Robert Hanson, the last surviving member of the storied Memphis Belle B-17 bomber crew, which was the first to fly 25 bombing missions in Europe during World War II, has died. He was 85.
Hanson, the radio operator of the famed aircraft, died Oct. 1 in Albuquerque of congestive heart failure.
The exploits of the B-17 were detailed in a 1944 documentary "The Memphis Belle," made by William Wyler. Its final mission was recalled in a fictionalized 1990 feature film "Memphis Belle."
Hanson, addressing his grandson's high school class after the feature film was released, was asked if everything in the movie actually happened.
"No, it didn't all happen to the Memphis Belle," he told the class, "but everything in the movie happened to some B-17."
In 1989, Hanson had accompanied pilot Robert Morgan and other crew members to Binbrook Royal Air Force base in England to meet with the young cast of the movie.
"They're not quite as good-looking as we were," said Hanson, known for cracking jokes and his happy-go-lucky nature, "but they are young and enthusiastic -- exactly like we were."
Hanson was a construction worker in Spokane, Wash., when he joined the Army in 1941 -- three months before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, drawing the U.S. into World War II. During his training at Walla Walla, Wash., he was assigned to the Memphis Belle.
The "Flying Fortress," as the giant bombers were called, and its 10-man crew flew to England, their wartime base, in September 1942. Between Nov. 7 and May 17, 1943, they flew 148 hours and dropped more than 60 tons of bombs over Germany and France.
They were credited with shooting down eight enemy aircraft and five "probables," and damaging a dozen more. Four members of the original crew died in combat as the plane was hit by cannon and machine-gun fire.
Although Hanson and the rest of the crew survived unscathed to become early war heroes, they had several close calls.
"When we got the tail shot off, Capt. Morgan put the ship into a terrific dive and we dropped two- or three-thousand feet. It pretty nearly threw me out of the airplane," Hanson recalled on the Memphis Belle Memorial Assn. Inc. website.
"I hit the roof. I thought we were going down and wondered if I should bail out. Then he pulled up again and I landed on my back. I had an ammunition box and a frequency meter on top of me. I didn't know what was going on."
