“We’ve been friends for a year and a half, and he’s got a story that, I think, needs to be told,” the words rang out from LiveOak resident Aubrey Tarplay as he offered a smile to the man at his side—WWII Veteran John Robinson.

Robinson began his military service with a three year agricultural deferment at his seed corn business in central Ohio, the 92 year old veteran began.

He joined the army’s infantry in fall of 1944, noting that the war was over in 1945, and worked in a machine repair shop. He explained that he’d developed pancreas complications while in Korea. Doctors in Korea agreed that he had low blood sugar, but had never operated on a pancreas, so the Army decided to send him to the U.S. He boarded a B-17 plane to make his way home.

“It’s a wild thing—right at the time at the end of WWII, the Chinese pushed back up into North Korea,” he said. The crew was one man short with three instead of four in the cockpit and Robinson on a stretcher in the back of the plane. To make matters worse, after one or two hours in the air, his plane was fired upon by enemy aircraft.

“The Zeroes came in on ‘em and I woke up to bullets flying by me and one grazed my ear.”

The waist gunner was killed and the pilot was wounded during the this time, he explained.

“The cabin I was in had gasoline squirting into it,” he added.

Tarplay chimed in, “That made it a flying time bomb.”

Robinson agreed. “I determined that I was the only man functional.”

Even though a fellow soldier had to help Robinson patch the grazed skull and ear wound that “bled like a stuck pig,” along with patching holes in his arm and his thigh, he readied himself for the next engagement.

“I heard the planes go by—they’d damaged the waist gun with the first pass, plus the tail gunner was killed and the gun damaged.”

“When the pilot of the Zero came up to check us out, I had fixed three guns and I blew ‘em away. I was sitting at the waist gun when he flew by for another pass. I knew the tail fun was out and he could come up from behind, so fast from the clouds—I had just seconds.”

His face lit up as he remembered the scene.

“It was the darndest thing—no matter what I needed, it was there: tools, parts….We swerved, he came back. I had a machine gun without the auto(matic) feature.”

He said that after he’d shot, they were left alone to fly for the next hour. The pilot had received severe wounds and asked if Robinson had ever flown a plane before.

“’Sit down in the pilot’s seat and I’ll talk you through it,’ he’d said. I piloted for three hours and bandaged his limb injury.”

“There was one more attack while I was in the pilot seat…we refueled in the air and crash landed in Seattle.”

Robinson explained that some of the landing gear had been damaged, so he was instructed to hold the left wing up to use the left landing gear.

“Just hold it steady,” he recalled the pilot’s words.

He reached the Seattle hospital, then moved to Ohio State Hospital for his pancreas surgery. He never saw or heard of the pilot.