Woody Sowers, USAAC/USAF Veteran, Turns 100

The American flag outside a modest ranch house in Staunton, Virginia doesn’t give away too much about the owner. Flags are common enough where it could be a schoolteacher, community organizer, or civil servant. But in this case, the owner is Woody Sowers, a World War II Veteran who will celebrate his 100th birthday Dec. 29.

Today, Sowers spends his time with family, friends and neighbors who drop by. He enjoys Chik-fil-A, especially the milkshakes, and he spends some time watching Virginia Tech football and Duke basketball between World War II movies, old westerns and the world news. But he also makes it a point to exercise regularly and get outside.

“Every year we take him to Floyd County where he was born and where he spent summers helping his grandparents on the farm and hunting squirrel, rabbits, turkeys and deer when he could,” said Melissa Wilkins, one of Sowers’ two daughters. “He taught his grandsons to hunt, and if he’s strong enough he attends the Veterans’ meetings at the local YMCA each month, and church on Sundays and Wednesdays.”

Sowers was born in Riner, Virginia in 1922 and his first year of school was in a one-room schoolhouse before his family moved to the relative metropolis of Roanoke. After completing high school and two years of night school he moved to Baltimore to take a job making war plane parts at the Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Company. It was there he was drafted into the Army.

Among the millions of men and women who served during the war, not all saw combat – tens of thousands were in training, keeping a full pipeline of trained soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines ready to be deployed to Europe or the Pacific.

So it was that on March 29, 1943, Sowers found himself in the Army. While in basic training, he read an article in a magazine that the Army Air Corps was looking for recruits to be bombardiers and navigators; he applied and was transferred to the USAAC.

Today, in a quiet voice, Sowers’ face lights up when he talks about his military experience. His stories are often disjointed, stopping and restarting in different places, but his two daughters, Rhonda Sowers, who is also his live-in caregiver, and Wilkins who lives nearby, help fill in the details.

When Sowers stops, one of his daughters provides a prompt that gets him moving again, like a parent pushing a bicycle for a child learning to ride. They have books of photos, and old uniforms, and shadow boxes that display their fathers’ WWII Victory Ribbon, and American Theater Ribbon. These gentle nudges maneuver him from basic training to bombardier training.

“We wanted to be pilots, me and a couple of my friends, but they had too many pilots – they weren’t taking any more. I chose to go to bombardier school – the bombardier gets to fly the plane for a few minutes leading into a bomb run,” he explained.

The training in Georgia took several months during which time they had to learn to fly the plane for the bombing run and learn about the conditions in the aircraft.

“We practiced bombing at low altitude to 10,000 feet,” Sowers said. “You had to know how much pressure your bodies could stand and so they put us in a room and reduced the pressure. One side of the room had to untie and take off their boots and put them back on without oxygen. The other side was normalized. It trained you to be conscious of a lack of oxygen and to use your mask. For navigator training we had to know the stars, what they were and where. You would take pictures of the stars and use a sextant – took readings and used a book that would tell you where you were.”

When he finished his training, he was made an instructor for a segregated class of African American cadets in Texas before being reassigned again.

“The Army still didn’t know what to do with me,” he said. “So, they sent me to navigator training in the A-26 (Invader), and when we were finished that, they sent us to a holding area in Lincoln, Nebraska.”

While Sowers’ brother, Harold, was an aircraft tail gunner in the Pacific theater, he himself was never deployed to combat, and was discharged Nov. 17, 1944. He rejoined the Army Air Force as an officer after the war and spent more than a dozen years in the Reserves as a navigator. Harold Sowers worked for a number of years at the Salem VAMC before he passed away in November, 1988.

Though recalled to active duty during the Korean War, Sowers was never deployed to the Pacific.

“In the Reserves we had to get four hours of flying in every month, and it was getting near the end of a month, and I hadn’t had a chance to do my flight time,” he recalled. “They said I could fly with a fighter pilot – and this is when jets were first coming out.” Sowers smiles as he recalls the story and laughs most of the way through its retelling: “The pilot was a guy who checked out planes after they had been fixed and well, we got to altitude and he said, ‘hold on tight,’ and did a nosedive. When he pulled up all the blood rushed from my head – but I got my time in!”

Sowers held a number of jobs after his initial military enlistment, to include work at a manufacturer of aircraft engine cowlings, selling some of the first TVs in the country with RCA, and for 30 years as a salesman for Top Value. During his time as a salesman, he made the most of his travels, taking a fishing rod with him and learning the rivers all through the region.

Today, Sowers enjoys going to his daughter’s farm and watching the busy-ness – hay making, lambing, and watching the great grandkids play. He has four grandchildren and seven great grandchildren.

“He is always content and has a wonderful, positive attitude – we’re so grateful for the gift of good health and longevity God has given him,” his daughters said.