While his family would go on to support Nazi Germany, Count Carl Gustaf von Rosen was strictly against both Nazism and Communism. Von Rosen joined the Swedish Red Cross and ran missions to assist in delivering aid during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War in 1935. Von Rosen flew many of the most dangerous missions into the heart of the battles and even suffered burns from Italian mustard gas.
By the time the Soviets invaded Finland prompting the Winter War, he joined up with the Finnish forces and was commissioned as a Lieutenant. He bought a Douglas DC-2 in Sweden, and had it converted into a bomber and flew routine bombing runs on advancing Soviet forces and their fortified positions. In 1945, he headed back to Ethiopia to help the newly independent nation establish its own air force and to personally train pilots and would do so until 1956.
When Dag Hammarskjöld became the second Secretary General of the United Nations, Carl Gustaf von Rosen served as his personal pilot. Hammarskjöld's plane was shot down and crashed near Ndola, Northern Rhodesia, and it was one of the only days that von Rosen was too sick to fly, narrowly avoiding his untimely demise. Von Rosen would once again take to the skies in Africa, specifically to the breakaway region of Nigeria known at the time as Biafra.
Von Rosen started flying humanitarian aid missions for Biafra in 1969. He went back to Sweden and acquired five Saab Malmö MFI-9B training planes that he then had converted for ground attack missions. The modifications included mounting light machine guns and attaching 6 rocket pods per wing. Von Rosen took on the role of commander of the Biafran Air Force and he recruited two Swedish pilots, two Biafran pilots, and an ex-RCAF veteran pilot named Lynn Garrison. Garrison would teach a Canadian method of dropping supplies in the Canadian wilderness.
The method was a bag of food was stowed inside a larger bag so when the package hit the ground, the inner bag would rupture, it would keep the inner portion intact. With this method, tons of food were dropped and saved the Biafrans that were being starved out by Nigeria.
The newly founded air force, known as the "Biafran Babies" , a nickname coined by von Rosen after the children who were dying from the Nigerian government’s indiscriminate bombings, would face off against a vastly superior Soviet-armed Nigerian air force. The Count and his men would carry out many stealthy hit and run missions on Nigerian Air Force bases, they often operated with complete radio silence and during either dusk or dawn. They had several very successful missions, decimating Nigerian planes as they sat on the runways or in their hangars, and in the majority of missions, they returned without even a scratch.
Von Rosen would soon see the futility of carrying out these missions, the more aircraft the Biafran Babies destroyed, the more they were replaced by the latest in Soviet tech. The Count stayed and fought until the end of the Biafran Conflict in 1970. Five years later von Rosen returned to Africa once again, back to Ethiopia, in an attempt to fly aid to the starving populace.
He then returned yet again in 1977 when the Ogaden War broke out between Ethiopia and Somalia, where the Count would fly relief missions for refugees. On July 13, 1977, Count von Rosen was caught in a guerilla attack from Somalian forces and killed during the ensuing battle. He was buried in Addis Ababa at the Gulale Cemetery, where he remains to this day, a testament to his love of the Ethiopian people.
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