Lt George A. Nicolau was born in Detroit, Michigan on 14 February 1925. He spent the first five years of his life there and then, the family moved to a town of about 75.000 people called Jackson Michigan, and that’s where he grew up and went to public school, all the way through high school. His father and mother were from north-western Greece and immigrated to the USA around 1906 – 1909. His parents ran a restaurant business. When his father first came to the States, he came alone and had various pickup jobs. He did some railroad work, worked in a mill, finally opened a shoeshine stand in Massachusetts, and then eventually went into the restaurant business. In the course of time two or three years, he was in the States making money, then he had to go back and get his wife to come to the USA. Like most immigrants, many of them come alone and made enough money to pay the wife’s ship fare at that point. George Nicolau had two older brothers and an older sister and they all grow up in the family’s restaurant in Jackson. George was one of four children that survived! His mother had eight children but unfortunately, the four died at various times at young ages of the usual kind of illnesses and diseases that immigrants were prone to. Regarding his combat tour in the USAAF, Mr. George A. Nicolau recounts:

“In 1943, I was 18 years old, World War II was going on, and I wanted to volunteer for the armed services, the Army Air Corps, which is what it was called then, and I did that immediately after I was 18. Two other friends of mine had done the same thing and the three of us convinced the principal of the high school that we could graduate in absentia in April ’43 I left Jackson to go into the Army Air Corps. That was the beginning of my military career. I trained mostly in Texas. After what they call classification, the Air Corps decided I should be a navigator rather than a pilot. I think part of that was because I did happen to break a tail wheel on a Piper Cub in a landing. The depth perception was not quite as good as they wanted, so I became a navigator and came back to Texas and trained at a place called Ellington Field, which was outside of Houston, and then went to navigation school in San Marcus, Texas (Class 44-05). I graduated as navigator and officer in April of 1944. About two or three months later the crew assembled in a place called Pyote, Texas where I met my pilot and the other eight members of the crew. We flew out of that base in Western Texas to various places in the United States, getting trained and getting used to each other. And then in early June ’44, we all hopped on to a ship and we went to England where we were assigned to a particular base in East Anglia. We flying B-17s, they’re called Flying Fortress which is a four-engine heavy bombers. As a navigator, my station was in the front of the aircraft. If you’ve seen a B-17 there’s sort of a Plexiglas nose which is where the bombardier sits on what we call the bomb run, and the navigator sits behind him but looking out a side window. He has a little desk there where you could work. So that was the usual configuration on a B-17. I have participated in only four combat missions because I was wounded in the fourth. I’ll tell you some of the highlights of those. Well, I think the second one was an unusual mission because at that point in time the invasion was going on and General George Patton and his tanks were breaking out of Normandy and B-17s were in effect going to be used as tactical bombers rather than strategic bombers at the time. Our aircraft usually flew at 25.000 feet in wings of 54, and that day we were just three aircraft apiece flying at 10.000 feet and therefore much more prone to anti-aircraft fire. Our job that day was to bomb an airfield northwest of Paris in a town called Evreau, but the lead aircraft mistakenly took us over Paris which we were told never to go to because the gunners were absolutely sensational there, and we went and got into a lot of anti-aircraft fire, a lot of flak, and the lead man took us back over that even though we’d lost 1.000 feet in a 180-degree turn and got shot at again. And then Cherbourg went over Le Havre and we got more holes in our airplane! By the time we landed, at a conservative count, we had about 200 holes in that plane, including a big chunk out of the wing root where it attaches to the body! Τhe our aircraft for this mission was the B-17G 42-97219, REUEL'S REVENGE. We were very unhappy because of what had occurred, so we decided to talk to the pilot of the lead plane and I had said to my captain, who was then a Lieutenant:

- We really ought to tell him that he made a terrible mistake.

So we went over to see him, and he was a Chinese-American, Captain Chin, and we said to him:

- You took us over to Paris!

And he said:

- Oh, no, no, that was Rouen, it’s west of the Paris.

As a 19-year-old I piped up and said:

- Captain, I’ve never been to Paris, but I know the Eiffel Tower when I see it!

So, that was the end of that story."