FORT WALTON BEACH — Charles Coons’ stories sound like the stuff of movies but, to him, they are memories.
The World War II Army Air Corps veteran can still remember vivid details of his wartime adventures, from the time he crash landed a plane to jumping out of a B-17 just before it caught fire.
But the 93-year-old will never say he was brave or courageous. He was just doing his job.
“I think I was probably too dumb to know what was going on,” said Coons, sitting on his walker.
The walls of Coons’ Neptune Court home are decorated with personal memorabilia, from photos of planes he flew to many medals displayed in a shadowbox. Nearby, a black-and-white photo shows Coons alongside the rest of the 303rd Hell’s Angels Bombardier Squadron.
Read some of Charles Coons' stories. >>
While his glory days are behind him, Coons’ blue eyes still light up at a chance to tell his tale from the very beginning.
When he was just 3 years old, his father took him to see an airplane show — one of the first to occur, according to Coons. It was the moment the plane soared into the sky that Coons knew what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.
He was going to be a pilot.
“I thought, ‘I’ll bet this will be fun. I’m going to fly me one of those things.’ And that was the start,” Coons said. “I wanted to fly and be a pilot all my life. So when I could, I did.”
At the ripe age of 22 in 1943, he joined the Air Corps and after a short training session was made to be a co-pilot of a plane he said he had never flown. It would be two more years before the war would end.
“I remember being in the barracks in a bed that was in the middle when I saw that all the beds to my left were empty. Those were all the people that had gotten shot down,” Coons said. “That’s when I thought I might have volunteered for the wrong thing.”
On one of his final missions while in Frankfurt, Germany, Coons said he was flying when the No. 2 propeller “took a bad lick.” He said the crew heard an “eerie sound” when the propeller stopped and the plane went out of formation.
From there, the crew fought off a German fighter plane behind them and thought they were done when they saw a second fighter plane coming at them head on.
“I thought the end had come,” Coons said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh crud, this is it.’ ”
The second plane, as it turned out, was a P-47, an American plane coming to the rescue. But that was not the end of the journey for Coons. Soon after the German plane had left, the crew had to deal with their second dilemma — a propeller not working and no electronics functioning in the plane.
Coons said at that time he was ready to steer the plane home and hope for the best. After a battle with the pilot, they were headed home when the entire engine seized.
“Wouldn’t you believe it?” Coons said.
That’s when the crew spotted a British runway and made a crash landing. The crew was able to manually work the landing gear and the plane stopped without a single injury.
In another episode, Coons said he and his crew were testing a B-17 that had been patched up after being shot in the fuel tank. A self-described “showboat,” Coons was doing tricks in the plane when gasoline started leaking.
Before he was able to get the plane to a stop, the back of the plane had caught fire.
“The two guys in the back shouted at me that it was getting hot, and before I knew it they had jumped out of the plane that was going 30 mph on the runway,” Coons said. “That was a close one. I was the last one off and just when I reached everyone else that plane exploded.”
Coons laughed at the memory. He kept a copy of the magazine that published the story when it happened in 1944.
During his time in the military, Coons saw the air fire during D-Day at the invasion of Normandy, fought in the Korean War, flew for the 303rd Bomb Squad and the 360th Bomb Squad and retired as a lieutenant colonel after testing droids with Eglin Air Force Base. He earned a Distinguished Flying Cross and an Air Medal.
“To him, it’s no big deal,” said Coons’ son, Pat Coons. “To me, it’s the stuff right out of the movies and I think other men like my father are the same. It’s just what they did. He got paid.
“But what these 20-something year olds did was just amazing.”
Coons doesn’t like to talk about the men who didn’t make it home. He prefers to share the stories that keep his audience on the edge of their seats until the happy ending — making it out just in the nick of time.
“I was the most naive little boy,” Coons said. “I was just the boy from a small town in Kentucky and I wasn’t prepared for what I was getting myself into. When I went to war it was like I was in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ except people got hurt.”
Contact Daily News Staff Writer Angel McCurdy at 850-315-4432 or amccurdy@nwfdailynews.com. Follow her on Twitter @AngelMnwfdn.