![]() Moran, resigned to dying as he plunged to earth in the tail end of the airplane, said the Catholic Rosary. ![]() The Germans riddled Rikki Tikki Tavi, the name of the B-17, with bullets, both hitting Moran, disabling his parachute and, eventually, causing the craft to disintegrate into pieces as it fell to the ground from above the clouds.Ĭrew members were Benny Cipresso, Linwood Langley, Donald Curtis, Jesse Orrison, Walter Reed, Sam “Pee-Wee” Amatulli, Anderson King and Edmund Swedo. Moran was part of a crew of nine flying with a group of other American bomber airplanes over Germany in 1944 when his plane inexplicably left the formation and was prey for Nazi fighter planes. He explained his capture by the Nazis and his 18 month confinement as a German prisoner of war. John Armbruster, author of “Tailspin,” told the tale of Gene Moran, a Soldier’s Grove native, who fell out of the sky without a parachute into a tree. ![]() ![]() The remarkable story of a Wisconsin tailgunner who survived a four mile fall to the earth in the shot-up tailpiece of a B-17 Flying Fortress over Germany during World War II was retold in a Walk In Their Shoes lecture on Memorial Day in the Edgar Public Schools auditorium. Moran fell four miles without a parachute and lived ![]()
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