Editor's note: This is part of a series of interviews with World War II veterans. The articles continue until Saturday, the date of the local World War II Memorial Dedication and Recognition Day.

Football fan George Lenke Jr. had a radio tuned to the Sunday battle between his beloved Bears and the Chicago Cardinals one fall day in 1941.

The Cominskey Park play-by-play was interrupted with news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

"It was so hard to believe," he said at his Center Street home in Warsaw of the tragedy in Hawaii on Dec. 7. "Really, quite shocking."

Lenke finished high school and signed up for the draft. While he was attending the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Army Air Corps recruiters approached students, describing the niceties of the Air Force and its good program. Were there any volunteers?

Lenke signed up, leaving the Windy City for basic training at Sheppard Field in northern Texas. College training followed at Peabody State Teachers College in Nashville, Tenn. Testing determined Lenke was a good candidate for pilot training.

Advancing through the Steerman and BT-13A courses on southern bases, he got his first taste of Indiana in mid-January at Freeman Field in Seymour.

The advanced flight school put him in a twin-engine plane made of wood.

"There was just room for pilot and co-pilot," he recalls. "We called them the Mahogany Marauder or the Bamboo Bomber. A number of mornings we had to clean snow off the wings before we could fly."

He received his commission and wings March 17, 1944. After a year in the service, he went home for one week and received notification to report for central instructors school at Randolph Field in San Antonio, Texas. Returning to Freeman Field, he taught other young guys how to fly in an AT-10.

"I got to know a lot of different people there. Some people took naturally to flying, others had to work at it. Most students were older than I was. I was 19 at the time.

"Ten of us were selected to go to Columbus, Ohio, to Lockburn Air Force Base to take B-17 training. That was interesting. I was a small guy back in those days. I weighed about 150 pounds. Most of our instructors were big and strong former football players."

Reassigned to Freeman Field, he resumed teaching. This time the students were a class of men with their wings learning to fly twin engine planes.

"After a month, the program was discontinued and we had a choice to either go overseas or be reassigned in the United States. I elected to go overseas."

After personnel evaluations at Plank Park in Florida, Lenke met his crew at Drew Field in Tampa, Fla.

"That was quite an experience. We had nine-man crews. I was a pilot. There was a co-pilot, a bombardier, a navigator, flight engineer, radio man, ball turret gunner, tail gunner and armorer gunner.

"Drew Field is now Tampa International Airport. Back in those days it was just a wide open space. Planes were parked all over the place many hundreds of feet apart. It simulated how the planes would be parked overseas. This way they wouldn't be subject to strafing by one particular aircraft.

"We spent two months learning to fly in formation, navigation and practiced bombing at Norton Bomb Site."

At Camp Kilmer, N.J., the crew boarded the Queen Elizabeth, along with 18,000 other troops. After a five-day trip across the Atlantic Ocean, the QE arrived in Scotland. Lenke's crew was assigned to the 100th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force at Thorpe Abbots Air Base 20 miles from Norwich, England.

After more education on formations and combat tactics, the crew proceeded to fly combat missions.

"Fortunately, I didn't arrive in England until sometime in February 1945. D-Day was a thing of the past and we had P-51 bases, which offered good escort on the nine missions that we flew.

"The 51s were good friends. They'd be up there with us and as soon as they saw any activity down below they would drop their wing tanks and go down looking for trouble before the trouble got up to us."

During Lenke's next to last mission he was to go into Hamburg at 14,000 feet. Supposedly by then there was no antiaircraft fire.

"For some reason our P-51s hadn't caught up to us and we were hit quite heavily by German fighters. I saw one German crash into the tail of a B-17, knocking off the right horizontal stabilizer. Fortunately the B-17 kept in formation and the German spun out of control.

"A few seconds later I saw another one up ahead. A German hit a B-17 right in the middle. They both went up in flames.

"Minutes later I heard our top turret gunner firing away. A German fighter came right down in front of us, in front of our number three and four engines, between me and the plane I was flying formation off of.

"How we got through that small hole I'll never know. About that time I was thinking, 'Hey, this is it.' Suddenly the flak that wasn't supposed to be there came and the Germans pulled off.

"So all we had was the flak to contend with and that was much better.

"The next day, the last mission we flew was to Igor, Czechoslovakia. All along the route we heard, 'Bandits in the area! Bandits in the area!' So you can imagine how we felt after the previous day. But we never saw anything.

"Before end of war, we stopped flying bombing missions and began food missions to the Dutch, who were starving."

Holland's major ports had been destroyed. The Germans commandeered the food supplies and cut off access to coal, gas and electricity. Not only were the Dutch starving, they were freezing and dying. More than 18,000 men, women and children had perished before the Allies sent humanitarian aid in April 1945.

"Our bomb bays were designed with special floors and they put food in there. We had to fly a route that took us over the coast of Holland and Belgium at 300 feet. It was a welcome relief from 25,000 feet. We would fly past German flak towers. The Germans would track you with their guns but there were no fatalities.

"We would get to designated areas, over open fields and we opened the bomb bays and dropped the food. We could see the people waving their gratitude. According to some Dutch I met after the war, we saved thousands of lives. They were restricted to tulip bulbs, anything they could find. The Germans took all the food they raised and sent it back to Germany."

V-E Day was May 8, 1945. Now the Allies focused on the South Pacific. Now Lenke's assignments became varied. Once he flew American soldiers to Casablanca.

"I felt sorry for them because a B-17 is not a 747. They had no seats, had to sit on the floor, bed rolls, whatever they had."

He then ferried equipment from England to different bases in Germany during the 1945 summer of occupation.

"One day they sent the air transport in. They flew all our nice airplanes back to the United States, leaving us there without any planes. That was a sad sight," he said of aviators with nothing to fly.

Sent to France, the pilots and their crews became part of the Army of Occupation, traveling by rail to Munich. And Lenke spent a couple of months at an air base he bombed during the war.

Before Christmas in December, he was transferred to Berlin's Templehoff Air Base.

"It was quite a city. Berlin was very heavily bombed. In talking to the German people, I heard the Russians were allowed to come into Berlin before the Americans or the English and they just bombed indiscriminately. They turned their cannons toward buildings and just blew parts of the town apart. In retaliation, I guess, for what the Germans had done in Stalingrad and other cities."

The German capital was divided into four parts during the occupation with zones held by the United States, France, England and Russia. Templehoff was in the American zone, in the least bombed area.

"You would see these little old ladies, grandmothers, cleaning up rubble, putting it in railcars. These women were just like your own mother or grandmother, touched your heart. They were thankful for the work because they got fed that way.

"Templehoff was home to one of the European Air Transport Services - EATS. The EATS group had taken away our planes and flown them to America. The Army Air Force set up a scheduled airline with C-47s. Of course the C-47 pilots didn't think the B-17 pilots were as good as they were. We felt the same way about them. We didn't get to do much flying, but we could go as a co-pilot for some of them."

Tired of doing nothing Lenke became squadron adjutant. Berlin was nice enough city, he said, with a 16-hole golf course they were allowed to play.

After a 45-day leave, Lenke returned to Berlin and was sent home within two months, arriving in Elmhurst on Christmas Eve.

He was discharged in January 1947 and became a member of the Air Force Reserves until the late 1970s, serving in Illinois, and later in Indiana.

He met his wife, Patricia Cooley, in 1947. The couple married in September 1947.

"All I knew was airplanes and went to school in Spartan School of Aeronautics in Oklahoma. In six months I changed to the University of Tulsa and studied petroleum engineering."

After graduation, he and Pat moved to the west Texas oil fields. After years of eating dust, he and Pat longed for the greenery of the north.

Pat's father, Chester, was president of Da-Lite Screen and he had an engineering position for his son-in-law. Chester and Deborah Cooley had a vacation spot on Tippecanoe Lake and, when the time came to expand, Da-Lite Screen moved its headquarters to Warsaw in 1957.

Lenke became president of the corporation in 1963, retiring in 1984 after selling the company to Heritage Communications with Deborah Cooley's blessing.

Oh, the Bears won, 34-24, completing the 1941 season with a 10-1 record. [[In-content Ad]]