Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 (7 page)

Read Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8 Online

Authors: Robert Zimmerman

Tags: #History, #United States, #20th Century, #test

 

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young charges a month-long tour of postwar Europe. They had already visited Cologne, seeing a city so flattened by bombs that it resembled the well-known pictures of Hiroshima. Soon they would visit Berlin, then Austria, Rome, Greece, and a dozen other places. For their transportation and living quarters Bukema had arranged the use of one of Hitler's private railroad cars.
Among Bukema's students was a twenty-one-year-old third year Cadet Corporal by the name of Frank Borman. Borman, raised in Tucson, Arizona, had never imagined that such deprivation was possible. The young man stared with dismay at the refugees. Their clothes were ragged and thin, and they had a beaten, tired look about them. Whole families were crowded into the dormitories, using blankets to cordon off their meager living quarters.
Nor were these the only horrors that he had seen. Beaten, occupied, and nothing more than shattered plunder for other nations to fight over, the citizens of Germany in the late 1940's could barely find enough food to eat. Cities lay in rubble from Allied bombing, and the lack of food had been worsened by a severe drought in 1947. Compounding these problems was the ceaseless tug-of-war between the Soviet Union and the other allies for control of Berlin and the reconstruction of Germany.
To this destitute land came Frank Borman, a blond, small-boned man whose friendly face belied his intense, dedicated and relentless mind. Born in Gary, Indiana in 1928, he had been a sickly child, with serious sinus problems. When their family doctor told his parents that their son had to leave the industrial Midwest for his health, his father gave up his successful auto repair shop and, in the worst years of the depression, moved his family to Tucson, Arizona. Unable to make a profit with a new gas station, Edwin "Rusty" Borman was forced to take odd jobs changing tires at someone else's garage, while Marjorie Borman rented out rooms in their home.
For Frank, however, these problems didn't exist. His childhood in the warm desert country of the American Southwest was like being in heaven. He wandered the countryside, bringing home strange pets, from goats to tarantulas. He and his father built homemade model airplanes, some with wingspans as long as six feet, and each Sunday morning they took the planes out to the wide open windswept desert fields and flew them far and high.

 

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Flying was an early obsession for the boy. When Frank was five, before his parents moved to Tucson, his father paid a barnstorming pilot five dollars so that he and Frank could ride in an old biplane. The boy sat in the front cockpit with his father, feeling the wind in his hair and the unbounded freedom of the open sky and far horizon.
As Frank grew so did his love for flying. At fifteen he decided flying model airplanes was no longer sufficient: he wanted to fly himself. Though his parents didn't object, they insisted he pay the expenses on his own. Working three different partime jobs while attending high school, Frank earned enough each week to pay for one two-hour flying lesson each Saturday. Soon he was flying solo, having earned his pilot's license while still a teenager.
One Saturday Frank was caught in a sudden thunderstorm as he was returning from one of his first solo flights. Fighting the howling wind and the turbulence, Borman suddenly felt great excitement and joy: he was going to bring that plane home no matter what. His mind cleared, his senses became sharp, and he focused his entire being on doing what had to be done to land safely. When that plane glided to a stop at the end of the runway, Borman found himself overwhelmed with an extraordinary feeling of accomplishment.
By his senior year of high school Frank Borman knew that he wanted to spend his life flying airplanes. He had also met and dated the one woman he would share that life with.
Unfortunately, he didn't know this yet.
She did, however.
When seventeen-year-old Frank Borman first asked fifteen-year-old Susan Bugbee for a date, she knew that he was the man for her. Her father had died when she was thirteen, and she saw in Borman a stability and strength that few other teenagers had. She knew that he would be successful in whatever he did, and she fervently wanted to help him get there. Borman himself was strongly attracted to Susan. She was smart, articulate, and beautiful. By the end of high school they were going steady. Neither, however, had yet considered marriage.
Frank's focus was instead on flying. Because Borman's family was too poor to send him to any of the preeminent aeronautical schools, he was left

 

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with two choices: enlist and take advantage of the G.I. Bill, or apply to West Point. Unfortunately, he hadn't thought of West Point until well into his senior year of high school. It was now too late. There were too many applicants ahead of him.
Then, as Borman believes, fate intervened. The son of a local judge was in trouble, hanging out with the wrong people. Having heard that a certain high school student by the name of Borman had not only obtained his pilot's license but also built and flew model airplanes, the judge asked Frank to work with his son. He even offered to buy all the model plane kits, regardless of cost.
For Borman this was a deal he couldn't pass up. He and the boy became good friends as they assembled and flew some of the most expensive model planes available. In gratitude for straightening his son out, the judge pulled the right strings and got Borman on the applicants' list to West Point. The day after he graduated high school Borman received a letter telling him to report to the academy. He was in.
Three years later, Frank was on his way to Europe. His standing at the military academy was high enough for him to be chosen as one of a dozen cadets to tour Europe.
Borman arrived in Berlin just as the yearlong Berlin Airlift was coming to an end. "We flew into West Berlin on sacks of coal," he wrote later.
4
During the previous eleven months, the Soviet military had barred all ground transportation from entering an already struggling West Berlin. Food shipments were stopped. Coal supplies were blocked. Electricity, which came from a power plant in East Berlin, was cut off. With stockpiles for, at most, one to two months, it appeared that the 2.5 million inhabitants of West Berlin faced starvation unless the Western powers abandoned them to the communists.
The Soviets began the blockade not merely to exert their power. They had a legitimate fear of a re-united Germany, and felt that dividing the country would prevent the Germans from mounting another war against Russia.
5
They also wished to install a communist state in their East German zone. The presence of the capitalist island of West Berlin in the center of the communist zone made these goals difficult, if not impossible, to

 

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achieve.
6
When, on June 18th, the three Western powers unilaterally introduced a new West German currency, the Soviets responded in kind, further declaring that their East German marks were the sole currency for all of Berlin. "Russian legislation must apply to all sectors of Berlin,"
7
they proclaimed. The West answered this by bringing its new currency to West Berlin and announcing that both currencies would be legal tender there. General Lucius Clay, the United States Military Governor of Germany and commander of the U.S. forces in Europe, told the Russian Military Governor: "I reject
in toto
the Soviet claims to the city of Berlin." The Soviet reacted by cutting off West Berlin.
Clay's response to the blockade was a daring airlift, dubbed "Operation Vittles."
8
For the next eleven months planes landed in West Berlin every two and a half minutes, unloading powdered milk, flour, and diesel fuel, as well as the sacks of coal that Frank Borman had been sitting on. In the process, the people of Berlin accepted severe deprivation and near-starvation in order to resist Soviet rule. A second airport was quickly built, and at its peak the airlift was shipping more than 10,000 tons of supplies each day, including endless tons of coal needed to keep the people of West Berlin from freezing in that brutal winter cold.
9
After almost a year, the Soviets finally realized that force would not get their former allies to leave Berlin. Furthermore, the siege had been hurting their own zone, which needed the shipments of coal, steel and machine parts that West Germany supplied. In May, 1949 the Soviets finally lifted the blockade, re-opening the rail lines and highways leading to Berlin.
The airlift continued, however, for another two months. When Borman arrived in June the Allies were aggressively re-stocking West Berlin with supplies, just in case the Soviets once again changed their minds.
Borman's European tour ended in Greece. There, a guerrilla army of communist rebels was trying (for the third time) to seize power by force. Knowing that they would certainly lose in the 1946 elections (some estimated they would only receive nine percent of the vote
10
), the communists abstained and declared war instead. Using bases in neighboring Yugoslavia, Albania, and Bulgaria, they made repeated forays into Greece, attacking villages and killing hostages.
11

 

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When Borman arrived in the summer of 1949, the rebellion was on the verge of defeat. The rebels had lost the support of Yugoslavia, and were defending their last strongholds within Greece itself Borman and the cadets were taken to the front lines, where both sides were preparing for what in mere weeks would be the war's final battle.
12
En route, one of their convoy trucks hit a land mine, and once at the front the cadets watched for several days as the two sides lobbed mortar shells back and forth at each other.
Still young and eager to prove his mettle in the world, Borman had stood witness to the start of what was to be a forty year "cold war," a toe-to-toe stand-off which would dominate every aspect of the world's politics and culture. With the development in the late 1940's of the atomic bomb, the stakes rose to a frightening level, preventing outright war but forcing both sides to take actions that sometimes abrogated their own ideals. Machiavellian politics led to military dictators, the funding of terrorists, and indecisive military skirmishes throughout the world. In the end, however, the outcome of this stand-off determined whether the world's entire population would live under a state-run communist system or the free and chaotic capitalist system.
That 1949 journey through the ruins of Europe radically changed Frank Borman's perspective on life. His three years at West Point, dedicated to the motto of "Duty, Honor, Country," forged in him a desire not merely to fly airplanes, but to do it in defense of his country. The devastation of Europe and the communist oppression he saw there further committed him to the deeper principles he felt his country stood for: freedom, democracy, and the right of any human soul to pursue his or her dreams.
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
As Susan Borman notes today, "Frank Borman is the most uncomplicated man I have ever known." His passionate desire to dedicate his entire being to the military actually made him doubt the concept of marriage. To his straightforward mind, it had to be all or nothing. Only six months after arriving at West Point he wrote Susan a letter, explaining that he simply didn't have time for her anymore. With naïve innocence he had decided that he was going to live an obsessed, almost monklike existence in devotion to the cause of freedom.

 

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Susan Borman, 1946. 
Credit: Borman
Susan Bugbee was heartbroken. Up until that moment Frank had been the only man in her life. After crying her eyes out she decided to try and put Frank Borman from her mind. She began dating other high school boys.
Not more than three months later, Frank Borman realized how incredibly stupid he had been. He wrote Susan again, trying to repair their relationship. This time, however, she wasn't going to be so easy to get. While she didn't reject his offer outright, neither did she accept it. He had hurt her, and Susan had no intention of letting him hurt her again. Besides, she was now being wooed by a number of other boys.
For his sophomore and junior years at West Point Frank Borman did live like a monk, though not for his original reasons. He dated no one, and instead courted Susan by mail, sending her presents and gifts whenever he could. When he came back to Tucson during school breaks she was the first

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