MASTERS OF THE AIR | Bloody Hundredth | 8th Air Force | John "Lucky" Luckadoo

It was scary and chaotic. It was traumatic. When you're in the heat of battle and anti-aircraft fires coming up from the ground to knock you out of the sky, these enemy fighters are coming in and attacking you from all angles, all hell's breaking loose. It's scary. It's just riveting. But you're flying in close formation at high altitude, freezing, freezing to death because we were unpressurized. At a high altitude, at 50 to 60 degrees below zero, if you take your gloves off, your fingers can self-amputate to the nearest knuckle and you don't see any blood. You don't feel any pain. You're not even aware. You just see your fingers lying on the floor. Well, it's a wonder. It's just a miracle that I did not lose all my toes because this hole in the nose of the airplane just sent that jet of cold, freezing air directly onto my feet. And it didn't affect anybody else on the airplane, but it did me and just my toes, just my feet. And so when I landed, finally, after five and a half hours of that, they had to chip me out of the airplane and send me up to the hospital and gradually thaw my feet out. They packed them in ice originally and then gradually brought them back to normal temperature. And fortunately, the treatment I got was correct and I did not lose my toes, but I still have effects from it in cold weather. I was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Well, I joined the service almost immediately following Pearl Harbor. I had just entered college there in Chattanooga. We were cannon fodder. We were the proper age to be called up. And so my fraternity brothers and I almost en masse joined up in early 1942. I went immediately to Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama for pre-flight and was fortunate enough to be designated as the cadet adjutant, who was the second in command of a 4,000 cadet corps in pre-flight. And as it turned out, that stood me in pretty good stead all the way through my training because I was cadet captain of each of my classes. Forty of my classmates from my flying school, my advanced flying school, were selected to be sent to the 100th Bomb Group, which was a V-17 organization in Karna, Nebraska at the time, that had already been through pre-combat training. And they were ready to be shipped out. And they pulled all of the co-pilots, second in command of the crews, out of the planes and stuck us in the right seats. We'd never been in a V-17 before. They only did this in this one group, and nobody's ever explained or even admitted that this was done, but it was. And so here we were, second in command of the crew of ten men on a V-17. We were unfamiliar with the airplane. Never flown a four-engine airplane before. Our training previously was on twin-engine aircraft. So the commander called us together, and he said, you look to your right, and you look to your left, and you look ahead and behind you, and only one of you is going to come home. So you're going to be killed, and you might just as well accept it. So that was the way we went to combat. Now once you got to England, you say in your book that your first mission was pretty uneventful, relatively speaking, but you got resistance on your second mission. So what was it like to face real hostile enemies? It was scary and chaotic. It was traumatic. When you're in the heat of battle, and anti-aircraft fire's coming up from the ground to knock you out of the sky, these enemy fighters are coming in and attacking you from all angles, all hell's breaking loose. It's scary. It's just riveting. But you're flying in close formation at high altitude, freezing, freezing to death, because we were unpressurized. At a high altitude, at 50 to 60 degrees below zero, if you take your gloves off, your fingers can self-amputate to the nearest knuckle. And you don't see any blood. You don't feel any pain. You're not even aware. You just see your fingers lying on the floor. Well, it's a wonder. It's just a miracle that I did not lose all my toes, because this hole in the nose of the airplane just sent that jet of cold, freezing air directly onto my feet. And it didn't affect anybody else on the airplane, but it did me, and just my toes, just my feet. And so when I landed, finally, after five and a half hours of that, they had to chip me out of the airplane and send me up to the hospital and gradually thaw my feet out. They packed them in ice originally and then gradually brought them back to normal temperature. And fortunately, the treatment I got was correct, and I did not lose my toes, but I still have effects from it in cold weather. Well, let's talk about flak in general. How often did you face it? I'm guessing on most missions. So how did you deal with it? Well, you couldn't deal with it. You were helpless, because if you attempted to take evasive action, you could disturb the whole formation, number one. And number two, you could zig when you should have zagged and fly into it instead of away from it. So it was something that you had to essentially put out of your mind and say, well, I can't do anything about this, so I'm just going to have to fly straight and level. And actually, we didn't fly the airplane. On the bomb run, the pilot and the co-pilot turned the control of the airplane over to the bombardier, who was literally flying it by the input that he had with the interchange, the interconnection between the autopilot and the bomb site. And so pilot and the co-pilot were just sitting there ready to take over instantly if necessary, manually. But the plane was literally being flown by the bomb site, the bombardier. Did you have fighter escorts? Only part of the time, we were supposed to have fighter escorts. And the theory was that they could protect us from attacking fighters. Well, the thing that was completely forgotten was that the fighters were twice as fast as we were. And so in order to stay with us, they had to orbit and burn off fuel. And they couldn't stay very long. So they would have to leave, and another group supposedly would rendezvous with us and pick up and carry us from there. So they'd just relay us. But those rendezvouses were very haphazard, and they didn't work. Half the time, the fighters couldn't find us. And so essentially, during my combat tour, I flew unescorted. We had P-47s, we had P-51s, and we had some P-38s, which we never saw. But the Germans would simply wait until the first relay would run out of fuel and have to go back, and then they'd jump us. So it was duck soup. And when Jimmy Doolittle took over from General Aker on January of 1944, he said, well, forget escorting. That's not your job anymore. You go down and strafe the airfields and catch them on the ground before they ever get out. And that worked far more effectively than trying to pick us up or dogfight in the air. Now, we mentioned your pilot a couple of times. He had a mindset that he wanted to condense his missions as close to each other as possible so he could get done with them as soon as possible. Correct. And so when he was done, and the last mission was quite interesting, so we can talk about that a little bit. You became a command pilot then after that, right? So how pleased were you to have that promotion? Well, I was still a second lieutenant, and when the crew finished up, I still had four missions to fly. And so on my next mission, I went out with a brand new crew who was on their third mission, and as really an instructor pilot, too, because I had the experience. And flying directly in front of me was the operations officer who was second in command of the squadron. And this was the first week in Black Week in October, and we were—October the 8th, I'll never forget it, was my 22nd mission. We turned on the bomb run, and we were 18 ships from the bloody 100th. As we turned on the bomb run, the flak was coming up so densely from the ground to protect the target, denser than we had ever seen before. And the Germans were actually flying through their own flak. Normally they didn't do that. They would stay back and let the anti-aircraft fire damage the planes enough to force them out of the formation. And then when they were by themselves, we were duck soup. That was almost a death cell now. But on this mission, they were flying through their own flak, so they were susceptible to being shot down by friendly fire, as we were. But that was how desperate the Germans were at that stage. And we just—I lost 12 out of the 18 airplanes on the bomb run, and I brought what was left of the group back with my tacking on to a succeeding wave of bombers in the 95th Group in our wing that followed, or we wouldn't have made it back, because I lost an engine over the target. So I was only flying on three engines, and that slowed me up, and that slowed up the whole formation if they kept with me. So it was extremely traumatic, and the Germans were so desperate that when they ran out of ammunition, they began ramming us, just like Japanese kamikazes. And one rammed the plane directly in front of me with the operations officer on it, and they blew up. And so when I landed, the squadron commander came up to me and he said, well, Lucky, where is Barker? Barker was the ops officer. And I said, well, I saw them rammed, and they exploded, and nobody got out of that airplane, so he's not coming back. He said, all right, then you are the new ops officer. I said, well, that's going to be a little awkward, and then I'm just the second lieutenant. He said, don't worry, we'll give you the support and the authority that you need, and we'll promote you as rapidly as permitted, and that was every 90 days in the combat zone. How do you go back up on the next mission after experiencing something like that? I don't really know. I've thought about that and been asked about it, and I have to tell you that when I look back upon it, and I think of all of the odds, and I think of all of the circumstances under which we were functioning, I have to think, you know, that was suicidal. That was traumatic. It certainly changed me drastically, but then I realized, too, that nobody goes to war and comes back the same person. It's going to change you. It's inevitable. And when you're facing death day after day, and if you dwelled on that and your odds of surviving that, you wouldn't last. Tell me about your final mission, when you finally got number 25 done. What was that mission like? Well, I was acting as a squadron operations officer of a second squadron, not the first one. That I was assigned to, and, of course, was in a position to select the mission that I would lead. And the squadron commander had combat fatigue, and he had been sent to the flak house, as we called it, or the rest home, and he wasn't even on the base. And so I was in command of the squadron, and this mission came up where this was in early of 1944. The Germans had erected these launch pads along the coast of Calais and were lobbing these V-2 rockets into London and causing horrendous damage. So we had a mission at lower altitude to knock out one of those, and that looked like a milk run to me. So I selected a pilot who was on his last mission, happened to be from Dallas, and his crew, and we completed our tour. We thought that we'd just duck over the coast and drop our bombs and scoot home, and it'd be a short and sweet mission, and that would end it. It so happened that the Germans knew our target, and they came halfway out across the Channel and attacked us and inflicted some damage, but they didn't deter us. We went ahead and bombed the target and managed to get home. What was that feeling like? Well, it was such a relief, and it meant, of course, that I was unassigned instantly. I didn't have a job, and I'd been so concentrated and focused on doing what I was doing for so long that it just left me useless. It just wore on me from that point on, because eventually I stayed on the base for about 30 days and still had no duties and wasn't flying. They offered me several jobs—pathfinder or squadron commander or other jobs—but I'd still have to fly combat. I said, Hey, wait a minute. I've pressed my luck for 25 missions with the bloody hundreds, and I think that's the extent that I ought to do so. I could be sent home to train replacements coming over, and I said, Well, how soon can you cut those So I went to Liverpool and came home by boat, and that was a slow process, because we had flown our airplanes across the North Atlantic when we went to combat. Going back took 12 days on an old World War I clunker called the USS Washington. What do you want people to know about the bloody hundred bomb group? It was a very unique outfit. Its history was very unusual. Things happened to it that didn't happen in any other group. It's being documented now by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg in the docu-series that will be issued shortly in January. I think it became notorious because of the extremely heavy losses that we sustained. When we sustained them, we ended up being somewhat famous or infamous because of our losses. Hitler certainly miscalculated in thinking that we could not replace our losses, but he completely ignored the fact that we were protected by an ocean on both sides. In the meantime, our civilian population was outproducing the world. We're not only ourselves, but all our allies. So we could produce and we could train, and we did, and that's what spelled the difference for our prevailing.