WWII planes — and pilots’ memories — converge in Blaine

Basil Hackleman felt the years melt away as he watched the B-17, buffeted by hot summer winds, come into view over the airport in Blaine on Thursday.

“When I see that, I feel 22 up here,’’ said Hackleman as he pointed to his head.

Then, Hackleman, sighing, pointed to the rest of his body.

“But I’m 92 everywhere else,’’ he said.

Hackleman, who flew the B-17 during WWII, arose at 2 a.m. Thursday  to drive from his home in Springfield, Mo., to be in Blaine for the weekend.  The Wings of Freedom Tour is displaying the B-17 and a rare, operational B-24 at the Golden Wings Museum at the Blaine airport. A P-51 fighter plane also is on display at that exhibit that runs through the weekend.

I went to the exhibit in the hope of coming across someone like Hackleman, for the older I’ve become the more I regret the conversations I didn’t have with my late father about his time in Italy as a co-pilot of  B-24. When I was younger, I didn’t ask questions and he seldom brought up the subject of flying the bomber that was known as the Liberator.

Hackleman said he understood the silence.

“I didn’t talk about it [WWII] until I was about 70 years old,’’ Hackleman said.

Why the 50-year lag?

“There’s a lot of things you really don’t want to think about,’’ Hackleman said. “Just think about it. You make friends, you’re flying and they’re in the formation with you, a couple of hundred feet away. Then, pffff, they’re gone. It happens just like that. That’s something you just can’t spend a lot of time thinking about.’’

Christmas mission

One of the few things my father did reveal was in something he wrote a year before his death. It was about a Christmas mission in 1944.

“Twenty-five  Christmases have come and gone,’’ he wrote. “Now, the ghost has returned.’’

In this case, the “ghost’’ involved a primary mission scrapped by inclement weather. The standing orders for bomber crews was to never come back to base with bombs. If the primary mission was scrapped, find a secondary target. My father’s squadron found a small Austrian town which had an intersection of railroad crossings. The seven planes in the squadron dropped their bombs, bomb-sight cameras recorded the deed and the squadron was “lavishly praised for our exemplary execution’’ of the mission.

But years later, my father wondered who those bombs might have fallen on.

I told Hackleman the story and he nodded his head knowingly.

“That’s one of the things that always bothered me,’’ he said. “You didn’t know who was down there. Old people? Children? It’s one of those things that would come back and bother you later. You just have to remember there also were people down there trying to shoot you down.’’

Battle losses

Losses in battle, and training, were huge, especially early in the war.

Hackleman said that he and his crew were among 32 crews, of 10 each, that left New Jersey for England in 1943. Of those, just three crews completed all of their missions, meaning the others were shot down and either imprisoned or killed.

Hackleman carries a faded old photograph of the windshield of his B-17.

“You can see my goggles right there,’’ he said, pointing at the picture. “And you see bullet holes there and there.’’

There were 18,000 B-24s manufactured during WWII. Six thousand of those were shot down, another 6,000 crashed in training. The Liberator that landed at Blaine Thursday is one of just two Liberators still operational.

The old planes are maintained and flown by volunteers from across the country.

On Thursday, Paul Draper, a Michigander, was flying the B-24 from Mankato to Blaine. It was not an easy flight.

“It’s not a stable plane,’’ Draper said. “It wants to deviate, especially on a day like this [hot with gusty winds]. You’re always using both hands.’’

Draper is amused by the reaction he gets when people see him get out of the plane.

“They always say, ‘You’re so young to be flying ones of these,’’’ he said.  “I always say, ‘Not really. Actually, I’m really old. If I would have been flying these back then, they would have been calling me Pappy.’’’

“I was 23 and I was done with my missions and back in the states as an instructor,’’ said Hackleman.

He’s flown the old B-17 on numerous occasions in recent years and may fly again this weekend.  

If he flies, in his mind he’ll be 22 again. His body will tell a different story.

“When we were flying these,’’ he recalled, “you’d jump up, grab a bar and pull yourself up into the plane and land on your back in the catwalk. Now, I need a ladder and about 10 guys pushing.’’

Ah, the separation of mind and body.

“A few years ago, I put on my uniform,’’ he said, smiling. “It fit just fine, though I had to unbutton the buttons on my jack so I could keep breathing.’’