Pacific Stars and Stripes, Jan. 12, 1957
NEW YORK (INS)- Col. Dean Hess,
USAF, from Marietta, O., is the son of an electrician. He worked his
way into Marietta College and there made up his mind he'd be a preacher.
But he had hardly embarked on his calling-that
of a parson in Christian (Campbellite) Churches-when Pearl Harbor
was hit. Dean enlisted. By 1943, he was with the Army Air Corps, in
England, and moved with it into France after D-Day, serving as an
informal chaplain when he wasn't bombing.
A BAD THING happened to him in a raid on the marshaling
yards at Kaiserslautern. His bombs hit an apartment house and the
building crumbled into dust. He learned later that it had been a shelter
for hundreds of orphaned children.
"It left a mark in my mind
like a brand," the good-looking black-browed "sky pilot" says quietly
when he talks about it.
The years just after the war were brooding ones
for Hess. A call to return to the service occupied his mind and helped
him. In April, 1950, he was sent to Japan as an information and education
officer. By July he was in Korea, assigned to help create a ROK Air
Force.
With extraordinary patience and resourcefulness
he achieved his goal so well that President Syngman Rhee decorated
him with Korea's highest military medal-rarely awarded to a foreigner.
Later, flying on radio directions of a liaison
pilot, Hess raked a highway one day only to learn as the plane streaked
on that he had fired on refugees seeking asylum, not an enemy column.
Peace of mind began coming to him in 1951 in the
fire and terror of Seoul's fall. Preparing to flee with the others,
he froze with pity and sorrow to see hundreds of homeless and abandoned
children still left in the burning capital.
Hess organized "Operation Kiddy Car," an airlift
that took hundreds of them to a shelter in the south at Cheju. Mrs.
Rhee found a woman who could manage them, nurse them back to health.
Epidemics broke out among the children. Many died. But many lived
who would have died.
From that shelter came the Hess-founded organization
called Hope, Incorporated-an agency of mercy for needy children. He
is to the children of Korea what Father Flanagan was to the boys of
Boys Town.
Hess is not free of remorse nor will he ever be
free. In his book, "Battle Hymn," his dedication reads: "To those
we could not save." He concludes the book with:
"I cannot deny that from time
to time I think with longing of a little frame church in the quiet
Ohio countryside-perhaps the one at Paw Paw, with its single-ringing
bell and its oak-shaded cemetery. Perhaps when I am older, I shall
again be its minister-if I feel myself qualified and if the good and
simple people of that farming community will accept me in spite of
all I have done in an airplane."
Hess' remarkable life has been filmed by Universal-International.
Rock Hudson will play his role. The money from it has already been
spent at Hope, Incorporated.
By Bob Considine
PSS-607
