WWII B-17 Pilot John Lucky Luckadoo Veteran Tales

the bloody hundredth got its name because of our tremendous losses all of europe was occupied the minute we crossed the coast we were over enemy territory violent of a flight of two fw190s impacted the ship in front of me and knocked them out of the formation and exploded well the operations officer who's the second commander of the squadron was flying in that airplane his pilot was on his 24th mission i'm john lucky luckadoo and the nickname comes not only from my last name but the fact that i was actually lucky enough to have survived a combat tour with the eighth air force particularly the bloody hundredth bomb group that i was assigned to during world war ii i was born and grew up in chattanooga tennessee which is sometimes known as the cradle of the confederacy dating back to the civil war and grew up on actually on missionary ridge which was one of the famous battles of the civil war which took place on november the 25th of 1963. of course had public schooling during my academic career and prior to pearl harbor having graduated from high school my best friend and i decided that we would be cool if we were to go to canada join the rcaf the royal canadian air force and get our flight training and be a step ahead of all of our our buddies uh because we knew that our involvement or america's involvement in world war ii was inevitable anyway when we applied to royal the rcaf for application they greeted us with open arms and said they'd love to have us and train us uh but because we were only 18 years old at that time it would acquired parental consent and sully my best friend was an only child because his father had been mustard gassed in the first world war and died a horrible death when he was barely born so he never knew his father but being an only child he was somewhat doubtful that maybe his mother would agree to uh give her consent to his going to however she took a rather philosophical position on on the question and said sully if this is what you really feel you should do then you have my blessing and so i went home thinking that uh my parents would react the same way and as it worked out my mother knowing that mrs sullivan was willing to consent to her only child to go to canada said well if that's what you all think you should do why i'm okay with it my dad took an entirely different view he thought it was the most idiotic thing he'd ever heard of that here we were not involved america was not involved in the war in any way although of course the british at that time were being hard-pressed by hitler and on the brink of invasion as a matter of fact and so they had done everything they could to get us involved but although we supported them with war material and loans and and things of that nature we did not or roosevelt president roosevelt at that time did not have the backing of the american public to enter war and he was sure that the japanese were going to attack us but he didn't know when or where that's been proven since it was not known at that time but at any rate um my father refused to give his consent and he said over his dead body would he agree that that i go and it was none of my business and to get back in school so my friend did go to canada and did get trained and was posted out into north africa and flying spitfires against the um the german army chasing rommel and uh the occupying forces in in north africa in the meantime about a year later pearl harbor occurred and of course at that time i was in my second year of college and every able-bodied american was expected uh to be patriotic and to step up to the plate and and enlist if you volunteered you could select the branch of service that you served in and so i immediately volunteered for the army air corps since i still wanted to fly and was accepted and so in 1942 i became an aviation cadet and proceeded through primary basic and advanced training and ended up in valdosta georgia in early 1943 february and graduated from a multi-engine school which meant that i would be a bomber pilot and not a fighter pilot most people that enlisted in the air corps in those days envisioned being a fighter pilot because they had more fun they were pretty much free spirits and they only had their own butts to be concerned with whereas the bomber pilot had a crew on his shoulders in addition to being able to fly the airplane and and to get to the target and back safely different type of service altogether but upon graduation from flying school strangely enough 40 of my classmates and myself were assigned to a b-17 group that was then stationed in kearney nebraska about to go overseas so we were suddenly plucked out of school and into the right seat of a b-17 that we'd never been in before and about to be sent overseas well as far as we can tell no other group in history had ever had this done to them uh it was a very drastic move to make who was responsible for it we never knew the reason apparently was that they had been inspected by an inspector general who flew with them on a mock bombing range to san francisco in which they encountered a bunch of cloud cover and split up the group they flew all over and the commanding officer landed in las vegas and two of the crews landed one in virginia and the other in tennessee and we found out later that they both had girlfriends and where they went but the inspector general threw up his hands and he said well you guys certainly don't have any air discipline so you're not certified for overseas service well the crews in the group had been all the way through three phases of pre-combat training prior to our arrival but when this happened the group was split up into squadrons there were four squadrons each squadron sent to a different air base as instructors for crews that were going overseas they themselves weren't qualified to go but they were to be instructors for those that were gone that's the military for you know military intelligence at any rate this only lasted for two or three weeks because the press for bomber crews in england uh in early 1943 was enormous the british were being hard-pressed by the luper the german air force and hitler was threatening invasion um the battle of britain had already taken place and they barely succeeded in turning the german air force back at that time so um the pressure for groups to come over and join the eighth air force which was assisting britain in uh resisting the nazis uh was was really tremendous consequently they pulled all of us back together again in kearney issued this brand new aircraft which has been modified for the long hop from the states over to england 14 hours and said well you guys are going to be killed anyway you might as well go to combat we landed in newfoundland and it was a 12-hour hop from newfoundland to presbyteric scotland in order to make that even with the additional fuel that we were carrying which overloaded us we had to have a favorable tailwind or we wouldn't make it and at that time of course the north atlantic was being plowed by the german submarines the wolf packs that were attacking all of the shipping that tremendous amount of shipping and they were thinking an awful lot of it and so they positioned themselves to be sending out radio signals that would misdirect us and have us fly off into the toward the azores or south and miss england all together and never be heard from but while we were there waiting for a favorable tale then the pilot that i was assigned to took it upon himself to go across the base one night and um got it with a uh a british waff and ended up with a raging case of venereal disease in the hospital and so as a consequence the rest of the group got the favorable tailwind and they took off individually and and went ahead and my crew sat there twiddling our thumbs for two weeks waiting for him to be released and of course um this was a terrible embarrassment to him he was married had a child for which we named the plane and this is a replica of the plane that we flew over with that he named sunny s-u-n-n-y and um he was pretty uh chagrined that this would happen unfortunately at that time in history the only thing that could treat of them with vd was with sulfur and it was very debilitating he'd been flat of his back for two weeks so he's weak as a kitten when he finally was released he couldn't stand up and we literally had to load him into the airplane and he said well lucky you're going to have to fly this thing because we're ready to go and of course there's the co-pilot you're second in command of the crew ten-man crew and the only training that i had received or any of my fellow classmates was from their pilots as to what we might be expected to to be confronted with so i had been pretty highly resented on my particular crew by the fact that the co-pilot that i replaced was a favor of theirs and they budded with him and hung out with him and liked him very much and they'd been all the way through training together and they were sort of joined at the hip and they highly resented that a shaved tail like me that didn't have any familiarity with the aircraft or what we were supposed to be doing would be replacing him so they made my life sure hell did the best they could to discourage me from forced me off the crew if they could but i was stood all of their onslaughts and i called them over when the pilot was finally released and i said to the navigator that he better hit the landfall and scotland on the nose or i would personally throw him out of the airplane without a parachute and so that sort of leveled the playing field but at any rate we we did get successfully uh make landfall and landed in scotland and then proceeded from there down to thorpe abbott's in east anglia and england where our base was situated and um being a couple of weeks behind everybody else we didn't have the benefit of um practice missions or any preparation we were immediately thrown into combat flew our first mission and the bloody hundredth got its name because of our tremendous losses we had no federa fighter escort that could accompany us beyond the enemy coast all of europe was occupied the minute we crossed the coast we were over enemy territory and these guys that we were confronted with the german air force were pros they'd been fighting for four years eastern front against the russians western front against the british they knew what they were doing they were very practiced and they were defending their homeland so their backs were against the wall here we were playing in their backyard in washington mildred gilles known to thousands of as axis sally has been found guilty of treason after a lengthy trial [Music] accused of being a sort of lady ho-ho because of her broadcasts on hitler's wartime radio and having now been convicted she's driven off to await her sentence it could be life imprisonment or the supreme penalty the decision had not been reached as they took her away [Music] and when we arrived in england axis sally came on the uh high frequency radio that they beamed out of berlin saying well welcome to the war hundreds bomb group and named our commanding officers and and people in the group they knew all about us they knew we'd arrived there and they said you've made a terrible mistake this is not your war it's not your business but now that you're here we're going to teach you a lesson and boy did they so because as i mentioned our losses were extreme um we were going out in broad daylight high altitude unpressurized this airplane had no pressurization we had to be on oxygen from 10 000 feet up we were normally bombing from an altitude of 6 miles nearly 30 000 feet temperatures at that altitude were minus 50 to 60 degrees below zero uh fahrenheit and so uh this this was one of our enemies was freezing and um we were really inhibited as to how we could efficiently operate under those conditions but we had to do it we had no choice the the pilot of the crew that i was assigned to was determined that he was going to do the fastest tour that anybody had done had to do 25 missions and he swore that he was going to he volunteered us for every mission and so we started in and just were flying daily um even in the face of a huge losses and so it was a very very sobering and maturing process almost instantly to be contending with all of these factors that we were dealing with and some people withered under the onslaught and refused to fly uh and of course if that were the case then they'd be jerked out and sent to the infantry or removed immediately because that ruined the morale of all the other crewmen that had to continue flying we did that to have that to contend with but during the course of our missions and we were racking them up rapidly and so in order to redeem himself he was insistent that he was going to be the first to finish up um your average life of a crew at that time was four missions so if you were lucky enough to survive at least four you were on borrowed time during the course of the missions uh it was deemed that if your crew led the formation or led the squadron or the group the co-pilot was removed and tried to go back and find the tail gun position and a command pilot would take his place and he would be in command of the entire formation the airplane commander or the pilot would still be in control of his his crew and his airplane but his co-pilot would be in charge of the entire formation and all of the rendezvous with other groups and and formations and and also direct the navigators as to whether they bombed the target or they didn't in those days our rules of engagement involved withholding bombing if we couldn't visually identify the target so many times we would fight our way all the way into germany and the target would be obscured and we couldn't drop we had the alternative to go to a secondary target if it were closed then we had to bring the bombs back and drop them in the channel [Music] because to land with them was very dangerous but um those were the rules we were operating under and uh it was not uncommon for us to go all the way to the target and subject ourselves to being killed every minute uh and still not be able to accomplish our mission we'd still get credit for a combat mission uh even though we didn't succeed in hitting the target but um when i was placed in the tail as a tail gunner never having fired a 50 caliber in my life um i very innocently uh once we were under attack just bore down on the triggers you know burned out both barrels and i was useless as a side saddle on a cell sitting back there without the ability to hit anything or to do anything other than call out what was going on from that direction that was the concept that put the co-pilot in the tail of the lead ship he was ostensibly the fire control officer for the formation in the rear direction well whoever dreamed that one up had their head up and locked because tail gunner could only communicate with the pilot over the intercom he didn't have any connection or any communication with anybody else in the group or the formation and uh he would have to call the pilot and tell him what was happening and the pilot would then have to switch channels and notify the rest of the formation by then the danger was gone so there's different situation altogether i did that one time and having burned out the barrels i said i was trained as a pilot not as a gunner you gave me no training whatsoever and i'm not going to get in the tail again so you can court-martial me or do whatever you need to do but i'm not flying in the tail consequently this crew continued to fly and lead and they ended up in september they did in 91 days they did a tour of 25 missions in england in the beginning of the war and that was unheard of that was a record that was never as far as i know was never equal and so i still had four missions to go when they finished up and consequently on my next mission i was put with another crew as a command pilot because i was one of the senior experienced pilots in the group with 21 missions under my belt you know i was practically a saint and all these other guys who were you know had half that many perhaps so we were on a very tough mission um lost uh nine airplanes out of the out of the group uh raid to bremen on october the 8th and uh when i and the plane immediately in front of me i was leading the second element of the low squadron in the low group it's called the purple heart corner because the luffwaffer generally attacked the fringes of the formation and you were on the fringe plus you were closer to the anti-aircraft shells that were being shot up from the ground and and they were very effective because we lost almost as many crews from anti-aircraft bombing as uh or munitions as as we did from the fighters but um they were flying directly into our formations and this flight of two out of the corner of my eye was aiming right for us and the lead pilot of a flight of two fw 190s impacted the ship in front of me and knocked them out of the formation and exploded well the operations officer who's the second in command of the squadron was flying in that airplane his pilot was on his 24th mission and of course i saw them explode and um our fighter flare and what was left of the formation formed on me and we tacked onto a following wave of from another group who had lost the whole squadron and that's how we got got back or survived that particular mission but when i landed the squadron commander came up to me and he said well where is barker parker was the ops officer in the crew ship in front of me and i said well i saw them explode so everybody was killed he's not coming back and so he immediately appointed me as his replacement as the operations so as the operations officer of the squadron you are second in command of the squadron and i was still a second lieutenant so i said well it's going to be a little awkward because here i am directing captains and majors and telling them when they're going to fly and how they're going to fly and i said i'm still only a second lieutenant they said well your promotion is coming through and it did at the end of that month and in the combat zone they can promote you every three months every 90 days and they said well he said well you know you'll be entitled to um increase in rank as fast as we can promote you so at any rate um i became responsible for a lot more than just the crew but all of the crews in that squadron uh and if the squadron commander um was unable or incapacitated or was off the base or anything of course that left me in command of the squadron it also meant that if our squadron was designated as the leader of the formation that either the commanding officer or the operations officer would fly in the co-pilot's position in the lead ship as a command pilot in charge of the formation so i was to get the rest of my missions in as as a command pilot my original crew of course finished up and and was returned to the states as instructors uh unfortunately the navigator that i'd had a lot of trouble with and and particularly liked um was transitioned onto b29s and he and a pilot friend of his that uh got him onto his crew uh crashed into a mountain in montana and um were all killed after he had gone through his complete tour over involving europe but they were preparing to go to the to the pacific of course and p-29s because we never did yet have any b-29s that were operational uh in the european theater it was a matter of luck uh you could be as proficient in what you did or how you did it or focused on on your mission and uh perform it well but um you could zig when you should have zagged and and uh you never knew whether you were gonna a bullet had your name on it or not so it was uh it was a pretty traumatic experience um the cold as i mentioned earlier was a tremendous uh enemy uh we really considered we had not one enemy before the first was fear we were constantly afraid that on any mission we were either going to be shot down captured killed or whatnot and you never knew but when you got in that airplane uh and went out applying in broad daylight high altitude uh mass formations you didn't know whether that was your last one or not so that took its toll on on many people and i don't think anybody has a result of doing that um came back the same person you not only had to face your morality of being a killer or be killed for your mortality as to whether you survive and that was pretty ominous prospect to live with as a 21 year old most of us in front of the airplane we had a bombardier navigator pilot and co-pilot who were all officers and the rest of the six members of the crew were enlisted men and it was i i think as i look back on it now after 75 years 76 this year that it was just your luck and good fortune that i managed to make it i had a guardian angel on my shoulder or or i was lucky i'm i'm now writing my memoirs about what it was like and i'm calling the book damn lucky hope that'll be published by the end of this year but i didn't finally manage to um complete my tour in uh february of 1944 a 40 yes 44. uh we went overseas in the in the end of may 1st of june in 1943 and i completed my tour and was rotated back to the states as an instructor as a result of that and was still one of the earliest combat returnees to be back in the states one of the first things they did when i did return was to send me to the only instrument pilot school they had in america down in bryan texas and i said gee whiz i needed this before i went over there not after but it was excellent training and i was lucky again because that's where i met my future wife i established a combat crew inspection team in florida mcdill field tampa florida and um checked out these various replacement crews that were going over and they weren't going over as a bomb group or a squadron or a unit they were going over individually to replace crews that have been lost in various units in england and so i was evaluating them and giving them some benefit of my experience as to what they could expect and what they'd have to do in order to combat it and and that sort of thing i was also checked out or transitioned onto b2b29s and i was eligible therefore to be sent to the pacific to fight another war even though i had survived and completed a tour in europe the japan the war in japan was still in progress and we had to defeat them as well one day i was i received a phone call and they said lucky we want you to take this b-29 to the graveyard and i said where's that and they said it's in piyo texas so i said okay and i went out on the ramp to get in the airplane and it was the enola gay the airplane that paul tibbetts had flowed to tabam hiroshima and i thought my aiken back they're going to put this in the graveyard it's obsolete and of course it had been modified for that particular mission and and all but at any rate i did fly it out to uh pyote and parked it and um as i was shown to a parking place and there were acres of b-29s and b-17 and c-47s and b-26s every kind of airplane as far as the eye could see but there was this brand new b-29 right next to me and i got up in the cockpit and saw that the logbook showed three hours and 22 minutes it had been flown from the factory in renton washington the boeing factory directly to the graveyard because it had already been paid for it's already been produced and yet it was considered obsolete so i left the enola gay there and sure enough uh even though they had pulled the props and drained all of the fluids and and encased it in plastic and and this sort of thing to preserve it in case they did want to rehabilitate it the smithsonian institution finally got their head screwed on and said well this is a historic relic and we've got to reclaim it and so they went out and put it together again and fired it up and flew it to washington and that was its last flight so i flew it one time next to its last flight i later met paul tibbetts here in dallas one of the original founders of this museum frontiers of flight museum bill cooper was a b-29 pilot in the pacific and he knew of uh uh he knew uh paul tibbetts the pilot of the uh enola gay and had learned that um the smithsonian was going to put the airplane on display with a plaque saying that it dropped a bomb that should never have been dropped and the v-29 pilots that had flown uh including tibbetts were just a rate because they said it saved much many more lives than it took and therefore it should never be displayed under those conditions and so cooper and some of his buddies got tibbetts to go around the country and uh dispute what the smithsonian intended to do and they succeeded in getting the the guy that was responsible for it fired so it does now reside at dulles um at utm uh hazy uh in in washington and uh properly displayed as the bomb that ended world war ii the bomber that ended world war ii so i was privileged to meet tibbetts when he came through on his lecture tour and bill cooper had my wife and i joined him for dinner and i got to relate to him my experience in flying his airplane and had the opportunity to ask him if he were ever to be ordered to do the same thing again would he do it and he said in a new york minute and he was thoroughly convinced that he had done the right thing to be the instrument that succeeded in finally bringing japan to its senses and having them surrender instead of having to invade the island which would have been disastrous because they were fanatic they would have fought to the last man woman and child first mission that i flew as a command pilot after leaving the crew that i originally went over with my 22nd mission in other words to bremen germany on october the 8th of 43 was undoubtedly the worst mission that i flew and the one in which i really had serious doubts that i was going to survive because of our tremendous losses the way it occurred we were on our bomb run just turned on our bomb run and the flack had bracketed us totally and even at altitude um they were highly accurate and we lost 12 ships like that instantaneously out of an 18 ship formation so over the only six that were left i brought those six six back i lost an engine over the target we went ahead and and did drop our bombs successfully but only had three engines and that's very difficult to maintain the speed with the rest to keep up with the rest of the formation so i was nursing this through this fourth engine carefully and trying to get some power out of it and and still not stall out or or have to leave the formation because once you did and you were alone that's when the germans were jumping and that's what they waited for was you to be knocked out of the formation and and not have to be confronted with the mutual firepower of the whole group to ward them off but that was really my worst mission the other one that i flew that was uh well i flew several that that were memorable um one was a um a mission that uh to sentence air which was a submarine uh installation and the british were very hopeful that we could seriously damage it because of the tremendous success the submarine corps the german submarine corps was having in uh thinking shipping that was my longest mission that was 11 hours from takeoff to landing and to be stuck in that seat and literally we were stuck because when we wore all this heavy flying equipment to withstand the cold uh and plus our black vest and our bay west inflatable thing our parachutes harness and parachutes and black vests and all of this other stuff behind the pilot and the co-pilot were these slabs of armor plate and between those was only a foot 12 inches so literally even though i only weighed 125 pounds at that time i was pretty slim and skinny i couldn't get through there with all that stuff on we used to have to shiny through it and then put to put on uh much of that equipment but that was unless you were on fire and then you could go through a knot hole not touch either side it was amazing what you could do when the adrenaline was flowing but another thing that we encountered that might be of interest to you is that because of the bitter cold uh and and the possibility of frostbite and that incidentally was the only physical damage that i or wound that i received in my old tour was frostbitten feet and they were frozen so solidly to the rudder pedals that i couldn't they had to chip me out and take me off the hospital but in the heat of battle when you're jogging and trying to stay in formation you're concentrating on dropping your bombs and and all of this sort of thing even in those temperatures you find yourself perspiring profusely and that perspiration around your oxygen mask freezes instantly fast freezes and so you've got these ice crystals that are blocking your your oxygen flow and you've got to take one hand and break up these ice crystals and fly the airplane to the other well that's just one of the things we had to contend with i was offered the possibility of accepting a regular commission when the air force became a separate branch in 1947 i was still in the service and they offered certain reserve officers the possibility of taking an exam and accepting a regular commission in the regular air force uh which meant she was set for life uh you made the military your career and of course committed to um 30 25 or 30 years of service i did take the exam and accepted the commission and at that point they announced that they had a program where these newly integrated regular officers could go to any college in america that they could qualify for their credits were accepted and still retain full pay and allowances including flying pay to complete their education and so i applied for that and was accepted out at stanford in california and i thought well you know i only had two years of college and i certainly want to get a at least a bachelor's degree and so this is my opportunity to do that and was anxiously awaiting orders and never got them and at that point i was stationed over in fort worth at carsville in eighth air force headquarters as the operations and training inspector and inspector uh air inspectors division and um so i cranked up an airplane and flew down to the air university in montgomery field and at maxwell maxwell field in montgomery alabama they were administering the program and i said you've got this great program for newly integrated officers i've been accepted but i've never gotten the orders how come and they said well how old are you and i said i'm 26. and they said well you realize we have a age limit of 32 in this program and i said yeah so what they said well so the pipeline is so filled with people ahead of you that if they don't get in before their 32nd birthday they lose out i said well i can appreciate that but you know how long am i going to have to wait to get in the pipeline and they said well according to our calculations just until just before your 32nd birthday so i came back to to carswell with my tail between my legs and i thought well gee whiz this is you know having to wait six more years i've been out of college six years then uh just to go back and hit the books is pretty awesome and so i talked it over with my wife and i said you know i could go back to college under the gi bill as a civilian and i wouldn't have to wait six years and i think i'll resign my commission so i did [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Erik Johnston

Views: 190,015

Keywords: Aviation, Aircraft, Airplane, Flying, Airport, Runway, Taxiway, Hangar, Walkaround, Tour, Pilot, Aviator, Wings, Prop, Propeller, Veteran, Interview, Trent Palmer, Flight Chops, Just Plane Silly, Aviation101, Mike Patey, Mark Patey, Baron Pilot, Flying Doodles, In The Hangar, B-17, Flying Fortress, Bomber, WWII, Warbird, History, Historic, Lucky, John Luckadoo, Tail Gunner

Id: RIoF81Sma9M

Length: 52min 46sec (3166 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021