Harlan Burchardi was sitting in a hospital room the afternoon of Aug. 31, 2004 when he began thumbing through magazines his daughter Beverly brought him.
One dealt with hunting, another with guns, and the last was an aviation magazine with a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress splashed across the cover. It was about 1:30 p.m.
Hermann Burchardi stands in front of the Douglas AD-2 Fighter Bomber he would later die in during a training exercise off the San Diego coast.
Contributed, Elverhoj Museum
While flipping through the pages, Burchardi saw a haunting photograph: a snapshot of a Navy Corsair on its final approach to an aircraft carrier landing strip.
The side of the carrier read CV-45. The photo caption read Aug. 31 at 1:30 p.m.
He stopped short, choked by tears.
The significance would be lost on a casual observer, just a sequence of numbers and dates swimming in time. But 58 years earlier on Aug. 31, 1948 at 1:30 p.m., Harlan’s big brother, Hermann Jr., was lost at sea while attempting to land his Douglas AD-2 Fighter Bomber on an aircraft carrier during a training exercise.
The carrier’s call number was CV-45.
"That’s mystic, you know? How in the hell out of 365 days, and 50 some years later would that happen? The same day, the same minute,” Burchardi said, retelling the story from the easy chair of his Los Olivos home while his wife, Betty, worked on her needlepoint in the corner. They both teared up.
The photo seemed unbelievable to Burchardi. The USS Valley Forge, the carrier his brother was assigned to in 1948, was decommissioned and scrapped for iron in the 1970s.
But years earlier, it was where Hermann trained to be a combat pilot.
BORN TO FLY
From the time he was a boy, Hermann wanted to fly.
“All he could think about was airplanes,” said Harlan, explaining that his brother had no intention of getting involved in his family’s dairy business. The Burchardis were among the first families to settle in Solvang, part of the committee to establish it as a Danish community. They uprooted their dairy from northern California and moved to the west side of town in 1917.
“I hope you want something to do with these damn cows, cause I don’t,” Harlan says his brother told him. “He [Hermann] wanted to be a career Navy combat pilot. He wanted to fly.”
Early on, the Solvang farm boy would gather piles of balsa wood, obsess over intricate plans and construct model airplanes and gliders. They were decked out with landing gear, rudders and in some cases, wingspans so wide that Hermann would tow them with the family pickup truck to Buellflat, where he let them fly.
It was as close as a farm kid could get to the clouds without crawling into a plane.
That was before he got his first set of wings, before he graduated from high school, and before he dated a stream of girls. Back when his nickname was “Noony,” an adaptation of his kid brother Harlan’s failed attempts to say “junior.” Back when Harlan was nicknamed “Swede,” a confounding mix-up of his Danish roots that still baffles him. It was back when they were kids on the dairy farm.
As soon as Hermann was eligible, he joined the Navy eager for combat. It was 1944 and the world was at war. But by 1945, a treaty was signed. Hermann spent his first two years at the University of Redlands before starting flight training.
LETTERS HOME
He traveled all over the nation learning how to fly dive-bombers, amphibious aircraft, and fighter planes. He would send letters back home, bragging about the planes he would pilot.
“This is a SBJ-C ‘Helldiver,’” Hermann scribbled on the back of a black and white photograph he sent home. “We call it the ‘Beast.’”
Harlan peeled back the pages in a thick black album, tracing his brother’s life through the photographs.
“Here’s the big shot,” Harlan said, passing along Hermann’s graduation photo. He’s wearing a herringbone sports coat, slicked back hair and a serious expression just above his dimpled chin. A set of wings is pinned to his lapel.
“He’s proud as hell of those, I’ll tell ya,” Harlan said.
Harlan Burchardi flips through an album his mother put together containing photos Hermann Burchardi sent home before he died in 1948.
Harold Pierce, staff
In the album are dozens of photos of Hermann paling around with his flight buddies, snapshots of planes he flew and photos of him posing in his jumpsuit and skullcap, (on the back, Hermann’s note reads: “Don’t I think I’m hot!!!”)
On nearly ever page of the album are photos of Hermann’s girlfriends that he picked up from Corpus Christi, Texas to Beverly, Mass. Most of them are in bathing suits, and several have their measurements scribbled on the back.
“This is my little Dutch girl,” he wrote on one photo, before listing her height and weight.
“He left a string of broken hearts a mile and a half long,” Harlan said, laughing.
He pulled out another snapshot of Hermann jumping into a pool from a high dive board. It was back when Hermann was a lifeguard at one of the officer’s club swimming pools. A talented swimmer, he leapt at the chance to be a lifeguard anywhere he was stationed. Even though he was just a rank-and-file midshipman, at the pool, he was the boss.
“Even those fat-ass admirals had to listen to the lifeguards. He’d have those big old fat admirals swimming laps, and he was just a midshipman! But they didn’t know that, he had no uniform on to show it,” Harlan said.
UNOFFICIAL HISTORIAN
Harlan has become something of an unofficial historian of his brother’s life, the planes he flew, and his crash, which has been documented in various books and magazines. The plane is identifiable only by the numbers 503A painted on the body.
He’s performed extensive research on the history of the Douglas AD-2, the aircraft his brother crashed in, once attending a seminar hosted by the chief designer, who Harlan said told him the plane was constructed in a rush during a single weekend.
Hermann Burchardi in his airman's uniform circa 1946. On the back of the photo, Burchardi wrote, "Don't I think I'm hot!!!"
Contributed, Harlan Burchardi
Government officials could see the looming threat of a conflict with Korea and commissioned the Douglas Aircraft Company to design a sleek new single-engine fighter-bomber capable of carrying the same payload as a Flying Fortress, but with one catch. It had to be piloted by just one man.
Harlan grabbed his cane and made way for another room, shuffling back with volumes of magazines and pictures of the plane.
“You’ve got a 2,200 horsepower engine, 6,000 pounds of bombs, depth charges, torpedoes, 50 caliber machine guns under the wing and 20 millimeter cannons somewhere out there. All that ordinance on one airplane piloted by one guy and capable of almost 500 mph,” Harlan said.
“And you’ve got a 13-foot diameter propeller. That’s four feet taller than this room,” Harlan said, pointing at the ceiling. “That’s one big-ass bird. He was proud as hell of that thing. He was going to raise all kinds of hell in it.”
Hermann’s squadron was part of the first wave of fighters sent into Korea in 1950 — a fact that Harlan would stress to his mother as a way to grasp at some semblance of comfort in the way her son died.
The news came the day after the crash, just after lunch. Harlan was in the dairy, across the field from his family’s house when his father bolted out the front door.
“Swede, come out quick, something’s happened to Noony,” he yelled.
Harlan’s mother hit the panic button once her husband called Western Union to confirm the telegram wasn’t some sort of mistake.
Hermann was practicing his carrier landings about 130 miles off the San Diego coast. That day he had completed five, but the Landing Signal Officer noticed he was slow to react to deck signals. Something wasn’t right.
Carrier landings are nothing more than controlled crashes, and hitting the target hook that catches the aircraft upon touch down is like landing a plane on a postage stamp, Harlan said.
On his final approach, Hermann’s wing tip caught the corner of the deck. He gave the plane full rudder, trying to get out of the roll, but was too far gone. The plane plunged into the ocean and hit the water cockpit first. The weight of the plane and the bombs strapped to the wings caused it to sink before rescue crews could recover Hermann’s body.
By the time Harlan registered for his junior year of classes that afternoon, many of his classmates knew. Harlan hadn’t yet come to grips.
“I’m like a kid, thinking ‘what happened? Is he going to get found somewhere out there in the ocean?’ I’m thinking all kinds of weird thoughts. ‘C’mon, he can’t be dead. He can’t be dead.’ Something’s got to be different here,” Harlan said. “But no, that was just me.”
There were three separate crashes the same day by different airmen, including the XO of the squadron. Hermann was the sole fatality. The consensus among the crew was that the cadets should have more practice on land before attempting to put a plane down on a carrier.
After the crashes, Harlan read in a magazine that a Navy consultant suggested pilots should have at least 50 hours of flight training before attempting a carrier landing.
“There’s no bitterness, but that hit me when I read it. I wish somebody thought about that earlier,” Harlan said.
Two years after Hermann’s crash, his squadron entered the Korean War.
Hermann Burchardi dreamed of being a Navy combat pilot from the time he was a child.
Contributed, Harlan Burchardi
“Maybe he’s better off dying like he did than to be shot full of holes in Korea and be a POW some damn place and get killed that way,” Harlan would tell his mother. “Maybe he’s better off. He always wanted to be buried at sea, and well, he is.”
A TRADITION OF FLYING
Harlan’s interest in aviation, however, only piqued after his brother’s crash. His fascination started early on when his brother would come home and take him into the air. They two would rent planes from a field in Lompoc and head for the sky.
A year and a half after his brother’s crash, Harlan began flight training at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, but kept it a secret from his mother.
“Mom wasn’t going to go for this one iota,” Harlan said, explaining that his father signed the permission slip for him.
“My mom didn’t even know I was flying, and neither did this one,” Harlan said, motioning to Betty, then a high school sophomore who he was dating. She chuckled, barely looking up from her needlepoint. She’s heard the story more times than she can recall.
Under the rug, Harlan joined a local flying club and checked out an airplane. He called his future mother-in-law and said, “Grandma, don’t say anything to Betty, but I’ll be there in 15 or 20 minutes in an airplane.”
He buzzed the house while she was outside.
“I wonder who that damn fool is,” Betty said, looking up. “That’s your boyfriend,” her mother replied.
Afterwards, he buzzed his family farm. “There goes Swede,” his father said to Harlan’s mother.
“She didn’t have time to get upset, protest or nothing,” Harlan said. “I was flying!”
Harlan hasn’t flown in years, giving it up after developing vision problems. But he doesn’t let that faze him.
“I don’t need to fly anymore. I’ve got my own pilot, flying those things,” Harlan said, pointing to a photo of a Gulf Stream jet hung in the corner. “Huh, Ma?”
Betty grinned and nodded.
Harlan and Betty’s oldest son, Mike, pilots a corporate jet around the world for Fox Sports News. Harlan took him on a ride to check the fields from the air at 12 years old. From that point, he was hooked. “I want to do this,” Harlan said his son told him from the back seat.
“You want to fly, go for it! The whole damn sky is up there! It’s all yours,” Harlan told him.
Flying has become a Burchardi family tradition, and the family has seen a sequence of seemingly coincidental cosmic connections.
Harlan’s dad, the elder Hermann Burchardi, died July 10, 1963. Harlan’s grandson, Ben, was born some years later July 10.
“There’s 364 other days to choose from, how in the hell does that happen?” Harlan asked.
Harlan’s father’s birthday, Jan. 27, is the same day Harlan’s two granddaughters, Sophia and Nora were born.
“That generation dies and another generation of Burchardis starts,” Harlan said, still flipping through his brother’s photo album. He stopped at the images of his brother’s crash. “There’s something else that makes you know you’re not in charge.”
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