Lila Tomek doesn't feel comfortable about being singled out. She was part of a team — just one of so many, she insists.
"There were thousands of us," said the 101-year-old Humboldt resident who flew to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday to be honored Wednesday with a Congressional Gold Medal. "I have a little bit of mixed feelings about all of this."
Sadly, she is one of the few still standing. She's among the last of a dying breed. Literally.
And as America's Greatest Generation dwindles more each day, it's important to recognize not just the men who went off to fight campaigns in Europe and in the Pacific, but also the women who stayed behind and helped the war effort by building America's warships and fighter planes.
If Tomek, then unmarried and known as Lila Westerman, would have had it her way, she would have followed her two younger brothers in battle by joining the U.S. Army.
Lyle and Glenn Westerman were drafted into the Army. Lyle was deployed to Europe and Glenn to the Northern Mariana Islands in the western Pacific Ocean. Both made it home alive and lived into their 90s.
Times were different in 1942. For many women, serving during wartime meant putting in work on the homefront.
Lila Westerman became one of the 6 million women who worked in factories and shipyards during the war. They were known as Rosie the Riveters, and their contributions to winning World War II can't be overstated.
The award Tomek is receiving was approved as part of the Rosie the Riveter Congressional Gold Medal Act of 2019.
The act honors any woman who held employment or volunteered in support of the war efforts during World War II and recognizes their contributions to the U.S. war effort.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson will present Tomek and a group of other "Rosies" with the medal on Wednesday. It'll be her second trip to the nation's capital. She and her late husband, Rudolph, who died in 1994, took a vacation there several years ago.
"We're really excited about going back to Washington, D.C., for all of this," said Nancy Wilcher, Lila's daughter. "It's exciting for everyone. It should be emphasized there were 6 million women who entered the workforce during that time."
They kept the country going, making up 37% of the workforce from 1940-45. Not all of them built planes and ships. They did everything else — from pumping gas to working in railyards to fixing cars.
The idea of Rosie the Riveter came from a song, but the iconic image of a woman in coveralls wearing a bandana and flexing her bicep was made in 1943 by J. Howard Miller for a Westinghouse Electric ad that was meant to boost the morale of women in the workforce at the time with four inspirational words: "We Can Do It!"
"You remember what the signs said," Tomek said. "We can do it. We did. I went to school for a short time before they hired me. I'm pretty sure everybody took the test before they got in."
In 1942, Tomek, then 19 years old, took a job in Omaha for 60 cents an hour, building fighter planes. She started off splicing wires for the B-26 Marauder before punching rivets for the B-29 Superfortress.
She remembers the environment of the manufacturing plant. The gridlock — bumper-to-bumper cars of workers showing their security clearance at the front gate each morning to enter the grounds. The lunch room, hundreds eating together and the time a test flight plane crashed into the plant while workers were eating lunch.
She also recalls an April day in 1943 when she was startled by a loud whistle and the admonition for workers to descend from their ladders, put down their work and step away from their planes.
Minutes later, the doors to the hangar opened and a convertible carrying U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Nebraska Gov. Dwight Griswold and Glenn L. Martin, an aviation pioneer, entered the plant.
The car stopped along the way, and the president saluted the workers at each plane.
During her time at the plant, Tomek worked alongside Rosie — a real-life riveter from Verdigre — and the two were among a group of mostly men who received a special assignment. They were bused to a different Army hangar at the manufacturing plant and sworn to secrecy.
"We were told not to say anything to anyone or we would be punished," she said.
They wondered why they were disassembling the armor plates and munitions racks from the planes, but no one dared to ask why.
What they would later find out is they were stripping the heavy pieces from the B-29s to make them light enough to carry the heavy atomic bomb and the extra fuel required for their mission.
There was no moral objection from Tomek to helping ready the Omaha-built Enola Gay, which dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.
"I had two brothers fighting in the war," she said. "That question always angered me because there were people who objected to the war.
"I just wanted my brothers to come home and was doing what I could."
Photos: See historic photos of the Hiroshima atomic bombing 75 years ago
Lila Tomek was 19 years old in 1942 when she left an office job in Pawnee City to apply to work at the Glenn L. Martin Bomber Plant near Omaha. This is her engagement photo.
In this Aug. 6, 1945, file photo, the "Enola Gay" Boeing B-29 Superfortress lands at Tinian, Northern Mariana Islands, after the U.S. atomic bombing mission against the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Lila Tomek of Humboldt was among the women who helped ready the Enola Gay for its mission.
The Bomberettes were the first-place winners in the second shift B-29 Specials Thursday Morning Bowling League in 1945. Members (from left) were Millie McMillan (inspection), Lila Westerman, Mabel Peterson, Julia Slato, and Lois Bryson (all final assembly).
Lila Tomek was working at the Glenn L. Martin Bomber Plant in Bellevue on April 26, 1943, when President Franklin Roosevelt visited. Flanked by Secret Service agents in this photo, he inspects B-26 Marauders, planes that saw action in both Europe and the Pacific. Roosevelt was accompanied by Nebraska Gov. Dwight Griswold (back seat, left), Glenn Martin (middle), and plant manager G.T. Wiley.
Lila Tomek, who is 101 years old and lives in Humboldt, will be in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday with 29 other Rosie the Riveters to collectively receive a Congressional Gold Medal.