Follow this QR Code for extra savings!

Shop the Mighty Eighth Air Force Museum Gift Store Today!

Born and raised in Chagrin Falls, Ohio (a small suburb of Cleveland), Jeff Hoopes is a graduate of the University of South Carolina College of Engineering. Upon graduation, he was commissioned an Ensign in the US Navy and attended flight school in Pensacola FL. A distinguished graduate (#2 in his class), he was designated as a Naval Flight Officer (NFO) who served in Patrol Squadron 8 (home port, Brunswick, Maine). During his tenure with Patrol Squadron 8 he held the in-flight positions of Aircrew Navigator, Tactical Coordinator (TACCO), Mission Commander, Instructor NFO and Aircrew Instructor and Evaluator. His ground duties consisted of NFO Training Officer, NFO NATOPS Officer, Assistant Safety Officer, and Avionics Shop Officer. His next assignment was at Atlantic Fleet Headquarters in Norfolk, VA serving as a Command and Watch and Action Officer for the Commander-In-Chief, Atlantic Fleet (a 3 Star Admiral).

After transitioning to "civilian" life, Jeff went to work in the paper industry as a project engineer and soon transitioned to a production superintendent. Upon attaining a Masters in Business Degree (MBA) he became one of the youngest plant managers within Georgia Pacific's building products divisions when he transferred to the Savannah Gypsum facility in January of 1997.

Jeff's mantras of "Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way" and "Don't tell me why we can't do it, give me some ideas how we can do it" have served him well and have been a major contributing factor to his successes in life.

Jeff currently resides in Rincon, GA with his wife, Lori, a house full of cats and his yellow Labrador Jake. He is heavily involved in the restoration of the B-17 "City of Savannah" at the Mighty 8th Air Force Heritage Museum as one of the three crew captains, primary armament coordinator, purchasing agent, and design engineer. During tax season, he volunteers at the Effingham United Way helping low income families prepare their annual tax returns.

The Red Army had lost nearly 3 million men - an average of 44,000 a day since Barbarossa began. Stalin had begun fighting with almost 5 million soldiers under arms; now, this number was temporarily reduced to 2.3 million. By October 1941, 90 million people, 45 percent of Russia's pre-war population inhabited territory controlled by the Germans. Two-thirds of the country's prewar factories had been overrun, despite a massive industrial migration eastward of key factories and workers, beyond the reach of the Wehrmacht. Foreign observers in Moscow assumed the inevitability of Russian defeat, and merely sought to predict how long it would take. But on the battlefield, Stalin's soldiers fought on relentlessly, showing a splendid will to resist. They astonished the Germans with their dogged animal stubbornness. They were half starved, short on ammunition, sometimes deployed without weapons and dependent on those taken from fallen comrades. The Russians lost twenty casualties for every German, six tanks for every panzer; in October their losses were even worse than those of the summer, with sixty-four divisions written off. [Hastings, p.150-55]"Since the 1917 revolution the population of the Soviet Union had endured the horrors of civil war, famine, oppression, enforced migration and summary justice. But Barbarossa transcended them all in the human catastrophe that unfolded in its wake, and eventually became responsible for the deaths of 27 million of Stalin's people, of whom 16 million were civilians." [Hastings, p.152]

Read Further