99-year-old Bruce Cook - B-17 Ball Turret Gunner in the 8th Air Force

“Anytime I got in that plane and we took off, I told myself that I'm coming home. That was my attitude.”

Meet 99-year-old Bruce Cook, World War II veteran of the 379th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force. He flew 35 combat missions over Europe as a B-17 ball turret gunner.

Bruce Cook grew up in Suwanee, Georgia, raised by his uncle and aunt after losing his mother at just a few months old. When he graduated from high school in 1943, he dreamed of flying a P-38 as an Army Air Corps pilot. But after washing out of aviation cadet training for what the military called a “negative attitude regarding military aviation,” he was devastated.

Determined to stay in the air, Bruce trained as a ball turret gunner—one of the most dangerous jobs on a B-17 Flying Fortress. At just 138 pounds, he was small enough to squeeze into the cramped bubble underneath the aircraft. “I could not get in that ball turret with my parachute on,” he recalled while describing his first mission. “The pilot said, well just take it off and just lay it aside there and maybe if we get shot down, you might have a chance to get out. All I could think about on that mission was what happens if we get shot down and I don't have a parachute.”

Bruce flew 35 combat missions over Europe with the 524th Bomb Squadron, 379th Bomb Group out of Kimbolton, England. Targets included submarine yards, airfields, bridges, and ball-bearing factories. “We would bomb just about anything that would disrupt the [German] war effort,” he explained.

On one of his first missions, he and the tail gunner both opened fire on a German fighter. The plane exploded in midair, but there was some debate over who brought it down. "So we flipped a coin, and he won.” Bruce laughed.

One time, a piece of flak about the size of a dime landed inside Cook's turret. "I wasn't hit with it, so it didn't bother me," he said.

“I don't think people realize how much of a price that's been paid for the freedoms that we have," Bruce argues. "I think it's good now to get out as much about what happened back then."