A hero in the sky: WWII veteran shares his tale

• Bill Dilger enlisted in the military in 1943
• After serving as a second airborne commando in Burma%2C Dilger graduated from Cornell in 1946
• He is one of only two surviving men from his unit

FREEVILLE – Aloft in a glider high above the wartime Burmese jungle, Bill Dilger felt a moment of the calm wonder so rare to soldiers in the crowded horror of World War II.

There, soaring in the clouds, the reconnaissance photographer from the second airborne commandos reveled in the brief tranquility afforded to him and the sky alone, separated for an instant from the madness far below.

"For a moment, I forgot all about the war and everything else," recounted Dilger, a 91 year-old Cornell University alumnus and professor living in Freeville.

Then, just as suddenly, another aircraft pierced his calm. A heavy fighter rocked the air streams held by the flimsy glider made of tubing and canvas, convulsing the craft like a child's balsam boat quaking in the current of a stream.

The other pilot sidled alongside Dilger, lowering the plane's flaps and wheels to drop enough speed to keep pace with the slow-moving glider. From across that narrow gulf of sky Dilger could make out details of the neighboring plane — the glare on the pilot's goggles, oil streaks on the engine, and the red disc of the Japanese emblem traced on the plane's siding.

"He had me cold, he really did," Dilger said of that moment in the air about 70 years ago. If the pilot pulled back to sight his weapons, Dilger would be one more piece of wreckage in a war that had claimed so many.

Instead, near enough to see the pilot's wide grin, the two aviators each raised a hand in greeting before the fighter accelerated past, never to be seen again.

The pilot could have been out of ammunition, Dilger surmised, or maybe it was something else shared that moment between two strangers in the sky.

"Maybe he knew I was having a good time up there and didn't want to spoil it," Dilger said. "He liked flying too, I guess, or he wouldn't be doing it.

"I'll never know who he was, or if he made it. I hope he did, though," Dilger said.

Surviving the terror of combat in a war that shook the world meant finding those brief glimpses of humanity, and holding them fast.

"It was part of what happened; we would just laugh about it," Dilger said of combat. "We laughed a lot, because that was better than worrying about it. Everything was funny."

Born in White Plains in 1923 and raised in a farm community just outside of Rochester, Dilger left for Cornell as the war tightened its grip. He enlisted in the reserves and then, in the spring of his freshman year in 1943, received a mailing at his Eddy Street apartment calling him to duty.

At his first base in Oklahoma, a posting for a mapping squadron working the front lines in Southeast Asia caught Dilger's eye. With a background at Kodak before he enrolled at Cornell, the photography part interested him, as did the tropical climate.

While most people thought of theaters in Europe or the Pacific, a hot war waged in Asia. Dilger and about 800 other American commandos in his unit fought to wrest control of the jungles.

"In the tropics, it's warm and wet; that suited me a lot better," he said. The jungles reminded him of denser, warmer Catskills, each hillside stitched together by streams no wider than Fall Creek.

Getting to the forward base took a 49-day voyage across the ocean by steam ship, then three days aboard an Indian train with windows sealed shut to keep monkeys from stealing food and nicknacks from the cabins.

Stationed at the Kalaikunda Air Force base in eastern India, the commandos provided tactical support to the British ground troops pushing into the Burmese territory occupied by imperial Japan.

To reach the sky, cargo planes towed a pair of reconnaissance gliders upward then released them over enemy territory to photograph unit movements and sniper positions.

Soaring a few hundred feet above the canopy, Dilger took stereoscopic photos on a Fairchild K-20 camera manufactured in Rochester not far from where Dilger grew up. Normally the glider was a two-person operation, but Dilger's pilot sometimes enjoyed a few too many furtive drinks, so Dilger learned to pilot the glider on his own when he needed.

"You got used to excitement after awhile. You got hooked on it, I think," Dilger said of wartime.

When he wasn't in the air, Dilger and the rest of the commandos braved the muggy heat of the jungle.

That meant avoiding dangers just as deadly as enemy fire — taking daily doses of Mepacrine to avoid malaria, and limiting exposure to the mosquitoes infected with dengue fever.

Broiled by heat and lacerated by bugs, the commandos pushed into enemy territory where they could, and held on through sniper fire and bombing runs when attacked.

When those came, all there was to do was find cover in the wet ground.

"You try to get your whole body inside your helmet. You're just down in a hole; It's scary as hell,"

On his first night in Burma, Japanese bombers strafed and bombed the campsite where Dilger bunked in a thatch-roofed hut.

"My first thought was 'I'm going to die in the next second'," he said. When that second passed, his next thought hovered on the heartbreak of his parents reading a telegram announcing his death in the name of democracy.

His next thought after that, was run.

"I took off like a big bird," he laughed. "I tripped over a root, and then dug a hole big enough for a bath tub."

After the pandemonium subsided, silence took over the jungle with only the crackle of flames and the call of insects to prove to Dilger that the world still existed.

When he regained his bearings, Dilger found unexploded anti-personnel ordnances scattered across the camp's jungle floor, harmless shells dropped by planes at too low of an altitude for most of the firing pins to trigger.

Where some soldiers brought home the spent munition shells or recovered helmets or pistols, Dilger never bothered himself with souvenirs.

"All you take home is yourself, if you can," he said.

For some in his unit, leaving meant a mental retreat when the horror overcame their sensibilities. It was a fate that befell his best friend, a medic, who after running time after time to care for the wounded finally lost his mind.

"They leave in their heads, and they're gone," he said of those like his medic friend, who after the war lived out his days in a Veterans Affairs hospital unable to even recognize his own parents.

Even as Dilger and other soldiers fired on enemies and mapped out locations to be bombed, he never lost the awareness that those on the other side were boys just like him, caught up in a conflict that no one could escape.

"They wanted to go home; I wanted to go home," he said. "You just want to stand up and say 'OK guys, lets all go home'."

To pass the time and maintain contact with home, Dilger wrote letters to his parents and to contacts in Ithaca. Government censors didn't allow correspondence that mentioned troop locations, so his parents didn't even know where he was stationed. Instead, Dilger wrote letters to Cornell professors describing birds in the area, knowing the professors could make a rough guess of the habitat, and pass the information to Dilger's parents.

When the war finally did end by atomic blast, Dilger met a Japanese prisoner of war who shouted out to him in stunted English, "War over!"

The prisoner, who looked no older than 15 years old, asked Dilger if he was going home, and what he planned to do. Dilger replied he was a student studying biology at Cornell. With a thrilled grin the prisoner said he, too, was a student studying biology at Kyoto University.

After a moment the military police officer guarding the prisoner nodded for Dilger to move along. As he did, the boy, with the common difficulty producing the 'l" sound absent from the Japanese language, shouted out to Dilger, "Lots of luck!"

That has seemed to follow Dilger through his life. When he got back to Ithaca in 1946, he resumed his studies at Cornell, earning a bachelor's degree, master's and his Ph.D. from the university. He taught for decades at the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, and as an administrator at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

Over the decades, the 800 or so members of his unit have thinned down as time and age beats down even the hardiest of soldiers. Now, he said, only two remain, a lieutenant who, like Dilger, smoked pipe tobacco, and the two shared hours as young men smoking in jungle half a world away.

Now, the two maintain connection by the occasional phone call from California and yearly Christmas cards.

Before long, he knows, one of them won't receive a card from the other, as the long chapter from Burma to today closes.

It's a funny thing, to listen to Dilger, how war can throw people into a most terrible situation, but from that horror enmeshes those who experience it together into a brotherhood that can't be broken.

"It's a miserable business," he said of war, of its carnage, and its aftermath. "But the people made it liveable."