Exclusive Portrait Series: Ken Burns' The War

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The news came the night of Oct. 3, 1942. That’s when Earl Burke read the article in the Sacramento Union. Tom, his older brother, had died in a plane crash two days before. He was 21, stationed in Puerto Rico and preparing to invade north Africa. Burke enlisted shortly thereafter.
    “I didn’t think twice about getting into the war,” he recalls.
    In 1943, Burke joined the 8th Air Force. The Egger twins, whom he had known since high school, persuaded him to apply for gunnery school. Over the next few years, Burke flew in 24 missions across Europe. His main plane was a Boeing B-17 — called the X-Virgin — where he was a ball turret gunner.
    “My mother and father didn’t know I was flying,” Burke says. “I didn’t want to scare them. They already received one telegram.”
    And the skies were hardly friendly. In the fall of 1943, a piece of flak hit his left arm and put him in the hospital for months. The next year, a 20-millimeter shell came through the right side of Burke’s turret, hitting his left arm again and smashing the bone. The shell then exploded out of the turret and killed the waist gunner. During a raid in Germany, Burke watched as the Egger twins’ plane was shot down. They parachuted out before the plane exploded but soon became prisoners of war.
    “One thing you didn’t do was make friends,” Burke says, “because the minute you made friends, they were gone. Unfortunately, the Egger twins were close so it hit harder when I saw them go down.” 
    After the service Burke worked at Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. until retiring in 1984. He lives with wife, Lois, in Sacramento, where he keeps a model of the X-Virgin and a picture of his big brother.

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