Friday, April 25, 2025
John Lucky Luckadoo, of Dallas, 104 years old, was a member of a famous bomber group during World War II.
“It was the Bloody 100th Bomb Group,” says Lucky. “That group was the subject of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s docu series entitled “Masters of the Air.” And it’s about my bomb group. And what a goof-off outfit it was. We were terribly young and didn’t have any idea what we were getting into when we went against the formidable Luftwaffe, the German Air Force.”
It was a time when war was raging in Europe. Hitler had occupied all of continental Europe and was about to jump across the channel and invade England. The British were crying out for help. There were fears that if England fell, Hitler would then head for the United States. Lucky flew 25 bombing missions over Germany in 89 days.
“Those days, if you lasted more than eight missions, you were on borrowed time.”
At age 20, he was a pilot in a six-plane formation of B17s, the plane known as the Flying Fortress. The plane had a crew of ten. He says it was high altitude daytime bombing missions, which had never been done before and was an unproven strategy. But Commanders of the American bomber force insisted it was the best way to bring Hitler to his knees.
“We were flying at high altitudes, 25 to 29,000 feet. And that was one of the things that we had not counted on: the absolute bitter cold that we had to endure. It was 50 and 60 degrees below zero. We soon discovered that we didn’t have just one enemy; we had four, and they all began with the letter F.
“The first was fear. We were scared naturally at that tender age. We were citizen soldiers, and we were going against professionals. Second was the flak. The anti-aircraft firing at us from the ground was devastating, and we had no defense against that. The third F was the fighters, and the fourth but not least was the freezing cold. “
Although he was never shot down, he was hit on every mission.
“The Germans were very adept at what they were doing. We were going against a very formidable enemy. They knew what they were doing. They would get out about three miles in front of us in a line abreast. They were flying ME 109s, FW 190s, and ME110 Rocket Ships. They would fly straight through our formation. There was only four seconds in that interval that their guns would bear on us, and our guns would bear on them. It seemed like four years, but it was only a brief time. They would just spray our formations, and it was kind of like playing chicken. You’d see those wings just lighting up with their machine guns and rockets.”
After the war, Lucky built some of the first air-conditioned shopping malls.
