"I thought 'My God, I'll never get that thing off the ground. It's so big,"' he said, laughing at the memory of walking into the hangar more than 55 years ago. "Now, it is dwarfed by (commercial airliners)."

Eventually, Mr. Kuhl did get the big bird up - flying 35 bombing missions over Germany between 1944 and 1945.

"I grew to love that machine," he said. "It was a tremendous airplane. It could take a tremendous amount of punishment and still get the crew home."

The pilot seat of a B-17 was not the place Mr. Kuhl pictured himself landing. His future, he thought, was on a baseball diamond.

But as World War II was beginning, Mr. Kuhl was graduating from high school in Washington. He knew military service was inevitable, but he didn't want to be drafted into the infantry.

So he chose the Army Air Corps and was called to active duty Jan. 31, 1943.

"I didn't want to be a bomb-dropper," he said. "I wanted to be a pro baseball player."

George C. Kuhl points out gun stations on a Franklin Mint model of the B-17 Flying Fortress, in which he flew 35 bombing missions. He bought the model after publishing his book. JIM BLAYLOCK/STAFF

His pilot classes began in Tennessee; he bounced from air base to air base every few months as he moved up in levels of training.

It was at preflight school in Texas that Mr. Kuhl first left the ground in a plane - as a passenger in a Piper Cub.

"I was scared to death," he said. "I couldn't figure out how we were going to get down."

During months of pilot training, it wasn't B-17s that caught Mr. Kuhl's fancy.

"I hated bombers because they were slow. I wanted to be..." he said, making quick movements with his hands, mimicking the flight of smaller fighter planes.

"But I'm glad it worked out that way now, because you had four engines instead of one," he said. "If you lost two, you still had two."

IT WAS AT CHELVESTON, England, in December 1944 that Mr. Kuhl - part of the 305th Bombardment Group (Heavy) - first heard the stories of a doomed mission in the skies over Schweinfurt, Germany, nearly 14 months earlier.

"Everybody was still talking about it at the base," he said. "I wondered what happened."

Some historians call Schweinfurt the greatest one-day air battle of World War II. Mr. Kuhl refers to it as something different: Wrong Place! Wrong Time! That's the title of his book, completed in 1993 after five years of research. The book tells the story of the crews - those who died and those who survived.

But the book also looks at what went wrong that day: a series of missteps by Air Force commanders that scattered the squadrons of planes.

"The secret of the game to survive over there was to stay in tight formations," Mr. Kuhl said, sitting in the office of his Augusta home. "They got them all scattered out, and the Germans started picking them off one by one."

In the end, the 1st Division lost 45 of 60 B-17s over Schweinfurt. Only two of the 15 B-17s that flew from the 305th Bomb Group returned; 130 crew members were listed as casualties - either dead, missing or captured by German ground forces.

"I said if I got that book published, I'm buying one of these," he said, fidgeting with a Franklin Mint model of the Flying Fortress.

George C. Kuhl (back center), a bomber pilot during World War II, stands with his flight crew and the plane he flew on missions. The name She's a Honey was inspired by Mr. Kuhl's mother, whose nickname was Honey. SPECIAL

ON THE WALL OF his office, there's a picture of a group of young Air Force personnel standing in front of a B-17G - complete with a honeybee painted on the nose. Mr. Kuhl is the one in the middle of the back row, standing and smiling.

The bomber in the photo was named She's a Honey after Mr. Kuhl's mother, whose nickname was Honey. The name was the one thing that wasn't up for a vote among his crew.

"I didn't give them a choice," he said, laughing. "But the next morning, I went out and they were painting the name on the plane."

In the cockpit of She's a Honey, Mr. Kuhl had several close calls.

"We had a few holes, lost an engine one time, but we were very lucky."

Few calls were more intense than a Feb. 3, 1945, Berlin bombing run.

"They started filling the sky with all the bullets they could," he said. "Gosh, they lost a lot of bombers that day."

Mr. Kuhl's last mission came Friday, April 13, 1945.

"It was a milk run," he said, describing the routine mission. "Three weeks later the war ended."

Each of Mr. Kuhl's missions is documented in a tattered scrapbook that contains a hodgepodge of news clippings and other memorabilia.

"It's filled with all kinds of notes," he said.

And it's filled with memories. But Mr. Kuhl likes to keep those inside the covers.

"You can't (live in the past)," he said. "You'll go crazy."

Reach Jason B. Smith at (706) 868-1222, Ext. 115, or jbsmith@augustachronicle.com.