Watch This 100-Year-Old Badass B-17 Pilot Describe Flying into Hell

in 1943 a tour of duty of 25 missions was required for each bomber crew member, the US Army Air Corps decided that 25 missions while serving on an 8th Air Force heavy bomber of the army would constitute a full period of service due to physical and mental exertion. Statistically, the crew had less than a 25 percent chance of achieving that goal. Most crews never made it past their fifth mission in 1943. The average bomber crew was expected to complete 8 to 12 missions before being shot down or disabled. John Lucky Luckadoo was one of those who beat the averages and completed his tour of duty in Nazi-occupied Europe.

His efforts are captured in a new book called Damn Lucky, written by a friend of the channel, Kevin Maurer. I recently had the opportunity to sit down virtually with Lucky who is now 100

year

s old, his experiences as a B-17

pilot

are both heartbreaking and heroic and in his story live details that will make those interested in the history of the Second War World realize that despite all the books, documentaries and films on The Subject, there is still much more to tell about the service and sacrifice of these brave airmen and the ground personnel who supported them, so let's talk to Lucky , what was the training plan for the army air corps when you go down the bomber route?

What planes did you fly along the way? Well, during our training, of course, I flew first and learned to fly and got my solo license, uh, on the uh pt17, uh, the Boeing Stearman Yellow Peril, as we called it, and then when we proceeded to advanced we flew the bt-13 the volte vibrator as we call it and eventually I was assigned to an advanced multi engine school in valdosta georgia where I was class captain and I flew at-10 beechcraft and it happened that uh they selected 40 of my graduating class to go to

this

heavy bomber group, a group of B-17s then stationed at Kearney, Nebraska, that was about to go overseas.

They had already gone through pre-combat training as crews and as a group. He took out all the co-

pilot

s and hit 40 of us, new second lieutenants who had never been on the B-17, in the right seat, just before we were sent overseas,

this

did not happen in any other group in the 8th air. strength, but it happened to my group and finally, of those 40, only four of us managed to make a combat tour, let's talk about how you calmed down, was it a gander waiting to do the translation and what happened to the guy who was supposed? being the pilot, uh and so on, what happened was, since we were stuck, we were replacing the regular co-pilots who were then revised as first pilots and given crews and sent to other replacement groups and um, uh.

We went overseas individually with other teams, but we had no benefit from any prior training and certainly had no familiarity with the heavy bombers, the four-engine B-17s, for God's sake, and the most we had ever fought. They were the twin-engine trainers. and so we were in the awkward position of having to learn our position on the job and therefore were totally dependent on our pilot to train us not only as co-pilots but as members of his crew because as co-pilot you were second in command of the crew. 10 men on a B-17 if the pilot was incapacitated for any reason the co-pilot became the commander of the plane and was therefore responsible for nine other lives in addition to his own and that's how We continued overseas and arrived in Newfoundland , Gander Lake, Newfoundland, uh, in a new plane with extra fuel tanks.

We had to wait for a favorable tailwind to be able to make the long jump from Loch Gander to Pressbrick, Scotland, non-stop, over all the water, so it will be. 17 about 12 12 and a half hours the normal range of a b-17 was about seven hours we had to wait for the weather and while we were doing it um the pilot of my particular crew none of whom had really fully accepted me as a substitute for their pilot usual, a co-pilot because they were very fond of him and, in particular, the bomber's navigator, so while we were waiting there, this pilot, who was not really a warm and fuzzy guy, um, he, reluctantly, uh, uh, gave me a chance. to train on the plane, make one or two landings and give me some instructions on the systems, he basically had to teach me what my position was in the crew and one night he got a little bored so he crossed the base and proceeded to move in with a British waff and ended up in hospital with a serious case of venereal disease during the war

year

s.

The only thing they had to treat him was sulfur, so he was on his back for two weeks, receiving doses of sulfur and as a result, the rest of the group proceeded when the winds were favorable to continue on and make their long flight to Scotland and arrive safely. and saved. None of them got lost, but we sat there as one team playing cards and board waiting rigidly. for the pilot to recover once he did and he was finally discharged, he was so weak after being hospitalized for two weeks that he couldn't stand up, so we literally had to carry him on the plane and he said, "Well "Lucky, I guess so." I'm going to have to fly this bird because you know I can't, so I called the navigator and the bombardier together and said, you guys have never accepted me as a crew member, but now you have to trust me. to take us into combat, so I told the navigator, who was the main instigator of my miseries, I did everything in my power, as well as the bombardier, to try to dissuade me from staying in the crew, trying to force me to get a I was full of this and asked for a transfer, which I didn't do.

He was determined to hold on and told him he had to sail and he had to land on his nose or I would personally throw his ass at him. We got out of the plane without a parachute, so it tended to level the playing field slightly, but yeah, it was just over the course of that flight, that I think they very gradually gained respect for my ability to rise to the challenge and, um, when we finally we got to England and then we went to Thorpe Abbott base where we were staying and we started

flying

missions immediately because the pilot was humiliated and embarrassed and swore he was going to fly the fastest tour in the European theater and go home, so He volunteered us for every mission and consequently managed to fly the fastest tour which lasted 89 days, so let's talk about his first mission, as you mentioned, this guy was very aggressive and his pilot in command was very aggressive in volunteering himself as volunteer for missions, so the first one was going against a submarine facility in France and they encountered some pretty harsh air resistance, which led them to use Boeing and come on, we have to change this plane in terms of its ability to survive a striker . quarter attack, so tell us about that, well, of course, we realized instantly that we were going against the luftwaffe, the German air force, that we were against professionals, we were all just citizen soldiers and, uh, here they were being thrown into the combat against an enemy who had been fighting.

For almost four years, the Russians on the Eastern Front went through Britain's battle against the United Kingdom and were professional. We also faced an enemy of the fact that the Nazi regime had completely occupied continental Europe by the time we arrived in England when a group axis sally appeared on the radio where they had a powerful radio beam from berlin which was voiced by a woman known as axis sally and greeted us by name, named our commanding officer and the squadron commanders who had accompanied us and said that they had made the biggest mistake of their lives, this is not their war, they have no business being here, but Now that they are, we'll teach them a lesson, believe me, they did it, let's quickly review for the viewers the various positions in the B-17 obviously pilot co-pilot you mentioned the navigator where are the other people on the plane?

Okay, there are ten crew members on a heavy bomber, pilot and co-pilot in the nose was a bomber with the Norton bomb site behind it. He was the navigator behind the canopy and the pilot in the cockpit was a top turret gunner who was the crew chief of the enlisted part of the crew which consisted of a radio operator gunner after the bomb bay. It consisted of a ball turret gunner who sat in a small ball turret under the belly of the plane with his knees up under his chin and two waist gunners standing at open windows firing single 50 caliber machine guns and a tail gunner who had fifty-year-old twins, what Curtis Lemay discovered in his doctrinal methodology was

flying

in formation, staying in formation, so what was that formation like, how did the pilots learn to fly these formations and how did the Germans take advantage of the breakdown of these formations to split the formations that we used for high altitude which was between 25 and 29,000 feet, which simply meant that to survive above 10,000 feet we had to have an oxygen mask placed over our face and have supplemental oxygen, we also had to have the engine supercharged to be able to force uh additional air into the carburetors for efficient fuel burning and we were operating in a strange environment the formations we used were groups of 18 aircraft, three squadrons of six aircraft each in two elements, you have one aircraft leader and one tall and one short.

The pilots of each element have two elements for each squadron and three squadrons in the group and the purpose of flying in formation was mutual protection. The planes were staggered, one pilot flew high and the next pilot flew at a lower altitude, but they still tried to fly as close to their leader as possible to protect each other, this had the added danger, however, of the gunners failing and actually They attacked one of their companions with friendly fire. The technique that the loop whopper used, which was most effective, was to get in front of the formation right in line in front of me 109s foxwolf 190s me110s which were rockets and would fly straight through the formation flying chicken and the reason they attacked us From that point of view it was that there was a void directly at the altitude level where the guns of the upper turret could not go down and the guns of the ball turret could not reach above a certain level, so in that void they tried to enter that slot and just fly straight through the formation fishtailing like they did and spraying our entire formation with machine guns, cannons, 20 millimeter cannons and rockets, there were only four seconds where their weapons were literally pointed at us and our weapons would target them, they were so devastating, yet in perfecting that technique, our losses were so enormously heavy that we appealed, uh, to the Boeing factory to rectify that deficiency and then the original airplane that we flew with the f model became a g model and they installed a turret that fired forward two 50s that were remotely controlled by the bomber, so that's a good example of how the industry reacted to a tactical need as the war progressed, as we talk about our procurement cycles in these days and how long it takes to deploy something, I was struck by how quickly Boeing responded and created the g, but in the meantime you still had applications that you had to fly. and uh, so you know they were hanging in there when they mentioned that the Falkwolf 190 in particular was designed to go after our heavy bombers, as they also mentioned that these pilots were veterans and had been at war for a few years at that time.

You guys showed up and you knew how to go after uh, you know, a forward cut attack was something you were very good at, you did this first mission against that underwater dock facility, all the planes survived, what you came back with was the feeling of euphoria. o What did you realize when you returned to deck in terms of your approach for the next 24 missions? That was, of course, our baptism of fire, our first encounter with these professionals who knew what they were doing, were very skilled at adapting new techniques to exploit our vulnerabilities and because we had to go out without any fighter escort or opposition. to them in dogfights, they relied on their anti-aircraft, particularly close to the target, to damage us enough to force us out of formation and then when we got off the target, they would swoop in on us and take us out at their leisure, so that they were very good at what they did, they were excellently equipped and experienced and they were fighting for their lives because they were protecting their homeland, so we knew that we were playing in the big leagues and we certainly blessed ourselves for every mission that we were able to survive because It was basically a matter of luck, if you did, we will only mention the period oftime we are talking about.

As to your point about the capabilities of the luff office, it is the summer of 1943 and beyond, because more or less after your time in the war, the luftwaffe was destroyed and we had more dominance than during your tour. You were there at the worst possible time. Regarding the luff office capability and this defense in depth, just like you mentioned, you would go through the first wave of fighters, they would leave and you know, maybe you would think, oh, we're ready to go, but that was the beginning. . from the bad part, which was now, it's akkack until you beat the objective and then on the way back now you face fighters again, so like three phases of the mission, huh, that was basically a survival game , so the Another thing that caught my attention while reading some of the details of these missions was Curtis Lemay's guide on how to deal with Akkac and basically his message was just hang in there, fly straight and level because if you try to do anything other than that the losses are going to be greater than they would be if they are simply eliminated and we want more precision because we don't hit the targets, we're going to end up coming back again, you know, it's all about results here and there.

It seemed to me kind of and oh, the way he set the example, he wasn't just giving these orders from headquarters, he led these missions to prove his point exactly, he was one of the best air warfare strategists we had in 8th Air. Strength, if not the best, I think he was underestimated and underestimated and it wasn't until the European war ended and he was sent to the Pacific as commander of the 20th B-29 Air Force that he really came into his own and showed himself. his abilities to the maximum, but he analyzed the attacks that the Luftwaffe made and determined, as you mentioned, that when it came to anti-aircraft, we had no defense, we had no effective defense against it, if we tried to take evasive measures, we had the limitations. of still having to stay in formation and not impact our wingman or our people who were flying in our same formation, so it was so minimal that it was totally ineffective if, however, the leader or command pilot of the formation could detect the barrages of anti- The fire from the approaching planes would enclose us and its uh, any plane was controlled by radar, so it automatically calculated its trajectory, our direction, our altitude and, um, the firing of the missile and It was electronically, it was electrically triggered, so all the anti. -the defenses of the planes that the Germans had just required the young Hitlerites to load the damn weapons, went off almost automatically and if our commander in the formation was able to determine where that heavier flap was coming from because from the moment a missile and reached our altitude of Five miles up was about 45 seconds, so we were able to vary our heading maybe a degree or half a degree and maybe avoid that predetermined volley, so Lemay realized this and said, just fly straight and leveled and follow your leader because your attempt to take any evasive action or defend yourself is futile and he showed that by leading us and demonstrating it in the air he flew some of the worst missions so he didn't say well this is what I determined was the best tactic. and you go out and prove it, he went out and proved it himself, so one of your chapters is called You're Already Dead, and that's the attitude you have to have to fly straight and level when you have ack-ack. criticize everyone around you instead of your impulse, which is to take evasive action, um, so I guess there's some kind of zone where you go into, you know, in those environments it's okay, everything's okay now, pass Whatever happens, happens now that you blew up at least one. mission not as a co-pilot, you were the tail gunner, tell us about how that happened, what that experience was like and then what happened on the back of doing that, they developed a policy that when your crew was designated as the formation lead crew The co-pilot would be replaced by a command pilot who would be in charge of the entire formation.

The pilot's plane continued to be the commander of the plane but his co-pilot was then in command of the entire formation. The co-pilot he replaced was then placed in the tail of the plane. leader, now you take a trained pilot out of the cockpit and put him in a tail gun position, having never fired a .50 caliber in his life and expect him to defend the tail of the plane that was apparently the fire control officer of the entire formation, but what the idiot who came up with this idea didn't take into account was that the tail gunner had no contact with anyone else in the formation except his pilot via intercom and if he saw an attack coming or saw some dangerous situation developing, the so-called fire control officer would have to call the pilot and tell him the facts.

The pilot would have to change the channel and radio to the rest of the formation and at that moment the danger dissipated, a completely different situation in my case, I had never shot a 50 caliber in my life, the gunners had to load the weapons and They showed me how they had a little stick and a scope to aim those twin caliber 50 50. big caliber machine guns, but what they didn't tell me was, for the love of God, don't hold the triggers still because you'll burn out the barrels, which which I proceeded to do the first time we were under attack, so I sat there for that entire mission. with burnt barrels a knot in a log and said for the love of God you didn't train me to do this you trained me to fly the wrecked plane and getting in line is stupid so I won't get in line again Listen to my wings, court-martial me, do what you have to do, but I'm not a tail gunner, so they said okay, you'll have to sit on the ground when your crew leads the formation.

I said I'd be happy to do it. accordingly I did it and therefore when the crew I flew 21 missions with completed their 25, of course I still had four left and my worst mission was the next mission, number 22, when I went to Bremen, so Before we get to those, let's leave the rest. of the required missions I just want to clarify some of the things that you mention in the tail gunner position because you and I are tall guys and so when you are describing what it took to get you into the tail gunner station It gave me claustrophobia just thinking about it and then we're talking about the ojt, so to speak, with your transland, where you know your pilot is still getting over the gonorrhea and he says you did good so hey, here we go, windy plane fully loaded tail.

Get to Scotland, same exercise here. You've never actually fired the gun at the tail gunner station until you're cleaning your weapons during the actual mission, so you go from gimbal to gimbal and make sure you don't shoot anyone. in the process and you say, "Okay, so this is all the first time, which is surprising since we're talking about the risk-averse military that we have now, so the contrast between how you were doing business in the conflict greatest of all." times and what we do now just blew me away. Also, I think you and I are kindred spirits in our kind of, shall we say, opinionated views, so you say, hey, guess what I'm not going to do that again.

Okay, so you're going to fall behind on the missions. You say it's okay, that's how things are now. I know you didn't have a great time sitting on the ground waiting for your crew to come back. Those are very stressful times. as you

describe

it and then the way this is resolved is now your four missions behind you, so your crew that you've been with for the first 21 flights on the mission you've trained with survived now that you're a unit with the We're out of there, so let's pick up mission 22, like you mentioned. The other thing I want to talk about is and I can relate to this because, as you know, my time at Tomcat, certain office numbers had personalities right, so you guys named the planes right, of course, we tend to name our planes if they we were assigned one as a crew, not all crews were assigned a specific plane, not all planes were given names, some were never given names and just used their serial numbers, but if you had a particular plane and a crew chief who I kept it.

You were certainly very fortunate because you understood the idiosyncrasies of that particular piece of machinery and they had some different characteristics, tendencies that were perhaps subtle but could nevertheless make the difference between your understanding of what you were facing and your ability to survive. to missions, but the original plane we flew overseas was called sunny s-u-n-n-y after the pilot's son and on one mission, I don't remember the circumstances, but the plane was flyable, but we weren't and therefore another crew blew up our plane and it was shot down so it didn't come back and so we were assigned another plane and we also called it sunny that was about halfway through our combat tour that that occurred, but as I mentioned earlier, because I had refused to fly as a tail gunner, I was not playing all the missions with my original team and also due to the fact that on one mission they made a small hole in our plexiglass nose which resulted in this.

An extremely cold stream of air directed directly at my feet crossfitted my toes and I was in pure agony for five and a half hours on that particular mission and when we landed I had to be hospitalized and my feet thought and I missed a few missions flying with my original crew there was also one of the gunners, one of the wasted gunners who, due to illness, was lost, some missions ate up a mission and he didn't end up with the original 10 men, but on the 22nd mission , the first mission that was to fly after the original crew finished and returned to the United States.

He was still a second lieutenant, with the same rank he had when I graduated from flight school and was assigned as an instructor pilot for a new crew. that only had very few missions and we went on this mission which was short to bremen which was almost as far into germany as berlin and i was flying in the second element of the low squadron of the low group, also known as the purple heart corner. Because it was closer to anti-aircraft fire and was on the fringe of the formation and was subject to most attempts to knock us out of formation as we approached the objective, we were under attack from the moment we crossed the coast enemy This was on October 8, 1943 and I was now on my 22nd mission.

The other gunner from my original crew who did not end up with the original crew was flying as a substitute in the plane directly ahead of me leading my squadron on board. that plane was a pilot who was flying on his 24th mission and his co-pilot was the squadron operations officer who is the second in command of the squadron as the command pilot, so his tail, his co-pilot, was on the tail of that plane and uh I formed just above them, just below them, uh, slightly as we approached the target normally, when our formation would approach the starting point, which would be a turning point to begin dropping bombs , the fighters, the enemy fighters would normally hold back and allow the anti-aircraft fire to inflict any damage possible in an attempt to incapacitate us and force us out of formation and then take us out as soon as we veered off target, but on this mission in They particularly continued to fly through their own enemy fire.

That had never happened before, we had never seen that before, they were in just as much danger of being shot down by their own fire as we were because they were pressing their attacks so aggressively the night before Hermann Goering we later found out had threatened them. He said you can't allow the heavy bombers to continue these daylight flights and if you do I will send you to the infantry because you are not doing your duty, so of course they were desperate to prove him wrong. They were doing everything they could to knock us out of the sky and as a result they were pressing their attacks so aggressively that some of them ran out of ammunition, so instead of turning and retreating and rearming, they flew kamikaze missions and tried to cut us off.

The tails of the plane with its wings while they are on the bomb run Now, when a B-17 or a heavy bomber is on the bomb run, the pilot and co-pilot are sitting there with their arms crossed because they have turned the plane over. For the bomber who is literally flying the plane via the autopilot attached to the bomb site in an attempt to create a level platform for the release of the bombs, he has full control of the plane via the bomb site, that It's pure terror when you're sitting there and you're

watch

ing all

hell

break loose and the fighters are breaking through the formation and the attacking plays are coming in and it's total chaos, it's just a horrible position to be in and you're in.You ask how in the world you would ever allow yourselves to get into that place in the first place, so as you mentioned, you guys are flying a plane with no pressure at over 29,000 feet, you discuss some details that maybe people had never thought about, which is true, you guys are urinating on condoms and then tying them up. those that are off and at altitude freeze and then as you descend they thaw, so if someone didn't strap them on at that time that can be a disaster and you also mention that if you had to pull you just did it.

You're in your sheepskin suit, which wasn't a problem at altitude because it's frozen, but then when you suddenly come down, it's like, "Oh my God, who sucks." These are details I've never seen before. it's the kind of scary facts associated with what you guys were doing day in and day out when you mentioned hypoxia, a big threat, you're using o2, that those lines would sometimes freeze, you mentioned freezing, you know, and you experienced freezing and then when you warmed up it was painful stepping on the rudder pedals, you know, trying to land the plane was like agonizing pain, this is the kind of thing you had to do just to complete a mission, never mind achieving it. knocked down by a fog pit for a measurement number one was the extreme cold that we endured at high altitude because we were not pressurized, we were operating in temperatures of -50 to 60 degrees below zero and that so severely affected our ability to function and to do our work, that's how it was, and you can't really convey that in narrative form, but we did it for hours and hours and it really affected our ability to operate and, ironically, when you're fighting to stay in formation and you're fighting the elements and you're Fighting against the fighters and and the yak act, you suddenly find that you are sweating profusely and the perspiration freezes instantly and the moisture in your oxygen flow turns into ice crystals, so you have to break them.

To keep the oxygen flowing or you're not going to survive, you do it with one hand and fly the plane with the other, you can't really convey that either. Another thing that I think is impossible to convey properly is what it feels like when you get shot and you know that there is someone out there who is going to kill you if you don't kill him and the horror of that realization is so petrifying. You mature overnight, you mature instantly because not only are you worried about the morality of what you're doing and maybe killing someone else, but your mortality is whether you're going to survive.

You are so lucky that more than anything else, you are the embodiment of a greatest generation

badass

, so thank you for telling your story here today and for coming to the channel, well, you're welcome, and I appreciate the opportunity, I admire your service and I envy you because you fighting jockeys have as much fun as we do. fighter strike rivalry, but you know, thank you for what you did, because the war would not have been won without the efforts of the Eighth Air Force and the other Army Air Corps units that took it and held people forget that the largest number of casualties the US military had were among aviators in the European theater.

You know, we thought about D-Day and different things like that, but you know, as we just mentioned, huge losses were suffered, so you did it and thank you for telling your story. be well, thank you very much, it's a pleasure to be with you, okay, that will do it for this episode, please subscribe, like and comment, check out the links below for products, including details on where you can get the punk trilogy , my first three novels about life on an F-14 Squadron, is now available as a Kindle and as an audiobook. If you'd like to help support the channel, consider using the super thank you, heart icon below or become a patron at patreon.comwardcarroll in the meantime, I look forward to talking. to you again soon foreigner