PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Watching the Apple TV+ miniseries "Masters of the Air" recently, I was reminded of Mike Hofkin from Hatfield, Montgomery County. Like so many families on this Memorial Day, Mike's is hoping that we all remember and respect the incalculable price that has been paid in all of our wars.
A few years ago, Mike mailed me a detailed draft of a story about his dad, Lt. Elliot Hofkin, a B-17 Flying Fortress pilot in WWII who had sometimes daily moments of near death.
Mike is soft spoken but very proud of what his dad did in the war. Piloting the enormous B-17 in formation with hundreds of other planes, dodging machine gun fire and anti-aircraft fire on dangerous missions to destroy targets inside German-occupied Europe.
It was airmen like Elliot who inspired the series, which follows the 100th Bomb Group, a B-17 heavy bomber unit in the Eighth Air Force in eastern England.
Mike's story was as captivating as the fatality rate was shocking. Elliot survived the war, along with his crew, but the stats on these missions are grim. Almost 13,000 B-17s were built, and about 5,000 of them never returned.
American casualties, Mike notes, were higher in the early years — 1942 and 1943. High-speed fighter planes faced so many dangers. Odds of survival went up after Hitler's air force was decimated.
"Before D-Day, they said that if you were in the Eighth Air Force as a pilot or crew member of a B-17 or any other kind of airplane that was in the conflict, the chances of you getting out of there alive was like 30%."
Conditions were unbearable. Deep in the heart of Germany, Mike’s dad and his crew managed through bitter cold to care for wounded gunners, praying that they had enough fuel to get back.
"It was basically around minus 50 degrees,” Mike said, remembering his dad’s stories. “He told me that he didn't want to put on the heaters they had for your uniforms because he didn't want to have to worry about disconnecting wires if you had to get out of the airplane fast".
The worst hardship of all — low fuel and bad calculations.
"It was a rather long mission to a certain part of France,” Mike recalled. “Those in charge didn't get the correct amount of fuel for each airplane to use during this particular mission. A lot of airplanes were running out of fuel coming back."
Elliot’s B-17 made it back with one less engine. Against all odds, he survived the war. Too many didn’t. Like the soldiers who landed in the early hours of D-Day several years later, those early pilots and crew members disappeared in the fog of war.
Over 100,000 Americans died in World War II bombing raids. B-17 crews just like Elliot’s team would come back to base in England and stand by the runway, keeping watch as so few planes returned.