From Sweden to the Stars and Stripes
By Caroline D’Ambra
Bertil Erik John Ljung
5/19/1927-3/3/2002
Bertil Erik John Ljung was born May 19th, 1927, in Långasjö, Kronoberg, Sweden, to parents Johan Teander Ljung and Alma Hillevi Charlotta Ljung Karlsson.[1] His high school education consisted of learning English, Danish, Norwegian, French, and German. On the side, Bertil worked as a one-time movie extra and starred as a schoolboy in a film titled “Torment”, which won many European awards and played at foreign film theatres in the United States. Ljung led a busy life and traveled from Sweden to the United States on multiple trips. He was interviewed many times for the Camp Carson Mountaineer Newspaper, a newspaper that recorded weekly military life at Fort Carson. He had an Army hitch and became a civilian employee of the Swedish Army, worked for the Texas Oil Co. office, was a translator for the United Press Bureau in Stockholm, and a credit investigator and a legal reporter for the F. W. Dodge Corporation in Denver, Colorado. Ljung migrated from Sweden to the United States on the S.S. Gripsholm on May 8th, 1948, before being inducted into the United States Army for the Korean War.
Corporal Ljung served as an airplane spotter at the Arctic Circle for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment from January 27th, 1951, to January 26th, 1953. This job position originated in World War II, where volunteers were given extensive training in aircraft recognition and were provided materials such as “aircraft spotter dials, aircraft recognition playing cards, aircraft identification cards and hard rubber aircraftmodels to help them learn how to identify American, British, German and Japanese planes based on wings, engines and aircraft shape. Spotter towers and call centers were manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” to accurately report enemy activity. Because Corporal Ljung was stationed in the Arctic Circle, his job involved spotting planes in long periods of daylight, a skill that is highly valued, as most objects blend in with the surroundings and the masking of the sun’s beams. The 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, later given the insignia of a black horse, was activated and deactivated multiple times from the early 1900s to the end of the Cold War. In Ljung’s time, the regiment was stationed at Fort Carson, Colorado, where the regiment was rebuilt by the 23rd Colonel of the Regiment: Brianard S. Cook. During his service, Ljung continued to travel between Sweden and the United States on paid leave before deciding to live in the United States permanently. His interviews were recorded in the Camp Carson newspaper, where he challenged the ideas of world affairs by comparing his time living in Sweden during World War II to the events of Russian Communism, persuading himself to stay in the United States with a newfound desire for patriotism. According to the article titled “Personality of the Week Corporal from Sweden Recalls Life in Trouble-Ringed Nation”, Ljung fell in love with the way of life in the United States with a free enterprise system, as “he credits the system with the higher standard of living. He was amazed by the slums he saw in big cities (he says there are no tenement districts in Sweden) and was equally astounded by the number of automobiles in America. Radio advertising was new to him, and so were drug stores selling household appliances.” He viewed the United States as a “land of opportunity…a chance to get ahead.” In Denver on May 8th, 1953, Bertil married Anna Maria Kjellin from Sweden, who emigrated over on the S.S. Gripsholm. The two lived together in Denver from 1953 onward. On October 31st, 1966, Ljung was sworn in as the legal editor of the Denver Daily Journal, a legal newspaper that publishes construction reports, legal advertising, and publications for the states of Colorado and Wyoming.
Ljung’s wife passed away before him on October 28th, 1991, in Denver, Colorado. Bertil Erik John Ljung passed away on March 3rd, 2002 in Denver, Colorado. Henow resides inFort Logan in Denver, Colorado as of June 25th, 2016.
Footnotes ↓
[1] Information for this biography can be found at: https://visitww2.org/aircraft-warning-service/. https://www.army.mil/article/261926/fort_carson_mountainer_the_end_of_an_era https://visitww2.org/aircraft-warning-service/.
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