The Bloody Hundredth

I finally saw the Apple TV series “Masters of the Air” and the companion documentary “The Bloody Hundredth.”

I am honored to call one of the Bloody 100th Pilots my friend.

In 2019, his nephew Peter and I flew to Michigan in the Tiger Baron to pick up Robert Shoens and take him and his daughter to one of the last reunions of the 100th Bomb Group’s surviving members at the Air Force Academy in Colorado.

Five years later, I still struggle to find words to describe it. I can’t do it. All I can do is be in awe.

I feel grateful to have been there, let alone the one responsible for getting Robert to the event. They called me “Robert’s pilot” the whole weekend, and it still gives me goosebumps. Imagine being a WWII B-17 pilot’s pilot. Yeah…

Like my Grandfather, who served in the Pacific in WWII, they were ordinary men thrust into extraordinary circumstances in a call to defend the world and future generations from tyranny.

The show does a pretty good job of giving us a tiny bit of what it must have felt like to board a thin-skinned, slow bomber and lumber into flack and enemy aircraft fire. But I suspect being there was on a whole different level.

It is estimated that about 3.5% of the world’s population was killed during those 6 years. Many from famine. Most innocent (on all sides). I hope we’ve learned many lessons from that terrible struggle, but I suspect we’ve not. We owe it to them and ourselves to be better to each other.

Robert passed away about a month ago at the age of 102. He didn’t get to see the show, but he didn’t have to. He lived it.

Godspeed, my friend.