Last man out. In 1946, shortly after leaping from a plummeting B-24 bomber and hiding in caves from Nazi patrols for six months, an Oklahoma farm boy was drafted by the Green Bay Packers as the 66th pick of the NFL draft. The strapping lineman declined fame and a football future: “I’m going home to work my crops.”
Rejection of the NFL was merely one tiny chapter in the astounding life of Bert Cole. Even beside the most remarkable figures in U.S. agriculture history, his story is standalone.
What happened when a farmer was born with the mettle of Teddy Roosevelt and stamina of Jim Thorpe, along with a MENSA-level IQ and virtuoso musical ability?
The stars aligned for the impossible Bert Cole.
The Prodigy
In 1888, accompanied by the rolling creak of a mule-hauled wagon, a Georgia farmer chewed on dust and inched toward a homestead in Old Greer County, north Texas, drawn by a federal promotion to populate grazing lands once in the domain of early-day cattle barons.
C.W. Cole drove a stake into dry dirt outside Altus, 850 miles west of his wife and two children. The area’s boundaries, later redrawn on the map, became southwest Oklahoma’s Jackson County.
Lacking timber and surrounded by a near-treeless expanse, C.W. dug into a natural exposure on a south-facing embankment to find shelter. Cutting slabs of sod, he patterned the chunks atop the cavity, dropped a tarp over the initial layers, and placed an additional covering of sod on the dwelling. Out front, he stacked sod walls to block the wind.
Thus, he made his home and lived in the half-dugout—a bare-bones sanctuary to cook and keep warm, fueled by buffalo dung. Sweeping buffalo herds, once estimated in Oklahoma alone at 4 million to 12 million head, had disappeared a decade prior. However, their chips remained.
After three years in the dugout, tending a successful livestock operation and scratching out crop sustenance, C.W. sent for his family. Toehold acquired, the next generation gained a rung in prosperity as C.W.’s son, Bertram “Earle” Cole, cut from the rough cloth of his father, took the reins.
Earle won the affections of Hattie Bird Talley (to the chagrin of her parents, who viewed their prospective son-in-law as a cowboy beyond polite society) in 1903. The newlyweds, along with C.W., built houses roughly 100 yards apart, almost within view of the original sod dugout.
Seventeen years later, in 1920, while corn averaged 54 cents per bushel; commercial radio bounced into American living rooms for the first time; and the Red Sox traded Babe Ruth to the Yankees, Hattie gave birth in her house on the farm.
Bouncing Bert Cole. The prodigy had arrived.
Gridiron Prince
Among five other children, Bert was a sponge, soaking up lessons of dirt, steel, and muscle from his father, and literature, art, and music from his mother. The house was a hive of learning. Proper grammar was currency within its walls, and Hattie made certain Bert was more refined than redneck.
As a boy, Bert spent his days in Earle’s shadow as mechanization replaced mule-power in rows of cotton and grain sorghum. His evenings were given to books and musical training under Hattie’s watchful eye.
By his mid-teens, the lean and angular Oklahoma farm kid was 6’ 3” and 210 lb., the pride of Altus High School and a gridiron prince in the bone-crunching era of leather helmets and single platoon football—playing offense and defense.
“He was a tackle and very, very fast,” says Bert’s son, Chris Cole. “They played a single wing offense with a lot of pulling. He would mess guys up pulling out and hitting hard.”
Beyond sports, Bert was the ultimate polymath. Hunting, farming, the arts, and a love of Shakespeare, i.e., his IQ was off the charts, combined with an inordinate ability to speed-read and collate information.
“Even his accent was unique,” says Chris, his words dragging a heavy southwest Oklahoma drawl. “The rest of us talked with strong southern tones, but my dad spoke with precise enunciation. Why? He just wasn’t like anyone else.”
Adding to the paradox, Bert was feathered lightning on the ivories, despite giant paws for hands: The farm boy sought a career as a concert pianist.
“He played the piano like nothing I’ve ever heard,” Chris describes. “It was natural talent. He had a blind sister, Joy, who was sent to Oklahoma School for the Blind, and she was trained as a classical vocalist and moved to New York City to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Another of his sisters went on to teach musical composition at Miami of Ohio University. In fact, all their siblings went to college and that was unheard of for a bunch of Oklahoma farm kids in the same household in the 1930s and 1940s.”
Football became the means to play piano.
In 1939, on an athletic scholarship and beefed to 240 lb., Bert suited up as tackle at Altus Junior College, but when the football program went belly-up, he transferred to Oklahoma A&M (Oklahoma State University) in Stillwater.
“He was playing football at Oklahoma State, but was frustrated trying to pursuit a degree in piano performance,” Chris recounts. “He’d get out of football, go eat, and then not be able to find something as simple as a room to practice piano. Circumstances pushed him out of piano, and he switched to agronomy, although the degree was ‘field crops’ in that day.”
Outranking piano and farming, Bert’s concerns turned to World War ll. In 1942, with U.S. forces fighting full-bore against Germany and Japan, He enlisted in the Army. Bert married his sweetheart, Willie Gazaway, and hit training, testing off the charts.
No G.I. fatigues and no M1 Garand rifle. Rather Bert was catapulted into the Army Air Corps and put behind the controls of a B-24 Liberator—the backbone, in tandem with the B-17—of U.S. air power.
The days of driving a 50-horsepower tractor were gone, replaced by a bomber with four 1,200-horsepower engines; 110’ wingspan; 66’ length; 8,000 lb. payload; 300 mph max speed; and 11 .50 caliber machine guns.
He flew the beast into hell.
Hit and Run
Hitler’s supersized gas station sat over 1,000 miles southeast of Berlin, in Ploesti, Romania, the source of over a third of German petroleum. In August 1943, the U.S. took aim, intending to decimate Nazi oil wells, refineries, and storage tanks.
A year earlier, in June 1942, the Allies had bombed Ploesti in a precursor raid. Thirteen B-24s dropped 24 tons of bombs from high altitude, met minimal resistance, and all returned with light damage. Why not go whole-hog with another aerial attack in big numbers?
However, the Germans anticipated the question. They poured in reinforcements with 25,000 soldiers, built decoy sites, draped miles of camouflage, updated radar, bolstered anti-aircraft systems, tethered defensive barrage balloons to steel cables, concealed hundreds of heavy guns in railroad cars and haystacks, ramped up Luftwaffe fighter plane numbers, and transformed Ploesti into Hitler’s most fortified stronghold outside the immediate Third Reich territory.
Satisfied with the refurbishment, the Nazis waited for the arrival of U.S. bombers and Bert Cole.
On Sunday morning, Aug. 1, as part of the 756th Bomb Squadron, First Lieutenant Bert Cole powered his B-24 through a curtain of dust on a Benghazi, Libya runway, and rose into the skies of North Africa, as part of a 177-bomber aerial armada of B-24s, manned by 1,765 American men from every state in the Union.
The flight plan was straightforward. Cross the Mediterranean Sea, ease along the Transylvanian Alps, drop into Romania at low altitude to avoid detection, and execute a massive bombing run from 100-130’ in 20 minutes over a 5-mile-wide area—all in daylight to ensure the efficacy of precision targeting.
Dubbed Operation Tidal Wave, the mission was supposed to be in and out, hit and run.
Instead, from the moment Cole and the other 176 B-24s took flight, the Germans had intercepted a coded message and were aware a large U.S. fleet was in the air.
The Germans at Ploesti closed ranks. They knew Cole and his comrades were coming.
Last Man Out
Under radio silence, 177 planes attempted to maintain formation and communication for 1,000 miles. Impossible.
Upon reaching Ploesti, the attack fell apart as synchronization collapsed into piecemeal bombing runs. The Germans, on vigil, filled the skies with flak. Smoke, low altitude, fire columns, and extreme hazards meant B-24s falling from the sky.
It was a duck hunt. German fighter planes sprayed departing B-24s. Bloody Sunday. Only 88 B-24s returned to Libya. Over 400 airmen were killed or captured.
“According to the little my daddy would ever say about Ploesti, the raid was chaos,” Chris recounts. “He talked about planes flying into each other, bodies hanging out of planes, and guys he knew going down all around in flames. He saw things he could never speak about.”
Cole delivered his bombs and reversed course out of Ploesti, evading the reach of Luftwaffe Messerschmidt Bf 109s, but his bomber had taken heavy flak damage. Over the eastern portion of Yugoslavia, in present-day Serbia, down to two engines and losing power, Cole couldn’t lift his craft over the mountains.
“He ordered everyone to parachute out while they could,” Chris describes. “He jumped last.”
“His crew all survived and were later rescued, but he got separated and initially ended up in caves where the peasantry concealed him from Nazi patrols. He was 240 lb. and he stood out from the lean Serbians. After all, a 6’ 3” farm boy is hard to hide.”
Back in Oklahoma, Bert’s wife, Willie, was teaching high school English and drama in Okfuskee County—dreading the potential of a life-changing, hand-carried message. In mid-August, whether carried on foot or by bicycle, a Western Union courier delivered a telegram from the War Department: Bert Cole, Missing In Action … “if further details or other information are received you will be promptly notified.”
The MIA notification came with an undeclared admission: Bert likely was dead.
Willie refused the possibility of war widow. “It was a formative moment in our family,” Chris says. “My mom responded with prayer—daily and constantly. She absolutely believed Providence was keeping him alive. No details; no return date; no nothing. She just had faith.”
Sunburned Serb
Shedding weight by the day, over several months on the run with Chetnik resistance fighters, Bert dropped to a gaunt 145 lb. Dressed in tatters and browned by the sun, he grew a dark beard and began learning Serbian.
“I was 14 years old,” Chris recounts, “when my aunt asked my daddy, ‘How close were you to the Nazis?’”
“He leaned toward her and answered, ‘This close,’ from about 1’ away.”
“Turns out, that with his complexion, hanging facial hair, and rags for clothes, the patrolling Nazi soldiers actually thought he was Serbian,” Chris notes. “They even asked about him and the Chetniks said my daddy was one of them. And he got to the point where he could speak simple Serbian, adding to the overall disguise. Bottom line, the Nazi soldiers assumed he was a sunburned Serb with a beard.”
Almost four months later, Bert was rescued during Operation Halyard, the largest extraction mission of airmen in history. Between August and December 1944, on a rough airstrip secretly built by Serbian peasants, the U.S. flew in C-47s in extremely risky conditions and picked up approximately 500 airmen—many of whom were shot down on the return from Ploesti. (For more, see The Forgotten 500: The Untold Story of the Men Who Risked All For the Greatest Rescue Mission of World War II.)
All the while, Willie’s faith was steadfast. Ironically, her husband’s eventual return via a return flight to a base in Africa, and a troop ship across the Atlantic, came with spiritual wink and a thick knot of bills.
“Momma was Baptist,” Chris explains, “but we were raised Methodist. Regardless, there were no playing cards allowed in our home. None. She made certain of that.”
“But daddy was a phenomenal poker player. In the 10 days or so it took him to cross the ocean to get home, he won a bundle at cards. He got off the boat with $9,000 in cash.”
On his arrival in Altus, Bert built Willie a house—within a stone’s throw of the homes built by his father and grandfather. “Guess how he paid for the whole thing?” Chris asks with a hearty laugh. “Of course, the poker winnings.”
66 in 46
In the spring of 1945, with one year of football eligibility left, and one hour away from a degree, Bert devoted his body to reconditioning and football. He seized the one-year opportunity to complete bachelor’s and master’s degrees.
“He regained his weight, but he was never able to fully redevelop his leg strength,” Chris says. “Otherwise, he was back to old form.”
And “old form” earned Bert a starting spot on the 1945 Oklahoma State football team—a historic squad that featured seven World War ll vets, went undefeated, won the Sugar Bowl on New Year’s, and ended the season ranked No. 1 in the nation (retroactively).
Two weeks after the Sugar Bowl, the NFL draft was held in New York City at the Commodore Hotel. With the 66th pick, the Green Bay Packers selected Bert and offered a $3,500 payday—significant money considering minimum wage was 40 cents at the time.
Without hesitation, Bert declined a visit to Green Bay, turned down the NFL offer, and went straight back to row cropping.
Why? Part of the answer hangs in the skies above Ploesti.
“He loved sports to his dying day and he’d thrown his heart into football,” Chris says. “But the war had a heavy, heavy effect on him. It was a mental, emotional, and spiritual effect. I suspect he had PTSD, but I’ll never know for certain.”
“After he survived and saw so many of his brothers die, I think for the rest of his life he just wanted peace and quiet. The farm.”
A Walking Contradiction
Avoiding the spotlight of heroism or football fame, Bert Cole went neck-deep in dirt and diesel.
In the 1950s, an irrigation project dammed the Red River’s north fork to create Lake Altus, feeding a series of dirt canals to deliver water to farmland. Physically shepherding the precious resource, Bert would sleep in the elements, laying at the low end of a given quarter section to ensure the flow didn’t breach the ditch lines.
“To maintain control, he’d stay onsite for days, only coming to the house to eat,” Chris recounts. “He’d sleep in the dirt at night, and when he felt his clothes get wet, he’d get up and move to the north end of the field to move siphon tubes down to irrigate more land.”
With the same calloused hands that gripped irrigation pipes, Bert would return to the house, and coax beauty from a piano. “He’d walk over with that large frame and sit down on the bench, and then belt out Sheep and Goat Walkin’ to the Pasture by David Guion. Unbelievable. Then go back to the fields.”
Slowly, across Chris’ childhood and into adulthood, the enigma of his own father unraveled.
“Over the years, I consistently heard compliments in public or appreciative comments about things he’d done in the past. But he blew them off. He’d do almost anything to keep attention off himself.”
Bright light is hard to conceal in the long-term. “He read a book a day,” Chris details. “Years later, we gave away thousands of those books. History, thrillers, westerns, mysteries—every topic under the sun. There was a desperation in him to learn and he fed it almost to the day he died.”
Financially, as farming margins tightened, Bert hid several golden parachutes in the form of coins and savings bonds (along with a collection of 1,000-plus belt buckles). He used the collection, packed with gold coins, as collateral for farm loans. “When he passed, there was a sizable sum in coins,” Chris explains. “And also several hundred thousand dollars in savings bonds.”
The coin collection was kept in a chest beneath a Hamlet quote hanging on the wall:
This above all: to thine ownself be true,And it must follow, as the night the day,Thou canst not then be false to any man.
A walking contradiction. A farmer to the core, yet a man who quoted Shakespeare, line and verse.
One Life to Live
In 1970, as agriculture entered a lean era, Bert left his beloved rows and took a state job as a feed, seed, and fertilizer inspector.
The whispers of war hero and football star faded with time, while a reputation for character and integrity intensified. “I got older and I understood why people saw my dad as a giant,” Chris says. “If he said it or promised something, you could take it to the bank.”
“He was the guy who lived out, ‘Your word is your bond,’ and ‘You are known by the company you keep.’ He walked what he believed, ‘One life to live and that means to live it for Jesus.’”
Blessed and burdened, Bert’s life was a book of the extraordinary—many chapters unread; many chapters never to be opened. In 2013, Bert passed away at 92.
“He knew he had lived a rare and unique life,” Chris adds, “but he was intent on not seeming special. His only cares were for family, farming, and the Lord.”
“I’d ask him, ‘Daddy, why didn’t you play football?’ He’d raise his eyes and look under the brim of his cap and say, ‘Do you know how cold it gets in Green Bay, Wisconsin?’”
Indeed. Respect to the impossible Bert Cole.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
