About a year had passed since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and Leroy “Swede” Svendsen Jr. thought he had waited long enough.
Not quite 14, he ran away from his Chicago home with a pal and took a train to Los Angeles. He really wanted to fight. He and his boyfriend told a Navy recruiter they were 16.
“The recruiter said, ‘We need to call your parents to get permission,'” said his widow, Juanita Svendsen, 83. “And the recruiter called home and they said, ‘Not only no, but no, and send him home. to the next train. He is only 13 years old.
The following year, Svendsen visited a Navy recruiter, and this time his parents signed the papers. It marked the start of an extraordinary 37-year military career for the longtime Garden Ridge resident, who died Feb. 14. He was 93 years old.
Interment will be at Arlington National Cemetery.
Known as “The Swede” to other sailors who couldn’t pronounce his last name, Leroy William Svendsen was a legend in the world of Air Force Special Operations. In Vietnam, he led a classified commando operation and flew more than 100 missions in support of Army Special Forces.
Leroy William Svendsen was a legend in the world of Air Force Special Operations. In Vietnam, he led a classified commando operation and flew more than 100 missions in support of Army Special Forces. He became a two-star general. Svendsen died on February 14 at age 93.
Courtesy of Randy Svendsen“A Great Warrior”
Svendsen entered the Air Force after leaving the Navy in 1946. He began pilot training at Randolph AFB in 1947. He joined Air Force Special Operations shortly after command formation in 1962 and became a two-star general, retiring in 1980.
Along the way, he commanded what is now the Air Force Personnel Center at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph.
“He was just a great warrior, a great boss and a wonderful man – the best boss I ever had,” said retired Air Force Col. Irv Gerrow, 89, of Windcrest.
“He let you do the work,” Gerrow said. “He gave you a job to do, and you did it. He left you alone. He said: ‘If you need any help let me know.’
The story of Svendsen’s childhood enlistment in the Navy surprises old comrades. Many saw him as a thoughtful and deliberate man – anything but reckless.
Retired Air Force General Chris Divich said Svendsen was all spit and polite when in uniform. Without a uniform, he looked like a wealthy rancher, often wearing blue jeans and cowboy boots. He could also dress like a high-flying business executive.
“If he puts on a coat and tie…you think he’s the president of a big bank,” said Divich, 88, of San Antonio. “He’s just that kind of person, and he’s not the kind of person that I would pick and say, ‘Yeah, damn it, he ran away when he was 15. “”
Retired Air Force General Andrew Iosue, who led Air Training Command at Randolph from 1983 to 1986, said Svendsen could have been a character from “Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy “, a popular radio adventure series broadcast since the Depression in the early 1950s.
Iosue’s wife, Shirley, described Svendsen as a commanding presence. .
“He wore his clothes so impeccably – civilian, military, whatever. He was always a gentleman and he never acted like he was better than you,” she recalled.
Leroy William Svendsen was a legend in the world of Air Force Special Operations. In Vietnam, he led a classified commando operation and flew more than 100 missions in support of Army Special Forces. He became a two-star general. Svendsen died on February 14 at age 93.
Courtesy of Randy Svendsen“I couldn’t wait to fly”
Svendsen was born in Chicago on Boxing Day 1928. It was a large family, with grandparents, two married children and three grandchildren living under the same roof in the Portage Park neighborhood of northwest Chicago. .
Svendsen was honorably discharged from the Navy in 1946 and returned directly to Chicago and Lane Tech High School.
Just as he had been in a rush to enlist as a teenager, he was in a rush at school too and completed two years of classes in one semester.
“And then the big thing was that he couldn’t wait to fly,” said Juanita Svendsen.
Sweden’s Svendsen fought in three wars in a long career, but he saw no combat in World War II. He was a gunner and radio operator aboard a PBY Catalina, a seaplane deployed to the Pacific theater.
Missing a fight was a huge disappointment, a disappointment he was determined to make up for.
During his first tour of duty during the Korean War, he was a forward air controller with the 35th Infantry Regiment of the 25th Infantry Division and commander of a tactical air control team. He then joined the 8th Fighter Squadron, 59th Fighter Group, flying 114 missions aboard F-80C fighter-bombers in attacks that took him deep into North Korea.
His squadron lost half its men in just four months.
“It was dangerous, but he always had his hand up to volunteer for dangerous assignments,” said his son, Randy Svendsen, 71, of Chicago. “My father was not afraid.”
Leroy William Svendsen was a legend in the world of Air Force Special Operations. In Vietnam, he led a classified commando operation and flew more than 100 missions in support of Army Special Forces. He became a two-star general. Svendsen died on February 14 at age 93.
Courtesy of Randy SvendsenSpecial operations in Vietnam
Returning from the war, the elder Svendsen remained immersed in flight, including three test programs of the F-102 Delta Dagger, a supersonic interceptor, at the US Air Force Flight Test Center in 1956 .
Svendsen joined Air Force Special Operations in 1962, then went to Vietnam. How he got there is a typical Svendsen story – he volunteered after learning that his former Korean War boss was launching a clandestine operation in Vietnam.
He served with the 1st Air Commando Wing, 6th Fighter Squadron from 1963 to 1965, overseeing classified commando operation and flying missions in support of Army Special Forces. His next tour was in Laos, where he directed all covert Air Force operations.
In some ways, the Vietnam War was as hard on the wives and children of the combatants as it was on the troops. During those years, Juanita Svendsen was married to Jim Boggs, who served with Swede Svendsen in special operations at Hurlburt Field, east of Fort Walton Beach, Florida. She and Boggs, a friend of Svendsen, later divorced.
She married Svendsen in 1985.
Another member of Svendsen’s commando fraternity was Richard Secord, who was later implicated in illegal arms sales during the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra scandal. Juanita Svendsen remembers Secord telling her that the commandos, all volunteers, had lost many men in the B-26 Marauder, a twin-engine bomber flown in World War II and Korea and used clandestinely in Vietnam.
Growing up in Fort Walton Beach, Randy Svendsen was around 11 years old when a special ops commando vanished, leaving behind a wife and eight children.
“I remember dad telling us friends of his, he was telling us, ‘Oh, they’re gone. They’ve been shot. They’re not coming back,'” he said.
“There were a bunch of these stories. One of the terms was “Such an omen,” the younger Svendsen added.
Juanita Svendsen said that in those days “it was just common to go to another funeral, and the wives disappeared quickly. They were returning to their hometown, wherever they came from.
Fighting was his calling
Svendsen returned from Vietnam to complete his studies at Florida State University in 1965, but was not yet finished with Air Force special operations. He served another six months in Vietnam before stepping down from command in 1966. In 1969, he was among the first inductees into the Air Commando Hall of Fame.
Nor was he quite finished with Vietnam.
In the spring of 1975, Svendsen, then a one-star general, spent the last weeks of the American withdrawal as assistant to the army commander in charge of evacuations. His family’s account of his life says that when 15 North Vietnamese divisions closed in on Saigon, Svendsen set out to destroy Bien Hoa Air Base, lest North Vietnamese forces capture the American military aircraft there. low. Bien Hoa was a center for U.S. combat, maintenance, and repair operations.
One night during the operation, Svendsen was blown out of bed by incoming fire.
“As Bien Hoa caught fire,” the family obituary reads, “he laid out a plan to destroy Long Binh, a South Vietnamese army supply base the next day. Air America that evening to the command ship, Blueridge, off the coast of Vietnam.
By the end of his career, Svendsen had accumulated 6,000 flight hours, most of it in fighter jets, and was also a parachutist. Flight time spent in combat is unclear. While he flew over 230 recorded combat missions in two wars, many more were secret and unrecorded.
His wife said that at 75, Svendsen pressed commanders at Randolph AFB, the Pentagon and an intelligence agency to let him join the US war effort in Afghanistan. In one instance, he requested a squadron of A-10 Thunderbolt II jets – offering to work for free with the rank of captain.
He was told to enjoy his retirement.
“He would come back as captain. We laughed a lot about it,” recalls Juanita Svendsen. “He was very serious, but when he told me about it over cocktails, I laughed and he kind of smiled at me. But no, he would have loved to go to Afghanistan as a captain and do the war.
“He really was a warrior, a dedicated warrior, and that’s what he wanted to do his whole life.”
