Serving on the Alley Oop

George Kuchenbecker remembers the image that led to his enlistment in the Army Air Corps in September 1943.

A grey-haired Uncle Sam with a red, white, and blue striped hat pointed at him and told him that he too could have his wings. So he signed up to get them and left Minneapolis just five days after he graduated from South High School in January 1944.

During the 23 months, six days, 12 hours and 30 minutes that followed, Kuchenbecker served as a B-24 tailgunner in the 780th Squadron, completing a total of 13 missions.

Sixty-three years later, Kuchenbecker, 81, is part of a KCTS Channel 9 documentary by Brad Branch titled “On The Wing.” The documentary tells the story of the 780th Squadron and aired for the first time this Veterans Day, on Nov. 11.

“I knew all of the (men in the documentary),” Kuchenbecker, a resident of Shoreline, said. “They were my flying buddies. There were also a lot of them that I knew that never made a round trip over there and back.”

The 780th Squadron was based out of Panatella Air Base in Italy. At the time, a shower was 35 miles away in Bari along the Adriatic coastline, drinking water was kept cool in lister packs, or canvas bags, poker was popular and Spam was a regular menu item. Kuchenbecker looked forward to receiving tins of cookies and popcorn from a cousin in Arizona.

“She was always sending me good stuff,” he said. “She would have a butcher save the tins from meat and fill them. One time she got an empty Spam can. I opened the end that was not opened by the butcher so it was still sealed, and heard, ‘Cookie got a can of Spam from home.’”

In the air, Kuchenbecker was part of a crew of ten men often found on the B-24J Liberator named Alley Oop.

“Our primary charge was oil refineries in the Balkans and Romania,” Kuchenbecker said. “One of our main missions was to get rid of Hitler’s oil.”

But the missions weren’t exclusively oil. Railroads in Vienna and other “targets of opportunity” were also hit.

“If coming home you couldn’t get to your primary, you looked for some place to do some good with your load on the way,” he said. “We came in at 25-26-27,000 feet to dump the load and if we got half the load within 100 yards we were doing quite well.”

Still, he said, it is 100 percent safe to say the plane never returned without holes. Antiaircraft fire known as flak, ripped through the plane and had an audible as well as a visual presence.

“The thing that very seldom shows up in any of the films you see is looking straight down into the burst; it’s a bright fire red, big, totally molten piece of steel … and then all hell breaks loose,” he said.

After World War II, Kuchenbecker earned his first class radio telephone license — a decision that served him well in his capacity at the Fairchild Air Force Base near Spokane whenhe was called back to serve at the beginning of the Korean War. Fourteen months later, he said he very graciously severed his relationship with the Air Force.

Before the Korean War began, however, he made a return trip home to Minneapolis to visit his favorite teacher.

“Sitting in the back of the room was this cute blonde,” he said.

He learned her name was Gloria. The couple married in 1949 and later had two sons.

“He didn’t talk about (war),” Gloria said. “I couldn’t get him to say anything when we were first married because it was too fresh but now it’s gotten to be that there are so many veterans who are dying.”

Through annual reunions, Gloria said she has gotten to know her husband’s flying buddies.

“The same stories get better every year,” she said. “They flew higher, farther and dropped more bombs every year.”

Although he admittedly may not remember all the details of his terms of service, Kuchenbecker proudly displays a painting of Alley Oop and two painted portraits in the downstairs of his home. The portraits are hung on the same wall — one of Kuchenbecker at 19 years old and the other, of him in his flight overalls, painted a little more than a year ago.

“I met him at the Museum of Flight (in Seattle) when the B-17s and B-24s were flown in,” Judy Ryan said. “He was sitting outside smoking a pipe.”

“I was kind of taking a breather and she came up and asked to take my picture and I was going to put the pipe down and she said, ‘No, I want the pipe,’” Kuchenbecker said.

Ryan invited the couple over to her home on Memorial Day 2007 to present the portrait.

“I just about lost it,” he said. “We got up to leave and she said, ‘Aren’t you going to take your picture?’”

When asked for his thoughts on the Iraq war, the retired staff sergeant referred back to a day that lives in infamy.

“After being attacked on Dec. 7, 1941, it was a logical progression of history that we should get involved but in this particular situation that we now find ourselves in, I am quite certain that we have no business being there,” he said. “We cannot be the world’s policeman and survive.”