WWII History Round Table packed for B-17 veterans

ST. PAUL — Centenarian veterans commanded the stage April 22 at the Dr. Harold C. Deutsch WWII History Round Table.

There were 404 years of life experience among four men that evening.

John H. Luckadoo, 103, was the guest of honor. He served as a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot and copilot with the famed 100th Bomb Group of the 8th Air Force. He is the last surviving pilot from the group’s original cadre. He was the subject of the book “Damn Lucky” by Kevin Maurer.

Luckadoo spoke at the April 22 WWII History Round Table, which is a monthly series that takes place at the 3M Auditorium in the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, except in the summer.

The place was so packed that the organizers had to provide a video feed to a second room. The 3M Auditorium holds 314. (I don’t know what the extra room holds.) It was the highest attendance for the series.

“After experiencing war,” Luckadoo told an attentive crowd, “I can tell you that anybody who goes to war does not come back the same person.”

He said he has made it his mission in the time he has left to recognize civilians who served their country “to come out of the homes and into the factories to out-produce the world.”

Asked whether today’s generations would answer the call his generation did, he said, “We don’t know what our current generation would do, and we didn’t know.”

In the 100th, he had four enemies: fear, fighters, flak and freezing cold.

“If you survived as we did, you were just damn lucky,” Luckadoo said. “You see friends go down in flames all around you, and you think, ‘How in the world did I ever find myself in this spot?’ You grow up really fast.”

Maurer was there, too, and he gave a presentation on Luckadoo’s story.

Luckadoo was born in March 1922 and raised in Chattanooga, Tenn. He and his childhood classmate, Leroy Sullivan, wanted to fly. Sully joined the Royal Canadian Air Force. Luckadoo’s mom wasn’t having it. He ended up joining the U.S. Army Air Forces after the Pearl Harbor attack.

Eventually, the two old pals met up in England. Sully flew Spitfires. Lucky flew B-17s.

Sully said, “You are nothing but a truck driver.”

Lucky replied, “This war needs truck drivers, too.”

Maurer retold the history of Germans having air superiority over Europe. American military leaders, relying on the Norden bombsight, felt they could win the war with bombs dropped at 25,000 feet from airplanes in tactical formations during the day. The British RAF opposed this and conducted their raids at night at low altitudes.

Even with the bombsights, Americans still were unsure where the bombs landed.

“We were guinea pigs sent out to prove this theory,” Luckadoo said. “When you drop bombs five miles up, it goes through all kinds of air currents before it hits the ground. You are lucky if you hit the target.”

In October 1943, Luckadoo completed 25 missions and finished his tour in October 1943. The average life expectancy for B-17 crews in the Bloody 100th was seven missions.

The 100th Bomb Group was portrayed in the Apple TV miniseries “Masters of the Air.” It is meant to be a companion to “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”

The tale of Sullivan is noteworthy. His father had died in May 1921 of blood poisoning before he was born. That meant he was his mother’s only child. As a single mother, she raised him from birth and had been against him going into the military, eventually relenting to his feverish desire.

Sully was flying a Hawker Typhoon on Nov. 7, 1943, when the engine busted right after takeoff at an airfield in Woodbridge, Suffolk. He managed to pass over some trees and keep it aloft 600-800 yards before the aircraft spun into the ground.

He was a month away from turning 22. He is buried in Brookwood Military Cemetery south of London.

Other veterans featured that night were:

• Les Schrenk, 101, Long Prairie.

He was a ball-turret gunner in the 92nd Bomb Group. His B-17, named “Pot O’ Gold,” was shot down by German fighters on Feb. 22, 1944, near Thisted, Denmark, and he managed to get out, depart the plane and deploy his parachute. All 10 men bailed out, and all survived except the pilot, who drowned in a lake.

The men were captured, interrogated and beaten. Schrenk spent 15 months as a POW. The Germans moved him from stalag to stalag as the Russians advanced. Finally, they had no place to put them so they marched and marched to evade the Allies, in what became known as the German Death March. Eighty-six days and 800 miles later, the English Army liberated them.

In April 2012, Schrenk met the German pilot, Hans Hermann Muller, who had shot down his aircraft but didn’t fire again after seeing them bail out.

“I wanted to thank him for not finishing us off,” he said.

• Bob Holmstrom, 99, Maplewood.

A pilot, Holmstrom flew on 30 suicide missions over Germany, at times almost to Russia and Switzerland, as part of a clandestine group called the Carpetbaggers. They never dropped a bomb. Instead, they dropped supplies to 350,000 people in the underground resistance. They would fly 500 feet high or lower to evade radar and just above stalling speed at 120 mph so they could read ground signals and deploy parachutes. Sometimes, they would drop spies, too, but they weren’t allowed to talk to them.

• Jim Rasmussen, 101, Edina.

Though not part of the original cadre, he, too, flew missions with the Bloody 100th Bomb Group — 32 of them, beginning near the end of 1944. He was a navigator.

Always the wisecracker, Rasmussen told a story about how the B-17 crew takes a leak. He said there is a forward relief tube. Prior to urinating, they are supposed to tell the ball-turret gunner to turn toward the rear.

He forgot, so the gunner’s view was covered in piss, obscuring his view even after it dried for the rest of this mission.