Robert T. Lee.

Robert T. Lee served as nose gunner and was one of the handful of original crew members still flying alongside Hughes when the tour finally ended. He was nick named "The Old Man" as he was the oldest of the crew at 26.

On April 4, 1945, Mission 33, the crew endured a forty-minute jet fighter attack — a sustained engagement that put considerable pressure on the gunners. Lee was firing from the nose throughout and landed hits on one of the jets. Four days later, on April 8, 1945, he flew Mission 35 to Roth airfield south of Nuremberg alongside Hughes and navigator Lou Windsor. By that point, most of the original crew had already finished their tours. Lee, Hughes, and Windsor crossed the finish line together.

He appears in the crew photo taken March 24, 1945, standing in the top row, and in an earlier photograph taken at the waist gun position at RTU March Field in July 1944 — a picture from the beginning of the story, before Station 104, before Hamburg, before any of it.