Families Commemorate Mann Gulch Fire Smokejumpers

Unfortunately, that birthday celebration never came to be. Just a few hours after departing from Missoula, Diettert and 12 others lost their lives in a devastating blaze that would forever alter wildland firefighting.

This weekend, a series of events in Helena will mark 75 years since the Mann Gulch Fire, the single deadliest day in the history of smokejumping. The fire inspired Norman Maclean’s award-winning book, “Young Men and Fire,” but more importantly it had a profound impact on how wildfires are managed and fought, leading to a set of rules that all wildland firefighters still carry with them three-quarters of a century later.

Diettert was born on August 5, 1930, in Moscow, Idaho, the second son of Reuben and Charlotte Diettert. Reuben was a professor and as a result, the family moved a number of times, eventually ending up in Missoula, where he worked for the University of Montana’s botany department. As a boy, Diettert and his brother Gerald would sell magazines and do whatever they could to help the family out financially. When he was old enough, Diettert worked for the U.S. Forest Service, and it was there that he decided he wanted to pursue a forestry degree. In 1949, he applied to join the smokejumpers.

Smokejumping was a relatively new craft, emerging in the 1930s as a way to quickly get firefighters into remote territory to douse blazes. At the time, the USFS subscribed to what it called the “10 a.m. policy” where it attempted to suppress every fire reported by 10 a.m. the next day, an all-or-nothing method of firefighting that did not consider the role of fire on the landscape. Missoula was, and still is, the largest smokejumper base in the country.

In the spring and early summer of 1949, Diettert did practice jumps around western Montana, many of which he recorded in sketches and letters to his family. But he wasn’t called on a fire until the afternoon of August 5, the day of his 19th birthday.

The lightning-caused Mann Gulch Fire had started the previous day northeast of Helena and by mid-day on Aug. 5, it had already burned about 60 acres. Early that afternoon, the local forest supervisors decided to call in smokejumpers. At 2:30 p.m., a C-47 military transport aircraft departed Missoula with a crew of 16 smokejumpers, including Diettert. A little over an hour later, they were approaching the fire, but turbulence was an issue and one smokejumper got so sick he couldn’t make the jump.

By 4 p.m., 15 jumpers were on the ground, but during their jump, their equipment had been scattered across the mountainside, and their radio, their only connection to the outside world, was destroyed. As the jumpers gathered their equipment, wind gusts up to 40 miles per hour began to fan the flames in the canyon along the Missouri River. The crew began to hike uphill to safety, but the fire only grew more intense.

Foreman Wag Dodge yelled to his crew to drop their equipment and run, but it was too late. By then, the wind was pushing the fire up the hill at a rate of hundreds of feet per minute. Realizing the men weren’t going to outrun it, Dodge did something never attempted before: He set a new fire and laid down in the ashes — “the black” — in a last-ditch effort to save himself. While he yelled for others to join him, no one did. Moments later, the fire overran the rest of the crew, killing 12 smokejumpers and a fire warden. Only Dodge and two other firefighters who sheltered in a crevice in the canyon’s rock wall survived.

In the hours and days that followed, news of the tragedy began to spread and families learned of their loved one’s fate. Among them was the Diettert family in Missoula. In a family history written years later, Gerald Diettert would recall the moment he learned his brother was dead.

“I recall vividly Mother running out of the front door where the rest of the family waited to hear about Eldon’s whereabouts,” he wrote. “‘He’s gone! He’s gone!’ she screamed in anguish.”