CEDAR FALLS - Cleon Wood says he was just plain lucky in World War II.

Lucky that he got to enlist in the U.S. Army Air Force. Lucky that he got the training he wanted. Lucky that he flew 31 combat missions over Nazi-occupied Europe without a scratch. And lucky he didn't fly a 32nd.

And he'll be the first to tell you he was lucky to have been in a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber, heavily armed and built for punishment.

"It took a lot of battle damage," he said.

"I never knew if I ever wanted to go through it again. But I'm glad I did what I did," said Wood, an 88-year-old great-grandfather and retired John Deere draftsman

A graduate of Cedar Falls High School like his wife, Lorraine, Wood was a B-17 top turret gunner and flight engineer on a crew in the Third Division, 452nd Bomb Group of the U.S. Eighth Air Force.

He and his crewmates were in aerial combat from his very first mission, returning over the Baltic Sea from an Easter Sunday raid over Poland on a German aircraft factory.

"We had three planes flying out to our right," Wood said. He identified them as German Messerschmidt fighter-bombers when they banked or "winged up" to attack the American bomber formation. They shot two straggler B-17s out of the sky.

"The first one, they started shooting at it and it just blew up, a white, blinding flash," he said.

Another, closer plane also got it. "The tail broke off at the waist door," on the fuselage, and it went down.

Then they came for Wood's plane, attacking from three different angles.

"We were going to be it," he said. "We started firing at them and they came fairly close to us," he said.

Amazingly, they survived the showdown.

"Along with other gunners, we were given credit with a probable (kill) and one shot down," he said.

Then a wave of German Focke-Wulf FW-190 fighters swooped in. "We received a 20mm cannon shell on the horizontal stabilizer, right on the end of it," but it didn't disable the airplane. Several others weren't as lucky, he said.

"Right now, as I look back at it, I think about how close we came to getting shot down," he said.

Wood and his comrades participated in the D-Day invasion June 6, 1944. He saw the unprecedented armada of Allied troops off the French coast as the invasion began. However, they arrived late to their target and were ordered not to drop their bombs lest they hit advancing Allied troops.

The bombers typically were protected from enemy fighters by "very excellent" U.S. fighter plane escort, but faced an equally dangerous threat from anti-aircraft fire or "flak" from below.

He recalled one horrific incident in which a nearby B-17 was disabled in a raid over Belgium, catching fire amid a flak-filled sky. Eight of 10 crew members parachuted out, leaving the pilot and co-pilot. They couldn't wear their chest-mounted parachutes while flying and had to strap them on before bailing out.

The co-pilot climbed out his cockpit window, hanging on to the plane as he reached in, strapped his chute to his chest and bailed out.

The pilot then put the burning plane on autopilot and attempted to follow suit.

"When he reached back in," for his parachute, "unfortunately the turret guns were over the top where that window was. And he barely got hold of the ripcord. The chute opened, and when it let go, the chute canopy just twisted around the guns of the top turret. Of course it ripped it off. He went down with the lines flopping above him," falling to his death.

Plane crew members were cycled out of combat after a certain number of missions. Wood nearly was denied credit for his last mission when the plane encountered engine trouble and had to return to England with a sole fighter escort.

"They didn't think we went far enough into enemy territory," Wood said, and he was scheduled for another mission. "Our navigator, he spent a lot of time that night with the group navigator, trying to prove to him that we were past a certain latitude," and should be credited with a mission. He finally succeeded and awakened Wood to tell him he didn't have to fly another mission.

"Oh, what a relief," Wood said. "I probably lucked out again."

The turret gunner who replaced him on that mission was hit in the head with a piece of shrapnel from flak that came through the turret. Fortunately, that man had his steel-plated flak helmet on, otherwise he would have been killed.

"I don't know, whether I would have had my helmet on or been facing in the right direction," Wood said. "So I was lucky I didn't go out on that mission."

Wood continued to serve in the reserves and was recalled to active stateside duty during the Korean War.