Only His Mom Called Him Arnie - But everybody else knew him as “Swede”
Born in Overton 1924, he was christened Arnold Walter Westerlin, the latest boy in a family of Swedes that had come to Dawson County a dozen years earlier. Grandfather August had brought the whole bunch to Nebraska in the 1890s to farm and to work with wood. Swedes were good with the ground and with making things. Many came to Nebraska. Many built their families and their new lives there.
It was a good life, although sometimes difficult. Swede’s father died young, leaving the family to find their way on the cusp of the Great Depression. Hard work and a chicken dinner on Sundays. Making ends meet by helping at a portable skating rink that moved from town to town each week. And, as with many in his generation, the war would be the great experience of his life.
In 1943 it was the Army Air Corps then “Off we go into the wild blue yonder…” training on B-17 bombers as a flight engineer and gunner. Watching the prairie on long flights across the mid-West and wishing he was home. But England and the 25th Bomb Group came first. Lucky to be there in 1944 when you had a chance of survival. In 1942 or even in 1943 B-17s without fighter escorts were being shot down in droves by the Luftwaffe during the daylight bombing raids. You could go home after twenty-five missions, but not many made it that far.
The 25th Bomb Group was different though, conducting special missions, secret missions…and weather reconnaissance. D-Day was scheduled be June 5th, but no one knew that on May 28th 1944 when the B-17F “BADGER BEAUTY” took off from Watton England on a standard weather reconnaissance mission code named “Epicure”. The largest invasion the world had ever seen depended upon the weather, and the crews of the 25th Bomb Group would fly the missions to provide that information.
The BADGER BEAUTY had already been scrubbed from her first mission that day due to engine problems. But the flight had to go, and at 1707 hours GMT she took off again for a fourteen hour flight with eight souls aboard. Swede was at his post behind the pilots at the top turret. Monitoring the engines, scanning the skies for random German JU-88s, even flying the plane for a few minutes from time to time if the pilots needed a quick break.
500 miles from land the No. 1 engine began leaking oil and then failed. The mission could not be completed; it was time to go home. Shortly before midnight and still far at sea the No. 3 engine faltered, and then failed. They would not be going home. It was time to find land. Any land.
An agonizing two hours later they were over Ballydavid, West Kerry, Ireland. They might survive the night. But with nowhere to land the pilot put the plane down a mile off shore while the eight men scrambled to two life rafts. But Swede’s raft wouldn’t fully inflate and no progress could be made towards shore against the wind and tide that relentlessly pushed them towards the open sea. While one raft with four men aboard paddled for shore and help, Swede’s raft struggled to stay near the land. Four young men, alone in the dark, cold, shivering, frightened. At dawn Irish fishermen towed them to shore. Towed them to safety. Saved their lives.
Swede finished his tour in the European Theatre of Operations with a Distinguished Flying Medal and four Oak Leaf Clusters. He ended the war in the Pacific awaiting the invasion of Japan. He returned to the USA to work, to raise a family. The hours spent in a B-17 transitioned into a life on the flight line, building and repairing airplanes. He died in 1990 in Elwood Gosper County, not very far from where he was born. A simple life. A simple story. Like millions of Americans he did his duty with quiet diligence, honor, and dignity.
(See Swedes picture by clicking on the image below)
