Allure of flying kept man from following dad into Navy

To this day, Thomas Rankin, 90, remembers his ninth bombing mission of World War II.

He was 19 years old and on a B-24 aircraft, a bomber, which flew missions over Europe out of England. He worked as a radio operator and a top turret gunner when the aircraft was struck by fire at over 20,000 feet.

“We thought we were going to go down,” he said.

Two crew members were seriously injured, he said. The pilot suggested the crew bail out from the airplane, but Rankin knew that would mean three of them would die, including himself, whose parachute was damaged.

Pieces of the aircraft were falling from the sky, he said.

The B-24 managed to land at an emergency airport in England, he said. Everyone survived.

A 1944 photograph of retired Lt. Col. Thomas Rankin’s unit (Rankin is in back row, third from left). Rankin served with the Strategic Air Command in WWII and Vietnam for a combined 24 years. Courtesy Thomas Rankin

“The ninth mission stayed with me,” Rankin said. “I remember every second of it.”

Rankin also remembered when, as a young man before the war, he was driving down a highway in San Francisco near the airport and saw a Lockheed P-38 Lightning aircraft take off.

“It pulled up and disappeared,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Wow. That’s what I want to do.’”

He said he had originally intended to join the Navy. His father was an officer in the Navy and a teacher at the Naval Academy.

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He ended up being drafted to the U.S. Army Air Corps instead.

After World War II, Rankin paused his military service to attend college, where he studied mechanical engineering and math. He returned to the military two years later.

During the Vietnam War, he said he was on a 21-day rotation of 12 hours on and 14 hours off, flying missions into Vietnam, hauling cargo.

One of the more memorable cargo he hauled during that time was a control tower, he said. The plane often carried much more than it could stand. “It was hanging out of the back about 15 feet,” he said.

And on some days, he would be sent on “vegetable runs,” he said. He and others would be sent to a base where they could collect boxes of locally grown vegetables and distribute them to the troops. He got to taste the “real good stuff,” he said.

Courtesy Thomas Rankin

Rankin retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 1969. He went on to receive a master’s degree in education and taught at Pueblo High School for 10 years. He held another job in the district working with computer programs for six years.

Last spring, Rankin was chosen to be one of 72 Arizona veterans to be on an honor flight to Washington, D.C., where the veterans visited war memorials.

He also spent 32 years as a volunteer at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, helping people prepare for their tax returns.

Looking back on his military experience, Rankin said he was lucky to have survived.

“I just did what was needed to be done in those times,” he said, “Sometimes it was dangerous. Sometimes it wasn’t.”