Commentary: On Veterans Day, let’s remember the little toy soldier that went to war

Most of the paint is missing from the little lead soldier. Half of his right arm is gone.

 He probably wouldn’t bring a quarter, even at a yard sale. But he’s priceless to Chester W. Hack Jr. of Paducah.

 “Daddy carried him all through the war,” said Hack, who worked out of Paducah Ironworkers Local 782, the late Chester W. Hack Sr.’s labor union.

 The little toy soldier that went to World War II with Chester “Billy” Hack of Paducah. 

Better known as “Bill” or “Billy,” Hack’s war was World War II. A left waist gunner on a long range, four-engine B-17 “Flying Fortress” heavy bomber, he fought the Nazis miles above enemy-occupied Europe in some of the global conflict’s most lethal air battles.

 He flew 28 missions between May 19, 1943, and Jan. 2, 1944. He flew two more in 1945, shortly before the war in Europe ended in Germany’s surrender.

 The little soldier was tucked in Army Air Force Staff Sgt. Hack’s pocket on every mission, including the one that nearly killed him.

 On May 29, 1943, Hack was firing at enemy fighters with a .50 caliber machine that poked through an open window on the left side of “Barrel House Bessie from Basin Street’s” fuselage. The bomber force’s target was the concrete-reinforced German submarine pens at St. Nazaire, France.

 Swarms of German fighters and exploding clouds of anti-aircraft fire, known as flak, tore into the American bombers.

 “Bessie” was flying in a three-plane formation. The other two were shot down, their crews killed or captured.

 The fighters’ machine gun and cannon fire ripped gaping holes in “Bessie.” A flak burst knocked out one of her engines, setting the B-17 on fire and sending her into a near vertical dive from 22,000 to about 800 feet when her pilots, straining at the controls, finally managed to level her off.

 All 10 of her crew were wounded, the tail gunner fatally.

 Bessie almost made it home, but with the big bomber losing unrecoverable altitude, the pilots had no choice but to ditch in the English Channel. Bessie hit the choppy sea hard, burst into flames and began sinking.

 Hack had just turned twenty-two. “I was dazed,” he told me. “But when I smelled my hair burning, it gave me the strength to live.”

 A British air-sea rescue boat pulled Hack and his eight buddies from the sea. It was too dangerous for the boat to stay around to retrieve the tail gunner’s body, which “floated away into oblivion,” Hack said.

 The toy soldier flew again with Hack in an even bloodier air battle—the massive Aug, 17, 1943, dual raid on Schweinfurt and Regensburg, Germany.

 Air gunner Hack was aboard “Me an’ My Gal,” another B-17. While that one made it back to England, 60 out of 376 B-17s sent against Schweinfurt and Regensburg fell to fighters and flak—a loss of 600 men killed, captured or listed as missing.

At age 77, Hack vividly remembered the carnage he witnessed. He never saw “so many planes getting shot down, blown up, bodies flying everywhere, parts of aircraft.”

 Fighting back tears, the still tough-as-boot-leather retired Ironworker continued, “The sky looked like a junkyard, motors over here and a wing out over there and a tail section over yonder.” He spoke of watching in helpless horror as “maybe a half a dozen men in chutes going by…some of them on fire.”

 Hack was sent stateside after VE day. When Japan surrendered in August, 1945, he was on a troop train heading to the West Coast where he was to join another bomber crew to fight the Japanese. Instead, he and the toy soldier went home to Paducah.

Hack died in 2016 at age 95. I had the honor of speaking at his funeral and I’m writing a book about him.

 Chester Hack has his father’s medals under glass in a frame. They include his Distinguished Flying Cross, Purple Heart, Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters and his Distinguished Unit Citation ribbon. The toy soldier is safely stowed.

 Hack was a boy when his father gave him the toy soldier. Thousands of other fathers have given miniature armies of toy soldiers to thousands of their sons, who deployed them in make believe battles.

 Hack’s tiny soldier went with him to the deadliest and most destructive war in history.