I’ve been writing Memorial Day columns for more than 40 years. I’ve listened to hundreds of combat veterans who served in World War II and Korea tell their stories with only one request.
Please, don’t call me a hero. The real heroes never made it home.
You can’t interview them. The closest you can come is 105-year-old Irvin Poff from Ojai, who sat in his wheelchair last week with a handheld microphone close to his lips — holding a roomful of local veterans, decades his junior in age, in the palm of his hand.
If you want your kids and grandkids to really understand why they don’t have to go to school on Monday, let Irvin Poff tell them. He has only one request.
“I don’t consider myself a hero by any means, and I don’t intend to brag,” the World War II B-17 bomber pilot said. “I’m just telling you how it was. I was scared plenty.”
105-year-old Irvin Poff, a WWII B-17 bomber pilot, shared his story with a roomful of local veterans. He was honored with a certificate of recognition from Wings Over Wendy’s Ed Reynolds (Photo courtesy Ed Reynolds)
You’re flying at 25,000 feet with the lives of your 10-man crew and the world’s freedom on your shoulders. You’re shivering because it’s zero degrees up there in the skies over southern Italy where your job is to bomb well-guarded oil fields supplying the Axis — the bad guys.
Even the sheepskin you’re wearing doesn’t protect you from the blistering cold.
“I looked down and there were icicles on the bottom of my legs from my sweat. In front of me were puffs of smoke — flack from over 200 anti-aircraft guns trained on us from the ground. The sky was dark with it.”
Suddenly, your number three engine quits. You’ve been hit. You fight mightily to stay in tight formation with the other bombers because if you drop out you know what’s going to happen.
“The chances of making it home by yourself are pretty slim,” Irv said. “A single plane is a prime target.”
You activate emergency power, drop your bombs on the target, and fly home on three engines and more than 200 bullet holes underneath your B-17 — never breaking formation.
Mission accomplished. No enemy aircraft and tanks trying to kill our infantrymen on the ground will be filling up with gas from those oil refineries anymore.
It doesn’t make you a hero, but it comes pretty close.
Irv was born on a farm in Missouri in 1919. The doctor who delivered him arrived in a horse and buggy. The Model T Fords couldn’t make it through the muddy, dirt roads after a heavy rainstorm.
“I went to a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher for eight grades,” he said. “For two years, I was the only student in my grade. When the teacher asked a question of the class, I knew who had to answer it.”
There were a total of 43 students in his high school. In his senior year, he was the class valedictorian.
“I’m not bragging,” Irv said. “Being the valedictorian got me a Sears Roebuck scholarship of $15 a month for nine months, my first year at the University of Missouri agriculture department.”
It paid for two squares a day in the school cafeteria where Irv filled up on the stew for 25 cents a bowl.
“It wasn’t that watery stew you eat with a spoon today,” he said. “You used a fork for this stew.”
After college, he volunteered for pilot training and was accepted on Dec. 7, 1942 in the Army Air Force, exactly one year after Pearl Harbor.
Forty-five crews were in training when five of them were pulled out for immediate deployment. Irv’s crew was one of them.
He never put a beautiful woman’s image on the side of his B-17, like in the movies, because he climbed into a different cockpit just about every morning.
“The squadron I was assigned to had lost half of its 24 aircraft the day before I arrived,” he said. “They needed new pilots and we flew whatever plane was air-worthy that day.”
In three months, he had completed half of the 50 missions he would fly destroying enemy railroads lines and refineries — saving Allied lives on the ground.
“After flying half the missions, pilots and crews were given a week off for rest and recuperation,” Irv said. “We turned it down and kept flying. I finished my 50 combat missions 10 days short of six months.
“I’ve been told it’s a record, but I don’t know for sure.”
From combat, he flew for peace. He and his crew were assigned to fly seven chaplains for a tour of the holy lands.
He finished World War II stationed at Love Field in Dallas, and went to work for the USDA Soil Conservation Service. He was a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force reserve.
And now, at 105, he’s among the last of his generation of combat veterans who went out and saved the world.
Just don’t call them heroes.
Dennis McCarthy’s column runs on Sunday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.
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