The following are some excerpts from the story of Elroy's Sanderson brothers, featured in The Hero Next DoorTM.
When America went to war, many families went with it, sending their sons into combat. So it was for Carl and Ekaterina Sanderson of Elroy, Wis. Parents who had fought their own battles in the First World War, sent both their sons into the second.
Their eldest, Gerald W., flew as a gunner in the skies above Europe; their youngest Archie L., battled in the European soil beneath him. They both returned home with stories they preferred not to tell and a desire to do something with the second chance at life that surviving World War II afforded them.
While Archie Sanderson was slugging his way across Europe's furrows, his brother Gerald was gunning his way through the skies above as a gunner and toggelier on a B-17 based in Italy and flying missions to bomb oil refineries, marshaling yards, ordinance depots, railroad bridges and troop concentrations.
Few of Sanderson's missions were as rough as a lone wolf extra-hazardous mission the crew flew to Germany in February 1945.
"The weather was so bad they couldn't get a group of planes in the air because they would run into each other. They said these missions were flown by volunteer crews but don't believe it. Our target was a city near the border of Poland, which had an oil refinery. We hid in the clouds all the way to the target and didn't encounter any German fighter planes; I guess the weather was too bad for them too.
"Being a lone plane, with no others for fighter protection, it was the most scary mission I was on. When we got to target, we ran out of clouds. They told us at the airfield that if the sky cleared, we should abort the mission and return to base. Our pilot asked us all what we should do and we all agreed that, since we had come this far, we wanted to do it. 'Let's go get them!' we told him.
"We got as much altitude as we could and started the bomb run. The German gunners opened up as we dropped our bombs and peeled off to the right trying to get back into the clouds. Those German gunners were really accurate as they followed us into the clouds. I can remember our tailgunner Hank Vailavick telling years later that he saw two bursts of flak behind us and figured the next burst would get us but it missed. The ball turret gunner had some flak rattling around inside the turret but none of it hit him; he kept a few chunks as a souvenir.
"We stayed in the clouds all the way home and no fighters attacked. When we landed we found that the main spar (main support) of our right wing had a good chunk missing. In the right waist, there was a big hole near my head; so it's a good thing I'm short.
"I can remember that while we were trying to get back to the clouds after the bomb run, I was shaking so badly I couldn't control myself. I don't know how we stayed in the air, but we were soooo happy when this mission was over. We must have had some help from above that day!
"We all prayed, I'll tell you that. You've got to talk to somebody and God was a good one, maybe the only one then, to talk to. Us guys never talked between us when we were flying though some crews did. And, when we got back we never talked about the mission. We'd take a couple jolts of whiskey, talk about anything else and go to sleep."
Still, no matter how far he flewnor how dangerous the mission Gerald thought often of how much harder his brother likely had it in the midst of combat with no cot to sleep in.
"I had hardships, but I have to consider myself luckier than them. As war correspondent Ernie Pyle said, 'there are no atheists in foxholes.' So I'm sure the men on the ground prayed as much as we did over the skies of Germany.
"I still think of my friends, of Mike Hornak who went down in flames, 75 miles south of Berlin; about Roy Milner who bailed out over Austria and walked back to Yugoslavia; about my Chinese friend Herbert Ginoz (sic) who went to the UW before the war, was shot down over Vienna and held prisoner of war until it ended; and about my brother who was wounded twice and suffered the cold and mud with nothing but the hard ground to sleep on. The challenge is for this generation to guard those freedoms, my friends suffered and died for."
This is but a small part of the Sanderson brothers' story. Read more about their battles in The Hero Next Door.
