It also helped that Robertson was flying in the notoriously tough B-17, a bomber that could take plenty of hits and still return its crew safely to England.

“That was the best plane in the war,” said Robertson. “The old B-24 Liberator guys would argue that point, I’m sure.” Great view, bad seat

From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,

And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.

Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.

When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

“The Ball Turret Gunner” by Randall Jarrell The ball turret gunner was probably the least envied crewman of the entire war. Squeezed alongside two .50-caliber machine guns inside a small rotating Plexiglas sphere in the belly of the plane, the gunner had the best view of the action and the worst seat to watch it from.

Robertson wasn’t fazed one bit by his assignment to the ball turret. In fact, despite hearing countless times that he was cursed with the most dangerous job on the plane, he believes all crewmen ran a pretty high risk.

“I never thought of it as the worst (job),” said Robertson. “There weren’t any of them good. Over the years they keep telling me it was and I keep telling them that I don’t know if it was the worst position. But they keep saying it was.”

There was at least one mission, however, where Robertson concedes life as a ball turret gunner carried with it some terrifyingly unique risks.

While on a bombing run somewhere over Germany, several flak blasts propelled jagged shards of shrapnel into the belly of the plane. Robertson couldn’t believe his luck as none of the shrapnel penetrated the ball turret.

Then much to his horror, he realized not all of his luck had been good. The turret’s hydraulic system had been badly damaged and Robertson was unable to get back inside the main body of the plane.

“You didn’t spend the whole time in the ball turret,” said Robertson. “When we left England I was topside in the radio room and when we landed I was supposed to be topside. Once you got going on the mission you would climb down in and on the way back you would climb out.

“But it didn’t happen for me like that this one time. The ball got shot up. Luckily, I didn’t get hit but it knocked out the hydraulic controls. I had to land stuck in that thing and that was no fun.”

For the entire duration of the nearly four-hour long trip back to England, Robertson sat tightly buckled into his small seat thinking about the upcoming landing. The shot up B-17 would land at about 75 miles per hour with Robertson seated just a mere few feet above the landing strip. Any types of problem with the landing gear would mean instant death for the young gunner.

To this day Robertson has no recollection of the actual landing. He can’t even remember if he watched the landing or shut his eyes.

“I don’t know what I did,” said Robertson. “When you land that ball is right on the ground and you are coming in at about a hundred miles hour. It was just bang, bang and it was over. It was a very scary situation.”

Robertson can remember the exact thoughts going through his head as ground crews struggled to free him from his Plexiglas prison. He told himself that once the war ended he would never fly again or wear a seat belt.

The vow to never fly lasted 43 years while the seat belt vow is still ongoing. Not even when North Carolina enacted a mandatory seat belt law in 1986 did Robertson consider changing his mind.

“When they passed the law I called my daughter and son-in-law,” laughed Robertson. “I told them they would have to come and get me out of jail regularly because I wasn’t going to wear a seat belt. I went to the junk yard and bought one of those (lap belts) from an old car. I use that in my car all the time but the seat belt is gone. I cut that right off. I am getting better at it and I do fly some but I’m still terrible with a belt around me.”

The war winds down

The Allies may have had air supremacy in the final months of the war but the Germans weren’t completely finished. Every once in awhile Robertson’s group would encounter the Messerschmitt Me 262A, the first jet aircraft in history to fly in combat.

Although the jet first flew sparingly in mid-1944, it wasn’t until early 1945 that the plane made any real impact. By then the war was already lost, fuel was short, and the Germans could not produce enough planes to reclaim the skies.

Still, first-time sightings of the Messerschmitt Me 262A instilled plenty of shock into U.S. airmen and left long-lasting memories.

“At the end of the war the Germans put up a few of those jets,” said Robertson. “One came right through our formation and he got the plane right beside us. We didn’t even know what it was. I remember our bombardier hollered out on the intercom, ‘What the hell was that?’”

The jets moved so fast that Allied gunners struggled to track them effectively.

“It was really moving,” said Robertson. “Our guns wouldn’t track them. They weren’t made for them. I never saw (the jet) until he got in the distance and I could see his smoke trail. He was gone that quickly.” Sitting in his turret watching thousands of bombs drop on German cities, Robertson’s thoughts began to focus on the civilians caught in the maelstrom below.

“Yeah, you would think about it,” said Robertson. “But it was war and it was something we felt had to be done. We were trying to do our part.”

But the first week of May brought a much needed respite from all the killing. Rather than dropping bombs the crew began dropping food to starving Dutch civilians as part of Operation Chowhound. Although parts of the Netherlands were still under Nazi control, Germans forces agreed not to fire on Allied planes as they dropped more than 11,000 tons of food.

“The Germans knew that their time was out and they were defeated,” said Robertson. “They agreed not to attack us during those food missions and luckily they didn’t. I understand that one of the groups was attacked but not mine.”

About 400 B-17s dropped 800 tons of food May 1-3 over Amsterdam. Robertson flew on four missions and considers them among his fondest memories of the war.

“We came in over Amsterdam and it looked to me like the whole town was waiting down there,” said Robertson. “They had been informed that we were coming and there was a whole lot of people standing on top of buildings.”

The planes flew only a few hundred feet off the ground, giving Robertson a clear view of the Dutch citizens waving below.

But what really warmed his heart was the sight of the words “Many Thanks” spelled out in tulips in a nearby field.

“It made you feel like you finally done something good for a change,” said Robertson. “At least that was my feeling. The rest of it was more or less just a job that had to be done.”

Shortly after the Germans surrendered on May 8, 1945, Robertson received a telegram that his wife had just given birth to a daughter. A crewmate took the telegram from him and showed it to the group’s commanding officer who then arranged for an earlier flight home.

“The other crewmen had to wait but I flew home,” said Robertson. “There were about three or four of us on this plane and we had some hotshot pilot flying it. He had his hat all curled like a cowboy. We flew to Iceland and had a stopover for a couple of days and then landed at Ft. Miles Standish in Boston. That was when I said, ‘That was my last flight unless there is an emergency.”

Robertson enjoyed a short leave with his wife and daughter before reporting to Ft. Bragg in mid-August for orders. He was told to meet his crewmates in Oregon where they would begin training for the planned invasion of Japan.

“I was on a troop train headed west and we got to Nashville and you never heard so many bells ringing and everything going on,” said Robertson. “You knew it couldn’t be but one thing – the war was over. We were the last to get the news.”

The train continued to Sioux Falls, SD where, after a few weeks, Robertson was mustered out of the Army.

“I never saw my crew again because we were supposed to meet in Oregon,” said Robertson. “Finally, I did see them, or the ones who were left, at a reunion in St. Louis 50 years later.”

Robertson flew to the reunion to spend time with his old buddies. He did not, however, wear a seat belt.