Dad never spoke about the war, did any father? But I knew the combo B-17. I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew it was important. My father convinced me as a child if you found a B17 on a bingo card, you would win the ultimate prize. I scanned my card convinced I would find the magic B17. It was impossible. The letter B in Bingo games only had numbers up to 15.When my mother’s life was ending at age 92, forty years after Dad, my sister Carol was rushing home from Colorado to NY. Traveling standby on a courtesy pass, flights didn’t look good. Suddenly, a spot opened up and she ran to board. The gate? B17. Dad again, giving us hope through the letter B and the number 17.
How does this carefree boy from Troy, NY (home of Uncle Sam) end up flying the mighty B-17?
Dad and his girlfriend Jane (who would become my mother) were listening to the radio when President Roosevelt announced the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
“It was a very sobering moment, All young men were required to enlist or risk being drafted,” Jane wrote in her diary.
Dad enlisted in the Army Air Corp. In February 1942 and after a going away party, he reported for preliminary training to Maxwell Field, Montgomery Alabama. By August, he was in South Carolina for the first phase of pilot training. Learning to fly was quite the experience. He wrote to Jane:
“Today I had one of the biggest thrills of my life. No, Jane, I didn’t almost crash or anything so drastic, but it was the wonder of nature that thrilled me. There were lots and lots of clouds in the sky, in fact the sky was almost covered completely, and my instructor took me up for the first ride in the morning, at sunrise… what a sight! We couldn’t even see the earth below and nothing above us by clear blue sky. It’s impossible to fully describe the beauty of it Jane, because it seemed so unreal. It didn’t seem possible that men could go up there and try to kill each other. It doesn’t seem right.”
On February 16, 1943 at Moody Field, Valdosta, Georgia, Dad completed his advanced pilot training and was commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the Army Air Corp. Jane pinned on his wings. Training on a B-17 was yet to come, but not in the way he expected.
By March, 1943, Dad was assigned to the 100th Bomb Group in Kearney, Nebraska, along with 2nd Lt. John (Lucky) Luckadoo, from his 43-B flight school class. Lucky recently recalled the strange expectation which was placed on the recent graduates from Moody Field, who had yet to see the inside of a B-17. This group of copilots had to learn to fly a B-17 on the job, and be second in command for a crew of ten airmen, right before shipping out for combat duty. No other group of copilots had such little training in the flying fortress.
In June of 1943, after a twelve-hour flight to England, the boy from Troy was now in the war. Dad was a member of the 350th Squadron of the100th Bomb Group—flying copilot next to pilot Bill DeSanders, in a B-17 nicknamed, Alice from Dallas
