls the airport manager coming to him to announce that the field was closed.

“I told him, ‘It isn’t closed now.’” Tiedeman told the man more than 100 wounded men were in the planes and they needed to get to hospitals as soon as possible. A call went out and local residents hurried over to help transport the wounded.

“They left their dinner tables,” Tiedeman said. “It was starting to rain.”

Soon, all of the injured men were taken away. Tiedeman recalls, “I slept on a pool table that night.”

The next morning, a telephone call came in for him at the airport. A British officer told him all of the men had arrived at a hospital and all were still alive.

Then the officer asked Tiedeman, “Did you know you had a wounded German?” The pilot was pleased.

He has no way to know how many of the wounded men survived. Likewise, he’ll never know how many of the soldiers with the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions who jumped from his plane made it safely home.

But Tiedeman swells at recalling the dignity and selflessness of all the young paratroopers who piled in for the flight to France on D-Day and for the invasions and missions that followed, culminating in victory over Hitler’s Germany in May 1945.

“I had a complete thankfulness to those kids. A lot were 18, 19 years old,” he said.

As they prepared to board his C-47 for battle, he said, “They were laughing and smoking while they were sitting on the ground.

“This is what they trained for, and they were anxious to get on the way.”

Tiedeman still can see the faces of some of the soldiers he flew to battle or to where their wounds could be tended.

“None of them cried and said, ‘I can’t go. I can’t go,’” recalled the veteran, who’s grateful to them all and for much else, as he approaches his 99th birthday on June 24.

“They were all well-trained, and they were patriotic,” he said. “And they were gentlemen.”

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 or chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.