AUBURN — The plane, and certainly the fuel tanks, looked much smaller than 95-year-old Irene Bourque imagined.

Some of the airplane fuel tanks she worked on in 1942 were massive — a grown man could walk in them, she said.

The tanks she and her family inspected Thursday morning at the Auburn-Lewiston Municipal Airport were long, flat and rather thin — just a part of the B-25 J’s wings.

Then there was the B-25’s seating.

This aircraft, nicknamed “Tondelayo,” had room for six. Passenger space had been sacrificed to make room for the bomb payloads.

But the B-25 her brother Richard was killed in back in 1942 carried 11 passengers when it went down in the Coral Sea.

Her son, Richard, named after the uncle he never met, explained the two planes were probably arranged differently. The one her brother died in was probably made to transport troops, swapping out the bomb bay for more seats.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never seen one before. I’ve never been this close. I always thought it would be bigger.”

She got the chance to see it Thursday thanks to the Stow, Mass.-based Collings Foundation’s Wings of Freedom Tour, which brought four aircraft to the Twin Cities. They were the B-25 Mitchell Bomber, a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, a B-24 Liberator and a P-51 Mustang fighter.

The planes will be at the airport through noon Friday, when they are scheduled to fly to the next show.

Irene said she has a history with that particular kind of plane, and her daughter, Annette Bourque of Lewiston, thought that seeing the plane firsthand would be a neat way to cap an important week for the family. They finally laid her uncle to rest last Friday at Arlington National Cemetery, 63 years after his death.

Irene worked at the Watertown, Mass., Hood Rubber Company back in her 20s, lining the fuel tanks destined for America’s war plans with thick rubber. The rubber was designed to help absorb the impact from bullets.

“There were seven plies of rubber we had to put on, all different types,” Irene said. “There were self-sealing layers and hard rubber.”

She worked on tanks for many different sizes of air craft as well as coats and clothes destined for soldiers.

“We made everything that was rubber for the service,” she said. “The ponchos, the boots — anything the men used overseas. But my favorite was the tanks.”

They were big and the work was intricate and interesting — and dangerous.

“You would slop that paint, the rubber cement we had to use — and that would sometimes catch fire,” she said. “You had to be careful. You know, if you didn’t, the whole place could go up.”

But she didn’t learn about her most important connection to the B-25 until several years ago.

Her brother, Sgt. Richard St. Sauveur, disappeared during World War II, but the family didn’t know where or why.

He was finally declared missing in action a year later in about 1943.

“But we never knew anything,” Irene said. “We didn’t know where he was or what had happened, until about five years ago. That’s when Annette decided to dig.”

Through Freedom of Information Act requests, Annette said she was able to learn her uncle was among a group of 11 being transferred from the Australian coast to Papua New Guinea in bad weather.

“The plane actually broke apart, according to eyewitnesses,” Annette said. “They saw it in flames on the top of the ocean, and they never saw anybody bob up or bob out. Everybody was killed.”

It took another five years to get him recognized at the national cemetery.

“It was just a long process to get it done, and a little bit of a struggle,” Annette said. “But in the end, it was a wonderful service.”

staylor@sunjournal.com

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