In Death-Filled Skies

"What did you do in the war, Grandpa?" asked my eleven-year-old great-granddaughter one evening. In the time it took her to ask that one innocent question, my thoughts slipped back more than seventy years to the summer and fall of 1943 and to the airfields of East Anglia and into the death-laden skies over Nazi-occupied Europe. The Eighth Air Force's rule was simple: "Complete twenty-five bombing missions, and you can go home." The problem was, the odds of completing those twenty-five missions was almost nil.

In our B-17 Flying Fortress, my friends and I had to fight off Germany's finest fighter pilots in their Messerschmitt's and Focke-Wulf's and fly through flak barrages so thick it looked, felt, and sounded like we were caught in the middle of a Texas tornado. We risked asphyxiation in the thin air at altitudes of twenty-five thousand feet or higher and endured temperatures so low that without the forty pounds of protective clothing covering us from head to toe, including electrically heated bunny suits, we would have frozen to death in a matter of minutes.

That one simple question convinced me that it was time that my family learned what I had done and the price my friends and I had paid during our war against fascism and tyranny, a topic that I had never really spoken about before.