‘Trench Warfare 5 Miles in the Air’

Chip Culpepper, right, with “Masters of the Air” script writer John Orloff. (Provided)

When Little Rock advertising executive Chip Culpepper first attended a convention of the 100th Bombardment Group, about 600 men — including his father — had gathered to recall what they did on some of the riskiest missions of World War II.

That was in 1993, seven years before Tech. Sgt. Conley Culpepper died.

Now of those hundreds of men, only 10 remain, and they’re all more than 100 years old.

Chip Culpepper was in Los Angeles with a few of them this month for a red-carpet premiere of an AppleTV+ miniseries that tells the story of the bomb group. “Masters of the Air” creators Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg were also on the red carpet.

The first two of the series’ nine episodes will start streaming on Friday.

Culpepper watched the first episode with the people who made the miniseries and four of the men who lived the history.

“It was incredible; it was moving; it was overwhelming. Pick your superlative,” Culpepper said the next day from his hotel room. “The aerial battle sequences were visceral. I was with four veterans of the 100th Bomb Group, men who flew those missions. One of them was John Luckadoo, ‘Lucky Luckadoo’ everyone called him. Greatest name in the world. He’s 101 years old. When we got to the after-party somebody asked him ‘Lucky, what did you think?’

“And he said, ‘Frankly, I feel like I just flew another mission.’”

When that comment was relayed to script writer John Orloff, the Hollywood veteran broke into tears.

Culpepper is now president of the 100th Bomb Group Foundation, an organization dedicated to the history and legacy of the unit, which flew missions from Thorpe Abbotts in northern England to bomb targets in Nazi-occupied Europe and Germany itself.

Early in the war, the B-17 bomber crews had “about a 50-50 chance of coming home” from any mission, Culpepper said. By the time his dad flew in mid-1944, the odds were a bit better, about a 1 in 4 chance of being killed or captured. It’s no wonder the bomb group came to be called “the Bloody Hundredth.”

Airmen had to fly at least 25 missions in the early days, a number that went up to 35.

“Wars are fought by young men, kids really,” Culpepper said. “My dad flew 35 combat missions before his 21st birthday.”

Culpepper, a partner at MHP/Team SI, said “Masters of the Air” vividly portrays the desperate combat conditions the men faced in the B-17s. “It was an unpressurized aircraft open in a lot of ways,” he said. “You had to be on oxygen because you’re 5 to 6 miles up in the air. It’s 60 or 70 below zero. The cold is trying to kill you. Ice crystals are forming in your oxygen lines, so if you don’t remember to crush those in your air hose, you’re going to die. And then there are German fighters and flak [anti-aircraft bursts]. It’s trench warfare 5 miles in the air.”

Conley Culpepper was his B-17’s top turret gunner and flight engineer. “He called himself a flying Mr. Fix-It,” his son said. “If anything mechanical went wrong with the aircraft, it was his job to keep it in the air, and to also man two 50-caliber machine guns in the top turret. If things got shot up, and they did, he had to figure out how to hold the plane together until they could get back.”

Conley Culpepper lived for 55 years after surviving World War II.

He took advantage of the GI Bill to become the first person in his family to go to college, majoring in forestry at what is now the University of Arkansas at Monticello.

“He was a professional forester for the rest of his life,” Chip Culpepper said. “He spent his career in the quiet woods. He’d seen enough noise and chaos.”