So they would line up on the horizon, and they come straight in on the bombers. So it's a game of chicken about 5 seconds. They're going about 5600 miles an hour right at each other. The combined air might of the United Nations is loose upon more plants. It is no uncommon thing for more than 10 American airmen to be flying over enemy territory in one operation. They are making ever deeper penetration into Hitler's Reich. Welcome to heroes behind headlines. I'm your host, Ralph Pazulo.
Please subscribe and check out some of our past episodes, such as inside the real takedown of El Chapo and hunting Al Qaeda's biggest financier, as well as new episodes that are released every week. Our guest today is number one bestselling author Kevin Mauer, who is here to talk about his excellent new book, damn one man's courage during the bloodiest military campaign in aviation history.
We're also extremely honored to have the subject of the book, 100 year old world war II hero John Lucky Luckadoo as a special guest on December 7, 1941, lucky was a 19 year old freshman at the university of Chattanooga in Tennessee. As soon as he heard the news about the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he didn't hesitate to sign up to join the military. Along with 10 million other young American recruits, lucky wanted to become a pilot since we had no separate air force at the time.
The organization he joined was called the army air force. What Lucky endured between June 1943 and early 1944 as he launched 25 very dangerous bombing missions over Nazi occupied France and Germany is the stuff of legend, especially the mission over Bremen when his plane was shot to pieces and only six of 18 bombers made it back to base. We're honored to feature best selling author Kevin Mauer and the great world war II bomber pilot John Lucky luck Adoo as today's heroes behind the head.
The fun thing about Lucky luck ado, right, is that he's got a force of gunklike quality to him. You almost feel like he's fictional. Grew up in Tennessee, in Chattanooga. Father was a stockbroker who lost everything in the crash and spent most of the 30s trying to get it back. A gambler. His dad's a gambler, loves the horses. They call him the colonel.
But lucky grows up going to a summer camp, seeing the west point polo players on the horses, and really gets inspired at that point to join the military. Hatch is a plan with his best friend Sully Sullivan to go to Canada as the war is starting to ramp up and join the royal Canadian air force so that they can get ahead of everybody, learn how to be fighter pilots, and then when the Americans get in, they could just transfer over.
That gets dashed by his father, who refuses to sign the papers and let them go. But Lucky, I think it really is a story of solely and Lucky, which I didn't set out to do, but when I started writing it, the research led me there.
But Lucky becomes sort of an avatar for this kind of American of the inspired by the air, inspired by having to get through the Great Depression, answers the call after Pearl Harbor and kind of goes with sort of an innocence to them that quickly gets dashed over the skies of Germany. Yeah, no, the innocence comes through for sure. Absolutely. He joins the it wasn't even an air force back then. Right, let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah. So he joins the Army Air Corps, wants to be a pilot.
I think he's inspired by guys like Jimmy Doolittle and these ideas, these dashing pilots. Lindberg sure. And of course, gets sent to be a bomber pilot and he joins up with a unit, the Hunters Bomb Group, who has a pretty checkered history, had a massive training failure that set him back from deploying. And in doing that, they removed 43 of the copilots because the copilots were getting as much time in the cockpit as some of the lead pilots and other squadrons.
And so they were like, well, we've got all these senior pilots, they pull them out, put Lucky's new class. And so Lucky never flies a B 17. Actually, he never flies an aircraft with more than two engines until he gets to the B 17s in Nebraska. By the end of 1941, the US demand for new pilots was dire. Recruits were processed so fast that more than 150 pilots and crew died in training accidents, ten times the number of men who would perish on the beaches of Normandy.
Even though that the man for pilots was High John Lucky. Luckydoo nearly didn't pass his pilot training. His West Point instructor wanted to fail it, but a civilian pilot named Blacky lobby to give Lucky one more chance on the single engine training aircraft, the VoLTE BT 13 Valiant. Lucky passed and was assigned to copilot a plane he'd never flown before, the B 17 Flying Fortress, a fourengine heavy bomber that carried a crew of ten.
Before Lucky and his crew set out to England to join the 100th Bomb Group and the air war against Nazi Germany, they were briefed by Colonel Howard Turner, who told them, and I quote, look at the man on either side of you. Only one of you will be coming back. You're all going to be killed and you might as well accept it.
I think the training numbers give you an indication of just how dire people treated World War II and how much risk they were willing to take to pipeline these guys through to the war effort. And what I think people take away very quickly is how much these guys were guinea pigs to prove either that bombing. I'm sure we'll get into what precision bombing looks like, daylight precision bombing looks like to either prove that theory or just to get people in the war effort, and
they were willing to take that risk. Incredible. Incredible. So he goes, he deploys to the UK, to a base in Thorpe Albert, and he's completely green. Right. He's never been overseas, he's never had much experience with the B 17. He doesn't kind of fit in right away. Is that right? I think that's one of the more interesting parts of the book. And that when he gets to the squadron, when he gets to 100 Bomb Group.
A lot of the crews are angry because they've spent months, years training together and they trust one another. And then you're taking a key member out, you're taking the second in command out of the crew and putting this brand new guy in here who doesn't have anything to do with it. Some of the crews embraced it, knowing that they need him, need this person, because you need everybody to do their job, to survive. Lucky's crew decides he's a jinx, and they take out their frustration with that.
Move on Lucky. And I think it paints a very different picture than we get in a lot of World War II books, because it shows the humanity of it, it shows fear. We all think of these guys as superheroes that all signed up and went and everybody loved one another, but they're all human. No, they didn't love him. They didn't love him at all. But he just sticks it out. And he's also very tall. Right. So he's six two, kind of stands out.
And they get this idea, some of them, that he's arrogant because he's tall and he's quiet. He doesn't come across that way as you read the book at all. So it was just a perception of these guys. I guess they were so suspicious if anybody knew who came in. I think it's absolutely that. I also think he's overwhelmed. He's overwhelmed in the training pipeline, and then he's put in the right seat of this V 17, an aircraft he's not familiar with, has to learn on the job.
I really feel like he was looking for somebody to help him, someone to give them a helping hand, and it just didn't come from the screw. Right. So let's talk a little bit about the B 17, because it's kind of a unique aircraft and one that Lucky was completely unfamiliar with. The B 17 is a whole brand new aircraft for him. He's never been in it when he gets assigned to it, really has no idea what it's about. The interesting thing about the B 17, though, is it was built in the mid thirty s, and
by the end of the war, it's obsolete. Yeah. It's an unpressurised four engine heavy bomber that relies on ten men to operate it. The crew. Yeah. Big crew. Yeah. And you just don't see it. If you think of the B 29, they had fewer crew, they could carry a much bigger payload and they could fly faster and higher. Yeah. So almost immediately, the B 17 is obsolete, and they end up having to add the chin turret to counter German tactics. But the B 70, as the war goes on, right to the German fighters.
And the incredible thing is this is an unpressurized plane they're flying, and they're flying it at, like, 2020, 5000ft. Yeah. Unpressurized. So they're operating at negative 40 degrees on a mission for hours on end. Incredible. I joked with them. There's probably not a more lethal battlefield in World War II than they were, because obviously we can't fly, we can't breathe. You touch anything without a gloved hand, you're going to lose that knuckle.
And then you've got flak and the Germans trying to get you to june 1943, lucky arrived at Thorpe Abbott's airfield in South Suffolk, England, near the North Sea. The US war strategy at the time was to destroy Nazi industrial and military targets deep behind enemy lines using longrange, heavy B 17 and B 24 bombers.
Instead of launching these bomb runs at night like the British did, the US chose precision daylight raids using the top secret Norden Mark 15 bomb site, which proved not to be very effective under combat conditions. The strategy of precision daylight bombing put US pilots and crews at tremendous risk. Adolf Hitler and German air Commander Herman Goering were convinced that the Americans could never sustain the heavy losses of air crews and planes that the German Luftwaff could inflict.
Let's go back to the Hundredth Air group. There were four squads, right? And how many planes and crewmen in total, approximately? They talk about in the morning when they go to eat breakfast. The whole show hall is crowded, and by the time they come home, it's only a few tables. They're flying in formations of 200, 300 planes from across England. Squadron, I think, puts up 1620 planes. But if you figure every one of those planes is ten guys. So when you lose 16 planes, it's 160 guys.
This is like June, 1943. And also the B 17 has this kind of unique site for dropping bombs, which is top secret. Can you talk about that a little bit? A top secret bomb site that was built to prove the bomber Mafia's theory that you could bomb your enemy into submission. And the idea behind it was that you could precisely hit targets that would break the spirit of the civilian population and then force the army to capitulate.
The idea being that we don't want to get another land war in World War I were entrenched. The problem is that the bomb wasn't very accurate. And when you're dropping at 2020, 5000ft, there's a lot of variables right in the middle of flak and fighters and everything else. I think the stat, they were successful less than 25% of the time. And so they put a lot of parameters, a lot of security around the northern bomb site, but it had already been exposed.
The Germans already knew it and had their own site. They already rejected it. You write in the book that it was even rigged with explosives, so if the plane went down the bomb site, it would blow up so the Germans couldn't recover it. Yeah, but it seems kind of silly. It's not even that good. Right. So why bother? Yeah, there's a lot of silliness when you break it down a little bit with some of the security. Yeah. Okay, so let's talk about the odds of survival.
I mean, if you get over ten missions, you're living on borrowed time. You get to eight, you're doing pretty well. If you think about every time you climb in the cockpit, there are only three outcomes. You fly the mission, you get home, you fly the mission, you get shot down and captured, or you fly the mission, you get shot down and killed. So two out of the three outcomes are pretty grim, pretty bad. And it takes 25 missions to complete your service. Right.
Once you hit 25 missions, you're done early. The chances of making it to 25 are pretty slim, very slim. And that's what makes Dai with rushing his crew through so dangerous, but also kind of maybe smart, and that he was right. He's playing the odds as best he can. This is the pilot on the crew that Lucky is the copilot. And as you say, he's just like, trying to play the odds, trying to pick the missions with the least danger and get everything over as quickly as possible. And he succeeds.
He does. And everybody I talked to and read about dad was a good pilot. Not a great leader, but a really good pilot. In 1943, a 25 mission tour of duty was required from every US. Bomber crew member. Statistically, there was only a 25% chance of someone ever reaching that goal. The average bomber crew was likely to complete only eight to twelve missions before being shot down or disabled. June 28, 1943. Lucky Lucky Due was on mission number two.
Their objective was to bomb the submarine Pens at St nazaire, France, on the tip of the Brittany Peninsula, which extends into the Atlantic Ocean. This would be citizen soldier and amateur pilot lucky's first time facing the battletested luftwa fighter pilots and over 100 antiaircraft guns on the ground guarding the submarine Pen. The group operation officers message before they took off was the bombers must stick together in order to survive.
If I recall, that's the mission where they fly way across England and come around because they're hitting the sub pins that's right. On the French coast. What's interesting about the sub pins is they must have hit those a couple of times and they never could crack them. And they were such an important target because to get across the North Atlantic that those are the subsequent that's out there but they could never really crack it.
And Lucky gets pretty angry about it having to go back over and over again. But on that first mission, it's funny, I asked Lucky one time, who did you talk to before your first mission about what to expect? And he said, who was I going to? There's nobody that knew anything. That mission, though, is on top of the fact that the Germans defended that area very well with their flak and fighters. The flight was along as long as it was a ten or twelve hour mission.
And so you're enduring negative 40 degrees as you fly, and then when you finally get to the initial point, I mean, you're cooked at some point. Yeah. I love that image that you had of them getting close to the target and just seeing all these dots across the horizon, and then it starts to dawn unlucky that these are German fighters and this is what we're going to face. Right. And that's got to be, like, incredibly terrifying.
Well, the Americans get to England and tell the British that we're going to do precision daylight bombing. That's what they're going to do. And the British think we're insane. It's a suicide mission. They have the British bombed at night. And what the British would do is they would send up an aircraft over the target, drop a flare, and then the bombers would come in at different angles and carpet bomb and saturate that area with bombs.
The Americans said, now we got the Northern bomb site, we're going to pick the exact location, we're going to fly in a massive formation, and we're going to drop all our bombs on target because we're going to be able to see during the day they did work. And what happens is Lucky and his crews become guinea pigs to prove this point, even though everybody begs them to stop and just join the night bombing missions, they won't.
To be fair, I don't really know why we were such a stickler as Americans to doing this, but we ended up proving that we could do it, but not because we had superior technology and not because it worked, but because we could pump crews out and aircraft better than anybody else in the world. Right. It was almost like a meat grinder. We're just pushing stuff out. Yeah, it's incredible. Unless you're the sausage, right. Like you're the meat. They push it through. It's not fun.
And at a certain point, as you mentioned, lucky realizes this right away. What we're doing, in a sense, is suicidal. This is crazy. And also, the B 52 had no armor. Really. Right. None. And the strategy was to you're just kind of flying into the enemy's flak and into all of their fighters, and the strategy was to just kind of you had to clump together, right, just to defend one another so they could overlap, machine gun, cover. The B 17 by itself, was no match for a fighter.
It would get shot down. So the German tactics were to break the formations so that they could pick off the bombers one by one. And that's what the flag did. The flak did two things. It damaged bombers to get them out of the Herd as well as the Germans called them, or it drove the bombers higher up so it was harder to hit things. The fighters were there that picks the peeled bombers off. So what they would try to do is they would attack head on.
00 eye comes from. So they would line up, like we described, on the horizon and they'd come straight in on the bombers, especially the F models, because they didn't have the machine guns in the front and they couldn't lower the top turret low enough to get them. So they would come straight head on on the bomber and try to attack the cockpit and the wing fuel tanks. So it's a game of chicken, about 5 seconds. They're going about 5600 miles an hour right at each other.
What's crazy is, as terrifying as it is for Lucky and the Americans, there's a great quote from this German ace who says, and I'm paraphrasing, but he basically says, when you fly against 20 Russian fighters or ten Spitfires, the British fighter, it's kind of fun and exciting. He said, but when you turn in on 40 fortresses, all your sins flash in front of your eyes. Even the Germans were like, this sucks terrible because they're just getting bombarded with machine gun fire from these fortresses.
And they had how many machine gunners? No, they had six. They had a tail gunner, two waist gunners who were right behind the tail in the long, slender part of the aircraft. And then they had a ball Turk gunner, who's usually the smallest guy, and he would sit in that metal ball underneath the plane. And then you had the engineer in the double to the two machine guns on the top, the top turret. And then in the nose you had two cheek guns, which were the navigator and the bombing deer
used until they had to do their job. Yeah. Incredible. And those guys had to have some Cojones, right? Because they're sitting there in a little glass bubble and there's all these planes, like, flying around them, coming at them. Incredible. And that's not even the Flak yet. It's just the fighters. Right. Let's talk about the flak. So when you go over these targets, when you get close, then you'd start getting the bombardment from the ground.
Hitler loved air defense and they threw a lot of money and effort into it. And essentially what they would do is their intelligence was very good, so they knew the path the bombers were going most of the time. And what they would do is they would pick a box, an imaginary box in the air, and they would fill it with flak. And essentially what the flag was there were shells that would explode at a certain altitude and throw shrapnel everywhere. Guys describe it as it sounded like hail bouncing off.
And most of it wasn't bouncing off because it was cutting right through. Right. Because there's no protection, there's no armor. So it's coming the skin of a B 17 is probably about the same thickness as a tin can. So it's cutting through this on the ground. They would aim it using radar and then they would have Hitler Youth or older soldiers that couldn't serve on the front just load the guns. And they would shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.
And the Americans figured out at first they would try to dodge through the flag. And then Curtis Lameay did some math and realized that in order for a B 17 to get knocked out, it would take a lot of hits. So he says, we're flying straight through. So it was like flying through a thunderstorm. Right. Yeah. It's something like 130 hits before it could go down. But if it's in the right place, it doesn't take 130. It's incredible. And then a very interesting point. So lucky is a copilot.
There's a pilot and a copilot. And then there's a certain point when they get over the target where the pilot and the copilot turn the plane over to the bombadier. Right. And then they're just kind of sitting there praying that they get through this while the bombadier kind of lines up the targets. Right, right. So when they get to the initial point, they call it that's when everybody turns in the same heading and everybody flies straight through the flag.
And the northern bomb site is actually flying the plane through the autopilot, which is the worst thing. Lucky hated that part. And he talks about it, how it's hard to not fly the plane. And remember, they're in tightly packed formations, too. So his job was to make sure they didn't crash into somebody as all the planes fly through this flack. And then as soon as they hit the target, then they separate. They come back together and get home. Right. And then once they were over
the channel, they were safe. Right. As long as you were on the probably 51% across the channel. Because if you crash in the channel, it was sort of a race to see who would get to you. That's right. Because the Germans would be there. And you'd hope to get picked up by a friendly fishing boat. Because if you picked up by a French fishing boat, you'd probably end up in a POW camp. Right, right. Yeah. And that happened quite a few times. Yeah, a lot.
The guys that would bail out, especially over Germany, would run to soldiers and hope they get caught by a Luftwaffe because the civilians would kill you. The German civilians, but not the French. Not the French, yeah. But we also when we were bombing France and other Allied countries. It was different in Germany. Bombing took such a toll on the German civilians. It was a terror camp. It was horrendous.
So to be on the other end of it and to then see the pilot on the ground, you could kind of understand it, but it's understandable, right. All right, so now let's talk about the big mission. Well, first there's Castle, I think it was number eleven, and Lucky almost gets frozen to death. Nearly frozen to death.
It's funny, he still moves his feet, apparently in his sleep, because of essentially what happens is, during the mission, the front nose of the aircraft is cracked, and it sends a jet stream of frigid air straight into his shoes and boots, and he just can't there's no way to keep his feet warm, and he gets frostbite. He's got to keep his feet on the he's got pedals right.
For some of the controls. Yeah. For the back rudder, he's got to keep his feet on the pedals, and he ends up getting frostbite that they have to carry them out of there. The best part of that story, though, is when he gets to the aid station and they slowly rehab his injury. He's in there with the ball turret gunner, who got frostbite because he pissed himself, and they give him the Purple Heart. And like he says, I don't think I deserve it from my feet.
And the Baltimore gunners, I don't want it either. And they say, well, why don't you want it? And he says, Because I don't want to explain how I got it. But that injury means that his original crew gets ahead of him. He loses two missions out of that, and he loses another mission because he refuses to fly in the back seat as a spotter because he's not trained the on tailgun.
And so that's why his main crew, after they complete their 25 missions, he still has three more to go before yeah, I think he spent what he said, you wrote eight days in the hospital for that one. Okay, so let's get to the Bremen mission, because that, to me, is the most dramatic story in the book and horrible and exciting at the same time. So it opens the book, and it sort of serves as the spine of the book. And essentially that's a mission where he gets tasked to be the lead pilot.
He's flying with a fairly new crew, guys he's never met before, and they're flying pretty deep into Germany to bomb a sub pen. And I don't want to say he had a bad feeling, but this one felt heavy. And it was the beginning of Black Week, where they were really pushing the bomber squadrons to pick up the pace and really lay it on them. And so he takes off, and he's leading the Low Squadron, which is probably the ugly, probably the worst place to be most vulnerable. Yeah.
The mission itself is notable, too, because when they get to the fighters and they fight through the fighters, usually the fighters would leave them when they started to get into the flak and then come back after they bombed. This time, though, the Germans had ordered the fighters to stiffen the resistance, and so they fly through the flag to continue to press the attack, which baffled the pilots and scared them to death. Flying through their own flack, basically, yeah.
And then don't forget. Too. There's a part of that mission. Too. Where you have a collision between one of the metricsmiths who takes out the plane in front of Lucky. Which almost takes him out of the formation so that's just before they bomb. And then when they actually get out of the after the bombing. His aircraft is so shot up that he has to nurse it back.
And luckily, he finds another squadron attached to because going back to that idea, that if these guys by themselves are pretty vulnerable, so what's left of his squadron connects to the follow on units coming behind him, and he's able to get back to England that way. The biggest mission Lucky participated in was the bombing of the submarine pens outside the city of Bremen in October 1943.
The plan required for the bombers to fly at 26,000ft, which meant that they would be on oxygen for 4 hours of the five and a half hour flight approaching Bremen, the Beef 17 formation Lucky was in was hit by wave after wave of highly skilled and motivated German fighters. One fighter rammed the B 17 in front of Luckies, turning it into a fireball. Within minutes, the cobalt sky over Bremen turned black with flak from the ground.
By the time Lucky and his crew dropped their bombs, german ground gunners and fighters had shot down two thirds of the US. Bombers. Of the 18 planes in Lucky's group, only six remained. Turning back towards Holland in safety, lucky saw smoke pouring out of his engine. Number three, his plane was losing power. He knew that if they fell out of formation, they would be a sitting duck for German fighters and would end up as corpses or POWs.
His plane shot to pieces, lucky somehow managed to fly it back to base. In total, 50 pilots and crew members were lost. Now Lucky himself is going to tell us his version of the mission over Brown. That was my 22nd mission. I flew with the crew that I went over with originally through 21 missions, and they completed 25, and so they were rotated back to the States.
And I was flying on this first mission afterwards with a brand new crew as a command pilot, which meant that the airplane commander, of course, was in charge of the crew, but I was in charge of the formation. And directly in front of me was the operations officer for the squadron and another. Buddy who was on his 24th mission, and they were rammed by F 190 on the bomb run and blew up. And I immediately assumed that nobody survived.
And so when I got back, that's what I reported in the debriefing. And I was still a second lieutenant, as I was when I graduated from flying school. And the commanding officer of the squadron met me, and he said, well, where's Barton? Barton was the operations officer. And I said, well, he blew up and they're not coming back. And he said, all right, then, I'm making you the squadron operations officer.
So this has been a horrible mission, one in which I really doubt it for the first time that I was going to make it home, because we had such ferocious opposition that we had not encountered previously, and the Germans were just pressing their attacks so aggressively that our chances of survival were just zero. And out of the 18 airplanes we sent out on that mission, twelve of them were shot down on the bomb run.
And I brought back the remnants of that group, which was six airplanes tacked on to a succeeding wave of bombers behind us. And that's the only way we got back, was to because if you're shot out of formation and you're flying separately, you're a doom dock. They can pick you off at leisure. And you almost didn't make it because your own plane was so badly damaged. Correct. Yeah. Did you lose an engine? I think you lost an engine. I did.
I lost an engine over the target and was having difficulty keeping up with the formation that we joined. So that was another difficulty we had to contend with. But by staying with another formation, we were able to garner some mutual protection, and that's the only thing that saved us. Yeah. And the other thing that I was very surprised to learn about the B 17 was that it was not a pressurized cabin and it had almost no armor and there was no insulation, basically. Correct.
So you would go up how high would your altitude be at some point about 5 miles above the Earth, 25 to 29,000ft. And that's such an alien atmosphere because the air is so light and it is so bitterly cold. 50 to 60 deg below zero. Unbelievable. And we had everything we could put on and heated underwear and that sort of thing, to try and withstand the hours of cold and numbing effects of that cold. And it severely impacted our ability to function. Sure. So we were really guinea pigs.
We were just simply trying to prove a strategy, or they were using as a proof of strategy that the British insisted was suicidal and that we should abandon daylight bombing altogether because the Germans had air superiority and they controlled and they were fighting for their homeland. Their backs were against the wall. Sure. We're going to throw everything in the backyard. So they were professionals.
They've been fighting for four years, and we didn't have a clue as to what we were going to meet when we became combatants. But they knew what they were doing and they did it very effectively. Yes. And as you said, the American commanders adopted a strategy that was different than the British, and they stuck with it. They did, and the British stuck with theirs. They had tried daylight bombing and the Germans had cut them to ribbons.
And that's why they concluded that it was suicidal and that the only way that they could really bring Germany to its knees, by bombing it and its industrial targets, was by going out at night. They flew at a lower altitude. They had different equipment altogether. They did not fly in formation, of course. They flew in single ships. And interestingly enough, their bombing accuracy was still about the same as ours.
Although they bombed on a flare, they would send out a pathfinder ahead of the group and drop a flare on the target, and then they would bomb at different altitudes and directions on that flare, whereas we were going out in broad daylight and mass formation and trying to prove that we could withstand the onslaught of German defenses, both fighter and flak. The mission to Bremen was the start of what became known as Black Week.
As the 100th bomb group hit one target after another in Germany, lucky figured his chances of completing all 25 missions was zero. He watched as 88 B 17s were shot down in three days and nearly 900 men were killed. By November, he had only two missions left. Then his bomb squadron commander ordered Lucky to replace him and lead a squadron on a bombing mission to the Nazi capital of Berlin.
General Curtis Lamay told the pilots, and I quote, if we get only one plane over the target, it will be a success. It was a suicide mission, and Lucky was pissed. As they approached the enemy coast, he heard the radio operator come over the inner phone. His message was abort. Abort. Return to base. The skies over Berlin, which they expected to be covered with thick clouds, were clear. I was not happy about that at all.
In fact, I refused to serve under him any longer because it was his job, but he assigned it to me and I thought that was cowardly. Yeah. So he should have flown the plane. He should have been the command pilot of that person. Yeah. But fortunately, as we got to the Anime coast, the clouds dissipated over the target and we didn't have the element of surprise. And so it was scrubbed. Yeah. And we came back, and that's the only way I survived that way. It truly was. Because I'm sure that none of
us would have returned that mission. Of course not. Probably not. That was a complete suicide mission. And we should explain to the listeners that it was the 24th of your allotted 25 missions. So it was the next to last mission. That's correct. And what were the odds of even making it to 24 were extremely low. Correct. The odds at that time, they changed during the course of the war because of the opposition that we faced, but our chances of surviving 25 missions were one in four.
Wow. Incredible. So lucky you finished your 25 missions and then it's back to the United States. And in those days, I guess there was no real understanding of post traumatic stress disorder or any kind of psychological adjustment that somebody who had faced death constantly and been surrounded by it on a daily basis, how did you manage to deal with that? Well, I hit the bottle, for one thing, and I was so darn glad to be alive that I really didn't care whole lot about whether school kept or not.
But I was really most anxious to share my combat experience with crews that were going over. And so I felt that that was an immediate assignment to doing that. Training replacement crews would be the best use of my experience. And in the interval between finishing my 25th mission and getting back overseas and going on leave and going down to Miami Beach to the redistribution center and all of that for several months there that I didn't even fly.
And after being so concentrated and so busy with the jobs that I had in completing my 25 missions, this was just night and day, so I parted a lot, and I was a basket case. I mean, how could you not be? Yeah. They recognized that I was suffering from some combat fatigue, and so they sent me to a hospital in St. Petersburg, and I said, I don't need to go to that place. I need an assignment to work. That's what I need. And I was convinced that if they kept me
busy that I wouldn't be wasting my life. Right. I feel that you were helping preparing the guys who are going to face what you had faced. Right. Something that I can share with other people that will help them. Exactly. Even though it was horrible, at least I can share it with them. Exactly. Yeah. And were you eventually given that opportunity? Eventually, I was. I was assigned to Tampa. Florida. McDill Field. And I set up a combat crew inspection team where we evaluated crews going over.
And we took them up and simulated difficulties they'd have to cope with and how they could react to them and how they did react to them and give them some semblance that we didn't have the advantage of when we went over. Because there was nobody that had any previous experience against the Germans doing what we were doing as the way we were doing it. Yes. Wow. When you look back at it over your life, what's your takeaway? What do you want to tell people?
How foolish war is, it proves absolutely nothing. We don't learn anything from fighting. And it's such a sad commentary on the human condition that rational individuals cannot resolve their differences without armed conflict because of the tremendous cost in every respect. And it's futile. It is folly. And that's what I'm looking back on it now realize that even though we were doing our patriotic duty, we hoped defending our freedoms by going out and putting our lives on the line, to what avail?
And I fear that those who didn't come home gave their lives in vain. And that's a very sad conclusion to have to reach. Well, unfortunately, wars are started by old men and fought by young ones. March, 1944. Lucky returned home to Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was lauded and paraded around the city as a returning hero.
But the idealism he had taken with him into war as a young recruit was now replaced by the trauma of losing friends, including his best friend, sully and nightmares, sparked by terrifying hours in the cold blue sky, battling German fighters and teeth rattling flak and frostbite. Like many survivors of the war, lucky didn't talk about his wartime experiences for 50 years because, as he writes, recalling them was not a pleasant exercise.
Now 100 years old, he says, quote that while being terribly proud to having served my country when called upon in the time of need, I view armed conflict as a sad commentary on Adversaries failure to reach reasonable resolution of their differences. His advice to all Americans is to stay united and seek common ground. We prove that during World War II, Lucky says, and we can prove it again with great gratitude.
We thank John Lucky Luck Adoo for his amazing valor and service to our country and to author Kevin Mauer for preserving Lucky's inspiring story in his excellent new book, damn they're today's heroes behind the headlines. Thank you for listening. I'm your host, Ralph Pazulo. Please like and subscribe. And don't forget to tune in to the next episode of heroes behind.