A dying WWII bomber pilot gets his final wish
PANAMA CITY (AP) – The plane sat alone on the airport tarmac, awaiting a long-retired war veteran ready to reconnect with the plane he flew in his youth.
The plane, a green B-24 Liberator bomber, is the only aircraft of its type still flyable. While 20,000 Liberators were produced and flown during World War II, they were scrapped unceremoniously in favor of toasters and razor blades for postwar America.
“I believe I could fly it right now. I remember that plane,” 89-year-old Lowell Mix said recently, ambling slowly toward the bomber while clutching the arm of his wife, Viola, in his right hand and a silver cane in his left.
Despite some hearing loss, Mix still could make out the lumbering B-24 flying over his St. Andrews’ home that previous February night.
“I told Viola, ‘That’s a B-24.’ I recognized the engine’s (sound) after all these years,” he recalled two months as he met the plane’s mechanic, and the Mixes gingerly ascended a small ladder tucked under the bomber’s belly.
With a recent illness shrinking his body toward its wartime weight of 140 pounds, Mix was able to slip through the framing of the plane’s bomb bay walkway toward the cockpit.
“I’d like to sit in it one more time before I pass on,” Mix told friend Charles Nichols and Jayson Owen, the Liberator’s mechanic.
Mix died about six weeks later at age 89.
Mix flew 52 missions in B-24s with names such as “Big Operator” and “Hey, Doc” splashed on the nose. He stood upright and grabbed the handles of a .50-caliber machine gun bristling from the bomber’s waist. He recalled the missions where he sat in the same spot as the air discipline officer, guiding the bomber formation during the end of his combat tour.
Flying eight-hour missions from their base in Leece, Italy, Mix and other Allied air crews would form 400-plane bombing groups to attack what Winston Churchill called “the taproot of German might”: the oil fields and refineries near Ploesti, Romania. They supplied a third of the aviation fuel and lubricants for Adolph Hitler’s war machinery. Ploesti had been attacked months earlier with 53 of the 166 Liberators that made it there being shot down.
In April 1944, Mix and his crew found the city ringed with hundreds of anti-aircraft guns sprouting from rooftops to haystacks.
After retiring as an Army Air Corps’ major after the war, Mix moved to Panama City and trained pilots at what is now Tyndall Air Force Base. Once out of the military, Mix sold mobile homes, travel trailers and ran Anchorage Mobile Home Park along 19th Street.
If someone came to the park with little money and in need of a home, Mix sometimes would let them stay there rent-free until financially righting themselves.