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Michael McLeod
Unless you are a WW 2 buff just ignore this message.
I have no memory of writing this story or interviewing these ww 2 heroes.
That's how long ago it's been.
I ran across it by chance recently and figured there might be a couple of history wonks among you.
It’s tough getting a bomber jacket these days, figuring out whether you want it in lambskin, goatskin, cowhide, horsehide or kangaroo, in nylon with matching lime green or burgundy combat boots.
You can purchase a bomber jacket for your pet ferret, in stylish faux brown leather and synthetic lamb’s wool collar, for $10.87. Or you can buy a new bomber jacket for yourself that looks like an old bomber jacket, having been “pre-distressed” by the manufacturer to give it “that 50-mission look.”
Fifty missions seem a bit much to Marvin Lubinsky. Fifty missions make him think it must be a lot harder to get pre-distressed than it used to be.
For him, just one was enough to do the trick.
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Lubinsky acquired his bomber jacket 58 years ago, as a B-17 pilot flying over Germany in World War II.
Then he gave it away.
Now it has returned to him, a thousand times over.
In September 1944, Lubinsky was a newly arrived Eighth U.S. Air Force pilot with a B-17 bomber group stationed near Rattlesden in Suffolk, England. The group was part of a massive, ongoing assault on German industrial centers that helped to end the Second World War.
Air Force policy called for a new pilot, on his first mission, to fly as co-pilot with a veteran crew to get a sense of what a real bombing run was like.
On that first flight, as his plane approached its target deep inside Germany, Lubinsky found himself transfixed by the appearance of a coal-black cloud bank hovering at 27,000 feet.
The bank stretched from one side of the horizon to another, resounding with muted explosions, illuminated from within by bright orange flashes. It was as if someone had taken a sliver of hell and found a way to suspend it in midair.
That was Lubinsky’s introduction to flak. By then, the Germans had perfected it.
The mottled thicket of radar-guided anti-aircraft explosions sent hundreds of shards of red-hot metal hurtling toward the thin fuselages of the B-17s and the crew inside each one of them.
Lubinsky turned to the pilot as the plane drew closer to the thunderous cloud bank.
“We can’t go through that and live,” he said.
The pilot laughed hysterically. “I know,” he replied. “We can’t.”
But they did, and Lubinsky went on to fly 29 more missions over Germany with his own hand-picked bomber crew, all of whom met as flight instructors at a Florida airfield and insisted on being sent to Europe together.
That was the limit, 30 missions, the Eighth Air Force brass having correctly assumed that nobody could take much more than that. And even at 30 missions, fliers who managed to survive their tours came home feeling they had cheated the odds.
They were right. Half of the 10,000 B-17s sent into action during the war failed to return.
Half of the U. S. Army Air Force casualties in World War II were suffered by the Eighth Air Force: 26,000 dead; 19,000 wounded or captured.
Lubinsky and his crew were among the lucky ones. When he returned, he donated his bomber jacket to the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio.
Last year, a researcher with Hasbro, the toy company that produces GI Joe, read an Air Force history about the crew and happened to see Lubinsky’s bomber jacket.
The original bomber jackets had no pockets in front, by the way, because it wouldn’t look good for men who were supposed to be serving their country to be standing around with their hands in their pockets.
But combat fliers were allowed to personalize the jackets, and during the war, Lubinsky had his done up with bombs to represent each mission and painted on the back with a Kewpie doll posed beneath a single word, drawn in dramatic, gothic lettering: “Stinky.” That was his nickname for his infant daughter and the name he had painted on the nose of his own B-17.
Intrigued, the researcher called Lubinsky, 81 and living in Clearwater, and asked for his permission to use the bomber jacket as a model for a miniaturized B-17 pilot uniform to be issued as part of the GI Joe series.
The retired lieutenant colonel agreed.
“I certainly wasn’t looking for any glory,” he says. “The love of my family is glory enough.”
So the GI Joe uniform set was issued last December, decorated with a World War II era photo of Lubinsky and his crew standing in front of their B-17.
“Something about this crew just struck a chord,” says Derryl DePriest, director of marketing for GI Joe.
B-17 crews were close — you couldn’t go through such a gut-wrenching, suicidal partnership without bonding like brothers.
In one of those bizarre dynamics of wartime, crews stuck together and avoided getting close to other crews, knowing that the guys they had breakfast with might not be home for dinner. You lived as a unit and died as a unit. You stuck together because you had no choice.
Having chosen each other, assembling on their own after meeting at Avon Park, a Florida flight-training airfield, Lubinsky’s crew members were a particularly tightknit ensemble.
They had their jokesters in Bronx-born radar navigator Joe Nidich and waist gunner Adolf Fix, who responded to the ribbing he got for his first name and his German heritage by growing a Hitleresque mustache. After a bombing run over a part of Germany where Fix knew he had relatives, he looked down and muttered over the interphone: “Here’s to ya, granpa.”
They had their debonair ladies’ man in navigator Robert Simeone, who fell in love with an English girl and had to be coaxed back to the base after going AWOL in pursuit of her.
They had a gentle giant in Malcolm Colby, a 6-foot-2-inch co-pilot who recalls a fight in the barracks with bombardier Everest Benton, a 5-foot-2, 108-pound former jockey. Colby simply put his palm on the top of Benton’s head, Three Stooges style, and held him off at arm’s length as he flailed away.
“After a while, we all just started laughing,” says Colby, who lives in DeBary. “We were like brothers.”
On Feb. 9, 1945, they joined a select fraternity.
They become one of the few B-17 crews to survive an attack from a weapon that might have turned the tide of the war in Germany’s favor if it had been developed sooner.
That day, their plane was among 1,300 B-17s that flew over Germany to drop 4,000 tons of bombs on targets in Lutzkendorf, Weimar and Magdeburg. Colby remembers look- ing up and seeing two unfamiliar aircraft streaking toward them at a speed that seemed impossible. He’d never seen a jet before. Neither had anyone else in the crew.
The Messerschmitt 262s that were headed straight for them had more speed and better weapons than anything either the British or the Americans could muster. Germany had been struggling to build the revolutionary aircraft and get them into the fray, but had been thwarted by lucky hits by allied airstrikes on the production line.
The jets began firing at Lubinsky’s B-17 with their 30-millimeter cannons. Huge chunks of the bomber began to disappear. One shot glanced off the wing and knocked the No. 4 engine out. Another shredded half the tail, destroying the rudder. Still another struck in the middle of the ship, tearing up the control cable and oxygen lines.
None of the crew was hurt, and Lubinsky responded to the attack with a bit of aerial trickery that probably saved their lives.
He put the plane into a spiral dive, as though he’d lost control and was plummeting to earth. When he reached a low-level cloud bank, he pulled out of the dive and managed to coax the aircraft to an allied airstrip in Brussels.
Today, he shrugs off the maneuver: “You trained so much that the right thing to do just came naturally to you.”
His crewmembers aren’t quite so low-key about it. They say he saved their lives. They say that while Lubinsky stayed cool, a captain who had hitchhiked a ride to observe the bombing formation went berserk and tried to bail out. Lubinsky “told the flight engineer to cold-cock the guy if he had to,” to keep him aboard, says Colby.
Five of the original nine crewmembers who met in Avon Park and survived the skies over Germany are still alive — two in Arizona, two in Florida and one in New York.
Today is Memorial Day, and the prescribed emotion of the day is gratitude. But it’s hard not to be a little jealous of people such as Lubinsky and his crew, people who have the luxury of savoring a clear-cut victory. They have lived long enough to see themselves replicated in the plastic action-adventure figures of an era whose enemies are more elusive, whose battles are far more nebulous than their own.
They remain close-knit, mourning the passing of their fellows, keeping track of each other’s children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, getting together for reunions now and then, still like brothers after all these years.
It must be nice.
“Whenever they get together, they fight the war all over again,” says Adolph Fix’s wife, Evelyn. “And they always win.”
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