Sergeant Fred Kopie of McAdoo, Pennsylvania served as an aerial gunner aboard B-17 Flying Fortress during the Second World War.

Kopie served in the famed 8th Air Force, flying bombing missions over Nazi Germany and occupied Europe from late 1943 to 1944.

The 8th Air Force suffered the worst casualties of any American unit in the conflict – airmen like Kopie faced down ominous odds about ever surviving the 25 missions they needed to go home for rest and recuperation.

After his fifth mission in early 1944, Kopie wrote home to his friends in a social club in McAdoo to describe what he was up to:

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Just a few lines to let you know how things are. Well I am fine and hope all you boys are the same…

Well I’ve been on five bombing missions and need 20 more. I figure I should get them in three or four months if all goes well and nothing happens, but it is just the breaks of the game.

I guess I’ll say one thing – its no game here.

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Here’s a concept about the chaos and carnage the airmen in the 8th Air Force faced in the skies over Europe, written by navigator Harry Crosby (featured in the new World War II miniseries “Masters of the Air”):

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As other planes were hit, we had to fly through their debris. I instinctively ducked as we almost hit an escape hatch from a plane ahead.

When a plane blew up, we saw their parts all over the sky. We smashed into some of the pieces. One plane hit a body which tumbled out of a plane ahead.

An unusual hit. In a plane ahead, all four engines got smacked at once. All burst into flames. And then the whole plane exploded. ‘No chutes,’ I wrote.

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Sergeant Fred Kopie survived his required number of missions and returned home to the United States in May 1944.

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