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A Tribute to Ironworker Bill Hack?and all U.S. Veterans

By Berry Craig

Chester W. “Bill” Hack had survived bloody air combat and the fiery crash of a B-17 bomber into the English Channel.

The Kentuckian was stateside teaching aerial gunnery when he volunteered to fly combat missions again.

Nazi fighters and anti-aircraft fire forced Hack’s bomber to crash into the sea on May 29, 1943. “When we ditched, I was dazed,” said Hack, an 89-year-old retired member of Ironworkers Local 782 in Paducah, Ky.

But when I smelled my hair burning, it gave me the strength to live.

World War II combat veteran and dedicated union member Bill Hack.

Hack was barely 22 on the day he came closest to losing his life in World War II. It was his third mission against the Germans in a big, olive-green, four-engine bomber the Army Air Force called a “Flying Fortress.” Hack’s plane was nicknamed “Barrel House Bessie.”

Jeff Wiggins, a United Steelworker and president of the Paducah-based Western Kentucky Area Council, AFL-CIO, says “Bill is one of my heroes.”

“He fought for our freedom in Europe in World War II, and he fought for the freedom of working people to be able to earn a good living in our country.”

In 1997, Hack received the W.C. Young Award, the highest honor the council bestows. Hack represented his local on the council for many years.

Hack worked for 53 years out of Local 782 and ultimately became the union’s business manager. He says he fought for unions in Detroit before he fought for his country in Europe. Like many Kentucky families, the Hacks of Paducah migrated to the Motor City in the 1930s, seeking employment.

Hack’s first job was in a nonunion shop.

There were very harsh rules. I was just a teenager, but I ran a machine for twelve and a half cents an hour. I couldn’t leave that machine to go to the bathroom without them writing down what time I left and when I came out. They worked me twelve hours a day, six days a week. It made me think something had to be done about such matters.

Hack moved on to work for Chrysler Motors. He eagerly joined the UAW and participated in the drive that organized the giant auto company in 1937, shortly after General Motors went union. He became a UAW member and a labor activist at age 16. “I needed a job, so I got a phony birth certificate that said I was 18,” he recalled with a grin. 

After he’d clock out at Chrysler, Hack would go to the Ford plants and help his UAW brothers and sisters struggling for recognition. Henry Ford was bitterly anti-union. He hired a private army to keep the UAW out.

I went out there and fought the police and the strikebreakers. I know what it’s like to have to fight for decent wages and working conditions.

Ford didn’t accept the UAW until 1941, the year the United States entered World War II. Drafted in 1942, Hack ended up an aerial gunner with the Chelveston, England-based 305th “Can Do” Bomb Group. The group’s target on May 29, 1943, was the heavily fortified German submarine base at St. Nazaire, France, on the Atlantic Ocean. 

When Staff Sgt. Hack flew with the 305th, U.S. heavy bomber crews?usually 10 men per plane?had to complete 25 missions before they could go home. A flier’s chance of reaching the magic number was one in three, he said.

On the St. Nazaire raid, Hack was Bessie’s right waist gunner, manning a 50-caliber machine gun about halfway along the B-17’s pudgy, round fuselage. He was filling in for a gunner killed in action. He usually flew in another bomber dubbed “Me and My Gal.”

Messerschmitt 109 and Focke-Wulf 190 fighters riddled Bessie and the other lumbering B-17s, shooting some of them down. A 20-millimeter cannon shell tore through the fuselage, missing Hack’s head by inches and slicing his oxygen line in two. When he reached down for his metal emergency bottle, another shell blew it up in his hands.

The left waist gunner plugged Hack into his emergency bottle, but his comfort was fleeting. Flak over St. Nazaire destroyed more B-17s and riddled Bessie’s number two engine, setting it ablaze. The B-17 nosed into what seemed to be a death dive?”from 28,000 feet to about 500 feet before the pilot and co-pilot were able to pull us out,” Hack said.

The dive put out the engine fire.

After the pilots righted the plane, Hack dragged the unconscious tail gunner to the radio room. He took over the twin 50-caliber machine guns, the stinger in Bessie’s tail.

Limping on three engines, Bessie was easy prey for German fighters. A pair of Messerschmitts jumped the B-17 about 100 miles from England.

Hack fired at the Nazi planes, which turned tail. He could hardly believe he chased them away?and, in fact, he didn’t.

I looked up and saw a flight of British Spitfires. Those Spitfires were the most beautiful airplanes I ever saw.

Even so, Bessie didn’t make it home. The pilots had to ditch her about 50 miles from England. While they brought the plane down, the rest of the crew braced themselves in the radio room.

Bessie hit the sea hard. The impact hurled Hack and another crewman through an aluminum door into the empty bomb bay, which burst into flames.

Hack splashed sea water on his burning face and hair, dousing the fire. Stunned, bruised and bleeding, he managed to flee Bessie before she sank. “Fire was spreading all over the water,” Hack said.

He swam through the blazing high-octane fuel to reach a life raft. It had been shot full of holes and couldn’t be fully inflated.

Hack and eight other crewmen?all of them wounded?were hanging on to the sides of the dinghy when a British seaplane arrived to rescue them. But the channel was too rough for a landing, and the flying boat turned back.

At the same time, Hack and the other fliers watched helplessly as the tail gunner’s lifeless body floated farther away. “His name was Ralph Erwin,” Hack said softly.

Meanwhile, Bessie’s crew faced another peril. “Hypothermia,” Hack said. “They told me that even in May the English Channel is usually around 48 degrees.”

Hack and his crewmates were in the water for about 90 minutes before a British rescue boat saved them. The fliers asked the captain to retrieve Erwin’s body. “…But he said we had to leave him because of the danger of enemy air attacks,” Hack said. “So we left Ralph, and he floated away into oblivion.”

Hack logged 22 more missions, including the Eighth Air Force’s famous first raid on Schweinfurt and Regensburg, Germany, one of the bloodiest air battles of the war. He returned to air combat in early 1945 and flew four more missions before the war in Europe ended.

Staff Sgt. Hack moved back to Paducah after he was discharged. His service to his country earned him a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Purple Heart, four Air Medals and two Presidential Unit Citations.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on May 31, 2010 (boomark / email).