I was so fortunate last year to walk through a B-17 bomber with WWII Air Force veteran Wayne Randall, his daughter, Pam Gold, and his grand daughter, Jackie Sanders.
I was assigned to go to the Commemorative Air Force Museum at the San Marcos Airport because they were going to display several old war planes. After watching the giant planes land, I turned around from where I was shooting and saw a man in a blue flight suit. The man turned out to be Mr. Randall and he had a huge grin on his face as he told his daughter about the aircraft that he flew on so many times before.
Mr. Randall, who was then 86, said he put in 52 missions as a radio operator in the Pacific on a B-17 bomber. I asked him and his family if they would mind me tagging along with them as they walked through the aircraft.
You would never know Mr. Randall was in his 80s as he climbed in to the plane. It was a very tight space and he climbed in to it like he was 20 years old. He went through the cockpit and back through the the area where missiles were held to the area he was most familiar with – the desk of the radio operator.
“Most of the time I sat right here, and then I had padding (on the desk) and I’d just put my head phones on, turned up the frequency, put my head down there and went to sleep on long missions. We’d go sometimes up to 10-14 hours on a mission,” said Randall. He used Morse code to transmit messages during combat if they were allowed to, but most of the time it was silence in the air.
Randall said they fit about 14 people in the cramped spaces of the B-17 and showed his daughter and granddaughter where everyone sat and what job they did.
I posted this today because we’re going in to Memorial Day weekend. I’ve shot a lot of Memorial Day services and I am always honored to be allowed to be with the families of soldiers who didn’t make it back. I can’t imagine the heartache military families face knowing that their loved one may not ever come home. People like Mr. Randall make me think how lucky we all are to have people willing to risk it all.
Dick McBride, who was also at the aircraft exhibit, told me this about WWII: “Especially the early part of the war, 1943, half of them never came back, and they knew it. How could they get up in the morning, you know? If you came back from a flight and you made it back and you saw your buddy’s plane go down, and the next day you had to go back and sit in the same place and do that. It takes a lot.”
I took some video and wrote a story at this event and the original package is posted in the San Marcos Daily Record archives here: http://bit.ly/bny73k