Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) Skip to main content

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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)




The Obsession of Flight "From that moment on, I knew: Little Dieter needs to fly." 

 Before the jungle, there was the Black Forest. Dieter Dengler's story begins not in a cockpit, but in the ruins of WWII Germany. At age 10, he witnessed an Allied bomber so close he could see the pilot's goggles—a moment of "ecstatic" clarity that defined his entire life path.

"Men are often haunted,'' Werner Herzog tells us at the beginning of "Little Dieter Needs to Fly.'' "They seem to be normal, but they are not.'' His documentary tells the story of such a haunted man, whose memories include being hung upside down with an ant nest over his head, and fighting a snake for a dead rat they both wanted to eat.

 

The man's name is Dieter Dengler. He was born in the Black Forest of Germany. As a child, he watched his village destroyed by American warplanes, and one flew so close to his attic window that for a split-second he made eye contact with the pilot flashing past. At that moment, Dieter Dengler knew that he needed to fly.

Dengler is now in his 50s, a businessman living in Northern California. He invites us into his home, carefully opening and closing every doorover and over again, to be sure he is not locked in. He shows us the stores of rice, flour and honey under his floor. He obsesses about being locked in, about having nothing to eat. He tells us his story.

As an 18-year-old, he came penniless o America. He enlisted in the Navy to learn to fly. He flew missions over Vietnam, but "that there were people down there who suffered, who died--only became clear to me after I was their prisoner.'' He was shot down, made a prisoner, became one of only seven men to escape from prison camps and survive. He endured tortures by his captors and from nature: dysentery, insect bites, starvation, hallucinations.




The thing about story-telling is that it creates pictres in our heads. I can "see'' what happened to Dieter Dengler as clearly as if it has all been dramatized, and his poetry adds to the images. "As I followed the river, there was this beautiful bear following me,'' he remembers. "This bear meant death to me. It's really ironic--the only friend I had at the end was death.'' At another point, standing in front of a giant tank of jellyfish, he says, "This is basically what Death looks like to me,'' and Herzog's camera moves in on the dreamy floating shapes as we hear the sad theme from "Tristan and Isolde.'' Now here is an interesting aspect. Dieter Dengler is a real man who really underwent all of those experiences (and won the Medal of Honor, the D.F.C and the Navy Cross because of them). His story is true. But not all of his words are his own. Herzog freely reveals in conversation that he suggested certain images to Dengler. The image of the jellyfish, for example--"that was my idea,'' Herzog told me. Likewise the opening and shutting of the doors, although not the image of the bear.



"I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder."





Herzog famously prioritizes "ecstatic truth" over "accountant's truth." In this film, he uses several techniques to achieve this:

  • Re-enactments: Herzog takes Dengler back to Laos. He hires local villagers to play his captors, binding his hands and leading him through the jungle once more.

  • Staged Moments: Some details are "enhanced" by Herzog. For example, the scene where Dengler obsessively opens and closes his house doors to ensure they aren't locked was a motif suggested by Herzog to visualize Dengler's psychological scars.



The Nature of Trauma

  • Food Hoarding: Dengler shows Herzog the massive stores of food he keeps under his floorboards in his California home—a direct result of the starvation he faced in Laos.

  • The Contrast of Environments: The film juxtaposes the lush, indifferent beauty of the jungle (which Dengler calls his "prison") with the sterile, infinite graveyard of planes in the Mojave Desert where the film concludes.

  • Dieter Dengler passed away in 2001, just a few years after the documentary was released. The film remains the definitive record of his voice and perspective.



The story of Dieter Dengler is one of the most astonishing tales of survival, sheer willpower, and resilience in military history. He was a German-born U.S. Navy pilot who became one of only two captured American airmen to successfully escape captivity and make it out of the jungle alive during the Vietnam War.

Born into Hardship

Dengler’s survival instincts were forged long before he ever wore an American uniform. Born in Wildberg, Germany, in 1938, his childhood was defined by the extreme deprivation of World War II. After his father was killed on the Eastern Front, his family resorted to boiling wallpaper to scrape the wheat paste off the back for nutrients.

When he was a young boy, a low-flying Allied bomber tore through his village. Looking out the window, he locked eyes with the pilot for a split second. In that moment, Dengler decided he was going to be a pilot—associating flight with absolute freedom.

At age 18, with less than a dollar in his pocket, he immigrated to the United States. He initially enlisted in the Air Force, but spent his time peeling potatoes and working as a mechanic. Realizing he needed a college degree to fly, he put himself through school, became a U.S. citizen, and successfully joined the Navy’s Aviation Cadet program, eventually piloting the Douglas A-1 Skyraider.

Shot Down Over Laos

On February 1, 1966, Dengler launched from the aircraft carrier USS Ranger on a top-secret, classified interdiction mission over Laos. While maneuvering through heavy thunderstorms and thick smoke from burning fields, anti-aircraft fire blew the right wing off his plane.

He crash-landed his Skyraider into a jungle clearing. Though he survived the impact relatively unhurt, he was tracked down and captured the following day by the communist Pathet Lao guerrillas.

Brutal Captivity

Because Dengler fiercely refused to sign a document condemning the United States, his captors subjected him to agonizing torture:

  • He was hung upside down by his ankles over nests of biting ants until he lost consciousness.

  • He was suspended in a well overnight; if he fell asleep and slipped, he would drown.

  • Bamboo slivers were driven under his fingernails and into his skin.

  • He was dragged through villages behind water buffalo.

Eventually, he was moved to a makeshift jungle prison camp where he met six other prisoners, including Air Force helicopter pilot Duane Martin and several civilian Air America employees. Conditions were unlivable. At night, they were shackled to heavy wooden foot blocks, suffering from chronic dysentery, malaria, and severe starvation.

The Great Escape

After five months, the prisoners accidentally overheard the guards planning to march them into the jungle and execute them so they could claim they tried to escape. The men knew they had to act.

On June 29, 1966, while the guards were eating lunch, Dengler and the prisoners slipped out of their handcuffs and leg irons using a makeshift key he had crafted. They seized the guards' unattended weapons. A brief, chaotic shootout commenced, leaving five guards dead. The prisoners split into smaller groups and scattered into the dense, unforgiving jungle.




23 Days on the Run

Dengler paired up with Duane Martin. What followed was a brutal 23-day ordeal of evasion. The jungle itself became their prison. They trekked barefoot, their bodies covered in leeches, deep cuts, and open sores. They were so weak from hunger that they resorted to eating raw snakes, insects, and whatever scraps they could forage.

Tragedy struck near the end of their run. Hallucinating and desperately weak, the two men entered a local village hoping to beg for food. Instead, a hostile villager attacked them with a machete, decapitating Duane Martin. Dengler narrowly dodged the blow and fled back into the brush, completely alone and losing his mind to fever and starvation.

A Miraculous Rescue

On July 20, 1966, Air Force pilot Colonel Eugene Deatrick was flying a routine mission when he spotted a lone figure on a riverbank waving wildly with a scrap of a parachute. No American pilots were missing in that sector, and Deatrick's superiors feared it might be a trap. Trusting his gut, Deatrick demanded a rescue helicopter be dispatched anyway.

When the crew hauled Dengler into the chopper, he weighed just 85 to 98 pounds and was suffering from two types of malaria, jaundice, hepatitis, and internal parasites. Doctors noted he wouldn't have survived another 24 hours. Of the seven men who escaped the camp, only Dengler and a Thai citizen named Phisit Intharathat made it out alive.

"Dieter was quite an unusual man. He was a walking survivalist."

— Colonel Eugene Deatrick, the pilot who spotted him

Later Life and Legacy

Dengler returned to a hero's welcome, receiving the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Flying Cross, and the Purple Heart. He retired from active duty, became a civilian commercial and test pilot, raised a family, and lived life to its absolute fullest.

In his later years, he was diagnosed with rapid-onset Parkinson’s disease. Refusing to let the degenerative disease take his independence, Dengler took his own life on February 7, 2001, at the age of 62. He is buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery.

His incredible story caught the attention of legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog, who directed both an intimate 1997 documentary about him (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) and a 2006 feature film dramatization starring Christian Bale (Rescue Dawn).

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