On This day

It's my birthday today. Please, no cards or presents. No Twitter or Facebook shout-outs. (Some of you got up earlier than I did so you already sent me birthday greetings. Thank you. It really is appreciated.) I bring up my birthday because for years I would tell people my birth date was significant because it coincided with the fall of the Alamo.

Now, however, I can relate another momentous occurrence—March 6, 1944, was the first successful daylight bombing attack on Berlin by the 8th Air Force.

The other day Gilda and I, with Gilda's sister Barbara and her husband Alan, visited the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, AZ. It's a fabulous museum, rivaling if not exceeding the new Smithsonian Air & Space Museum outside Washington, DC. What distinguishes the PASM, beyond its diversity of aircraft, are the knowledgeable and personable docents.

As we walked into Hanger #5, known as the 390th Memorial Museum, we were greeted by Richard Bushong. It was March 3. Richard told us 67 years ago to the day he was co-piloting a B-17 bomber on the first attempt by the 8th Air Force to penetrate Berlin's defenses. Bad weather scrapped the mission that day, and the next. But on March 6, the then 20-year-old Bushong and his crew of nine other airmen bombed Berlin. Eight hundred and twenty-one B-17 and B-24 bombers took off from England. Sixty-nine planes never made it back across the Channel. The 390th Bomb Group lost just one bomber while shooting down 27 German fighters.

A lanky Ohioan even at his advanced age of 87, Bushong served in the air force into 1971, flying F-4 Phantom jets in Vietnam. He retired as a colonel.

It is a remarkable experience to listen to history from someone who lived it first-hand. If you've ever seen a war movie of WWII bomber missions (films like Catch-22 or Twelve O'Clock High), you know the side gunners on the planes stood at open cutouts so their guns could swivel easily. With winds whipping by at 190-210 miles per hour, Bushong related, temperatures inside the plane plummeted to 30 to 50 degrees below zero. The crew wore electric suits under their sheepskin jackets and pants to keep from freezing. Just hearing about the cold made me shiver in the warm Arizona climate.

Aside from my birthday link to his historic exploits with the 390th Bomb Group, we share another common date, sad for him, happy for me. While laid up in hospital (a reaction to some bad food), Bushong's plane and crew were shot down. It happened December 16. That's a happy day for my family, the day Ellie was born.