Tale of a tailgunner

When he was growing up in Eastpoint, Kenneth Tucker dreamed of one day flying airplanes.

His daughter, Wanda Tucker Goodwin, would later dream of becoming a writer.

This week, Goodwin’s come true, with the release of a wonderful memoir of how her father’s did some six decades earlier.

Father and daughter have collaborated on “Last Roll Call,” a marvelously written 184-page paperback, chock full of vintage photographs, of Tucker’s adventures as a tail gunner on a B-17 bomber flying out of Italy during World War II.

Combining Tucker’s detailed recollections with his daughter’s loving capture of her 84-year-old dad’s humor and insight, the book calls itself “one of the last memoirs” of the war, mainly because the rest of Tucker’s tight-knit, 10-man crew aboard their Flying Fortress all have passed away.

A retired Air Force sergeant who lives with his wife, Ginny, in Lynn Haven, Tucker wanted to record his story ever since shipping off in Aug. 1943 aboard a Trailways bus out of Apalachicola. He had worked the summer in his dad’s crab house in Eastpoint, following graduation from Carrabelle High School, and was eager to fly.

“So you want to be a hotshot pilot?” cracked a cocky sergeant upon his arrival at Camp Blanding for processing.

“I just want to be a pilot, sir,” was his reply.

As it turned out, a March 1994 letter from Gen. Hap Arnold, commanding general of the Army Air Corps, to Tucker’s squadron, then training at Santa Ana Army Air Field in California, would alter his dream.

Because there were too many men in air crew training, Tucker’s squadron was taken out of the mix and given a choice of other fields experiencing shortfalls.

He chose armament training, as the regimen was the shortest. “I wanted to see action, not classrooms,” he writes.

From there began the fulfillment of a young man’s hopes, and his duty, flying the required 35 combat missions in cramped tailgunner quarters, in sub-zero temperatures, manning two 50 mm machine guns as he scanned the hostile skies.

Tucker’s aircraft, named “Kwiturbitchin” by mischievous ground crews, flew with the 15^th Air Force, 97^th Bomb Group, 414^th Bomb Squadron, out of a rustic base in Amendola, Italy. The setting was far less glamorous than the home bases of the more celebrated 8^th Air Force out of England, and it is in honor of those fighters, who helped shorten the war by targeting oil refineries in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia, that Tucker devotes his attention.

He kept a careful diary of his adventures until May 2, 1945, six days before the war in Europe ended, when he was sent to Naples for discharge. It was then military censors confiscated it.

“They said I had too many specific details about missions,” writes Tucker. “The floor around the checker’s desk was littered with photographs.”

More than 60 years later. Goodwin stepped in to help bring that diary to life. After 36 years in education, including teaching ESE at Chapman Elementary in the early ‘80s and the last 25 as a reading teacher in Panama City, she retired two years ago.

Goodwin pored over with her father, an avid reader and crossword puzzle fan, every memoir of World War II aviation they could find. But they often found them tedious and dull, overloaded with minutia and obscure details of the flying experience.

“It’s been a real adventure for me,” she said. “I said ‘Dad, we’re not going to write a boring memoir.’ We’re going to tell it like it was. That’s what I think separates my dad’s memoirs.”

            Still, Tucker refused to compromise when it came time to author his story. “I would tell it to make things a little livelier, make them more interesting, any way that I could,” said Goodwin. “When I would try to get him to add things, if it wasn’t true, if it didn’t happen, he wouldn’t let me do it. I had to really stick to the facts.”

            Tucker also had editing help from retired Air Force Lt. Col Raymond Tucker, no relation, whose expertise enabled him to correct any factual errors. “I felt real good after he edited it,” said Goodwin. “He’s an expert.”

            What emerged is a compelling story, told with the enthusiasm of an 18-year-old boy transformed by the loyalty, love and respect of older mentors.

            “Nobody on our crew ever raised his voice on the intercom,” said Tucker, recalling only a single instance was profanity was ever used, when the right waist gunner swore up a storm after witnessing Nazi troops shooting American crewmen as they parachuted out of their stricken planes.

            Flak from the ground was the gravest threat faced by the B-17s, which by the time of Tucker’s missions were being protected by fighter plans in tight formation.

            “You’re five miles high and you don’t see them down there,” Tucker said. “As the war progressed, our flak got worse. You don’t know what it’s like unless you sat there and rocked back and forth from concussion from flak bursts.”

            Today, Tucker’s medals, including a Purple Heart he earned after a fist-sized chunk of flak tore into his right shoulder on a bombing mission over Vienna, are on a Wall of Honor in his daughter’s home.

            “My attention always drifts to the old photographs of these brave young men,” he writes. “As I gaze at the faces of my crew, for a fleeting moment, those pictures seem to come alive and I can hear the faint sound of their laughter; sometimes I think I hear them calling my name.

            “It’s sad for me to acknowledge that they’re all gone now, except for me. I’m the last one - the last voice - the only one left to tell our story. Sadly, I know that it’s just a matter of time before I stand, for the last time, before my crew and make my last roll call,” Tucker writes.

            “It was a different generation,” he said, reflecting on what he might tell a young person today about his adventures. “Most of the guys in my age group were products of the Great Depression. We had experienced hard times. You had more of an appreciation for what you did have.

            “Everybody was a volunteer, nobody was forced to fly combat,” he said. “I was real proud of what I did. I was honored to be able to fly during World War II, because that’s what I wanted to do.”