16
Wednesday, May 3, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
12 O’Clock High
Some things are so intrin-
sically American they have
helped define the way we
understand ourselves. The
B-17 Flying Fortress is one
of them. Though there are
only about 15 of them still
airworthy today, for a few
years in the last century
the B-17, and the men who
flew them, did enough of the
hardest work to cement their
rightful place in our national
identity.
Last week I had the
opportunity to fly over
Central Oregon in the
Aluminum Overcast, a
restored B-17G now oper-
ated by the Experimental
Aircraft Association. For
me, it was less of a joyride
with other media-types than
a rare chance to achieve a
kind of synesthetic appre-
ciation of the conditions and
environment experienced by
Army aircrews in the Second
World War.
That’s a dicey proposi-
tion. No one was shooting at
us from the ground. We were
not fighting al-fresco in the
waist-gunner positions at -50
degrees Fahrenheit, with fro-
zen guns, while angry hives
of Nazi Focke-Wulf’s per-
forated the fuselage. No one
was packed into the lonely
world of the ball turret.
There is, admittedly, a
limit to how much one can
really learn in an exercise
like this, but a determined
mind can sometimes find
a moment, a takeaway, a
direct line into the past that
resonates.
The Aluminum Overcast
itself did not participate
in the war because she
was delivered to the Air
Corps too late to join the
fight. Nevertheless, she has
enjoyed a varied career in
the skies, serving on aerial
mapping operations in Africa
and South America, haul-
ing cattle in the Caribbean,
fighting fire ants in the deep
south, and now as a fully
restored flying museum.
Her service history is
irrelevant, of course, because
today she serves in honor of
those planes and their crews
who were in the fight. The
Overcast carries the colors
of the 398th Bomb Group,
and flies in honor of a sis-
ter ship shot down over Le
Manior, France, on August
13, 1944. It was her 34th
combat mission.
Despite their reputa-
tion for absorbing extraor-
dinary abuse and returning
home, some 4,700 Flying
Fortresses were lost in
combat, and another 4,000
in training accidents. In
August 1943, on a raid over
Schweinfurt and Regensburg
in Germany, the 8th Air
Force lost 60 B-17s out of
an original flight of 376
bombers. In October of
the same year, in a similar
raid over Schweinfurt, they
lost 60 more. Between the
two disastrous raids, which
led to a temporary halt in
American daylight bombing,
1,200 empty bunks were left
behind at bases in England.
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The magnitude of World
War II is, I fear, somewhat
lost on many of us who did
not live through it. It is hard
for us, in this age, when we
fight simultaneous wars that
require almost no personal
sacrifice, commitment — or
even attention from the aver-
age citizen — to wrap our
heads around the enormous
losses incurred in the strug-
gle against the Axis powers.
During the war America lost
an average of 6,000 service-
men every month, and from
1942 onward we lost 170
airplanes each and every day.
A staggering total of 43,581
airplanes were lost during
the war.
And still they flew. And
fought on.
Men such as Clark Gable,
who flew five combat mis-
sions as a waistgunner over
Europe, and Tom Landry,
legendary coach of the Dallas
Cowboys, who flew 30 mis-
sions as a pilot and lost his
brother in a B-17. And there
was Jimmy Stewart, who
was a B-17 instructor before
flying 20 combat missions
in B-24s. Or Norman Lear,
producer of “All in the
Family,” who flew as a radio
operator out of Italy, or Gene
Roddenberry, who created
“Star Trek,” and who piloted
B-17s in the Pacific Theater.
These were among the
more famous men to fly in
the Fortress, but for each of
them there were thousands
more whose service and sac-
rifice is lesser known, if at
all. Men such as Brigadier
Frederick Castle, who was
awarded the Medal of Honor,
posthumously, for remain-
ing at the controls of his
PHOTO BY CRAIG RULLMAN
The Aluminium Overcasd B-17 G visided Cendral Oregon lasd week.
damaged aircraft so that his
crew could bail out. Or 2nd
Lieutenant David Kingsley,
a firefighter from Portland,
Oregon, who became a
bombardier, and who also
received the honor posthu-
mously, for tending to his
injured crewmates and giv-
ing his parachute to a com-
rade as the plane went down
over Romania.
Eight decades later, the
legacy of this iconic aircraft,
and its heroic crews, men
capable of serving up aston-
ishing acts of selflessness
in the middle of unconscio-
nable and inescapable hor-
rors, miles above the earth,
remains with us. There is
an entire science dedicated
to the appreciation of B-17
nose art, from Betty Lou’s
Buggy of the 91st Bomb
Group, to the Hell’s Angels
of the 303rd. There are
countless books, television
shows, and movies.
And then there are the
guys like me, who thumbed
the ink out of books as a
Year-round
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child, studying the pic-
tures of B-17s in the skies
over Europe and the South
Pacific, desperately imagin-
ing what it might have been
like to sit in the open plexi-
glass nose as a bombardier,
seeing the world rush by
and manning the secretive
Norden bombsight.
For my patience, some 40
years later, I was rewarded
with the opportunity to
explore the plane at length,
to feel how she took to tur-
bulence, to stand in the
bomb bay somewhere over
Redmond, to take in the
radio room, the flight deck,
and finally to crawl down
beneath the pilots into the
most astonishing view in the
nose. I was able to sit for a
time in the bombardier’s
seat, and to watch as we
came in over the green pas-
tures of Powell Butte, qui-
eter now with the four giant
radial engines grinding away
behind me.
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