Last mission for World War II bomber squadron
But for a rapidly dwindling group of World War II veterans, what matters most right now is the last reunion.
The final curtain call for roughly 40 surviving members of the 320th Bomb Group will start Thursday at the Westin O'Hare Hotel in Rosemont. The storied unit caught flak repeatedly during some of the toughest missions of the war.
But there are fewer veterans left to talk about it, prompting the group to include other World War II and Korean War bomber groups at the three-day reunion.
"We're dying off too fast," said Alex Brast, 90, who remembers when the 320th had 3,000 members. "We're losing 20 percent of our membership every year. … Some of us are getting pretty infirm."
Brast, who lives in Florida, flew a B-26 Marauder. His twin brother, also a pilot, was killed in the war. Two other brothers also wore a uniform.
The surviving members picked Chicago as a final rendezvous, he said, because of its location.
Among those attending will be Allen Pang, 89, of Rockford, a retired pediatric dentist and member of the 452nd Bomb Group.
Pang, a former bombardier and navigator, flew 68 combat missions during World War II. His group fought in Africa, Italy, France and Germany.
"There aren't too many of us left from that original group," said Pang, who was attending the University of Hawaii when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. As a senior ROTC student, his military career began that same day.
"We were asked to volunteer on Dec. 7, 1941, and put on guard duty that afternoon outside Pearl Harbor," Pang said.
After completing his air training, he and the rest of the 452nd were stationed at "out-of-the-way sites," flying missions across the Europe before the war ended.
"Being in the (Army Air Forces), it's a clean war; we seldom got to see our dead," Pang said. "They were shot down, and it was usually in enemy territory. We didn't see the people we lost."
Brast described his experiences in harrowing detail in letters to his parents.
In one letter, dated Sept. 14, 1943, he wrote about a mission over "the warm, lazy Italian countryside … it is hard to realize that war could be raging so terrifically down there."