Respect

Saw this post over on FB and thought I would share.  It tells of the author Laura Hillenbrand (she wrote "Unbroken") visiting a vet from WWII.

Like most Americans I've long been an ardent admirer of the generation who went off to war and saved the world.  There were so many who put it all on the line for the cause of liberty and freedom.  At the very top of a long list of heroes were those in the 8th Air Force who flew into the teeth of the devil every day.  If you're every in Savannah, GA stop in at the 8th Air Force Museum out by I-95.  It is incredibly well done and you can't help but be enthralled by their story during WWII.  They aren't called the greatest generation for nothing.

On Wednesday I traveled up into the Washington State hills, down a bumpy, winding one-lane road in thick trees, to a tiny grass airstrip cut out of the middle of a forest. There, in a little room in a hangar by this unlikely air strip, I met history, in the form of a smiling, gentle man named John Luke.

Mr. Luke is ninety-five years old. As a twenty-one-year-old, he was the ball turret gunner in the belly of a B-17 bomber called the Nine-o-Nine, fighting Hitler's Luftwaffe in the flak-blackened skies over Europe. It was perhaps the most dangerous job for American servicemen in World War II. It is said that on every mission, the men faced a one-in-ten chance of being killed. A tour was composed of twenty-five missions, making it statistically unlikely that airmen would ever see home again. When the crews gathered for pre-mission briefings, they were told where to fly and what to do; when they returned, there would be a bottle of bourbon on the table, a replacement for all the eleven-man crews that did not come back. In one raid of B-24 bombers, 54 planes were lost, killing 532 men. Mr. Luke, who watched his best friend go down when his plane was hit and split in two some ten feet away, made it through twenty-five missions alive, went home, and married his sweetheart. His beloved Nine-o-Nine survived an unimaginable 140 missions, believed to be the most in the entire 8th Air Force.

We spent some three hours talking with Mr. Luke, who told stories that had us spellbound. Some were hilarious: on the long missions, his crewmen would pee through the bomb bay doors, which would promptly freeze shut. Many were terrifying: His crew flew only daylight raids, giving the Germans ample time to see them coming and fill the air with artillery shells and the dreaded Messerschmitt BF-109 fighters, whose pilots were so brave and skilled that they flew directly through the tight formations of American bombers, making it impossible for Luke and his fellow gunners to fire on them lest they shoot down their own planes.

On June 6, 1944, Nine-o-Nine was sent out over a stormy English Channel to support the landing troops on D-Day. Luke sat in his cramped turret under his plane, looking out over the supreme moment of the 20th century, thousands of ships crowding the channel, the sea pitching so high some of them were foundering and breaking open. The breakers on Normandy approached, and Nine-o-Nine blazed low over the landing forces. Luke saw LSTs spilling men onto the beaches, and in the cliffs above them, hundreds of German pillboxes pouring bullets down onto them. As he fired into the pillboxes, trying to protect the Allied men below, history turned in Luke's hands. More than 4,000 Allied servicemen would die in the sand below him that morning, but the survivors made it up the cliffs, stormed the pillboxes, and began the long and bloody march to Berlin and the defeat of Hitler. As Luke spoke, we sat in rapt silence and goosebumps, listening.

You don't know John Luke, but you owe him everything.