When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Bob Gallup, was picking corn by hand on the family farm about midway between the tiny Grundy County village of Verona and Dwight.
He thought it wouldn't be long until he would be in the war.
When he enlisted on April 1, 1942, he was 19.
"I had never even been close to an airplane, but I wanted to be a pilot," he said.
That seemed unlikely, he said, because the Army wanted college graduates for trainees and he had just two years of high school. Still, he passed an entrance aptitude test and was accepted. "It was mostly common sense stuff and a lot of the college boys lacked common sense," he said.
He wanted to fly twin-engine B-25 bombers, but was trained to handle four-engine B-24 liberators.
After a somewhat harrowing, multi-hop trip across the Caribbean to Brazil, then on to Africa and around German-occupied Spain, he arrived in England.
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