Dwight Parken
Age 87
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SERVICE: Enlisted in September 1942 in the Army Air Forces; served with the 457th Bombardment Group as a B-17 tail-gunner; awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
RANK: Staff sergeant
WHERE: It was about 3 a.m. on June 6 when the Flying Fortress that Mr. Parken was a crew member on taxied up the runway to take off for the flight to the Normandy coast. There were about two dozen B-17s stationed at the Glatton air base near Peterborough, England, and as they lined up for takeoff Mr. Parken was already performing one of his duties that day.
As a tail-gunner, he was to blink a flashlight on and off to make sure the following plane wouldn't get too close, or in his words, "Start chewing my shoestrings with a propeller."
This would be the eighth of 27 missions he would fly. This particular mission required his bomb group to take out enemy pillboxes on Omaha Beach.
The flight over was a "milk run" for Mr. Parken and the rest of the flight crew, as they encountered no enemy fire. He said they delivered their payload, then returned to base.
In and of itself, D-Day was not the most exciting event for someone who avoided death when his flak jacket stopped a piece of shrapnel from shredding his back on a mission before the invasion and narrowly survived a crash landing when his plane's hydraulic system was shot up during a mission after Operation Overlord.
But Mr. Parken knows it was the most important of the missions he flew.
"The invasion was the key, the crucial key," he said. "If we didn't make it on D-Day, we would have been in bad shape."
MOST VIVID MEMORY: There were 11,000 planes involved in the D-Day assault, and Mr. Parken can recall seeing them filling the sky, seemingly stacked on top of one another. There were B-17s at 25,000 feet, B-24s at 20,000 feet and smaller planes below that, he said.
"The air was alive with planes going over," Mr. Parken said.
"Here we were five miles up, and another stack five miles below us and another stack below that. To see those stacks, I guess what a sensation of depth it was."
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