B-17G-25-BO 42-31713 Snake Hips arrived at the 327th Bombing Squadron of the 92nd Bombing Group in February of 1944. It flew on operations continuously from then, surviving totally unscathed until the August 24th mission to Merseburg, when the bomber took a 88mm flak round hit directly in the bomb bay. Miraculously, the full load of bombs did not detonate, although ball turret gunner Sgt Gordon V Wescott was fatally wounded by the shell's explosion. Pilots 2ndLt John Bosko and 2ndLt Curt H Koehnert fought to keep the bomber aloft, and they aborted the mission. On the way home the hydraulic system caught fire and burning fluid spread over the floor of the fuselage and the catwalk of the bomb bay. Engineer S/Sgt Peter W LaFleur tried to put the blaze out with a fire extinguisher, and when this ran dry, resorted to tearing the flaming insulation from the walls with his bare hands. The bombs were then jettisoned, although there were five 'hang-ups', in other words bombs that did not drop and stayed in the bomb bay, and the crew knew that the damaged bombs could explode at any moment. Bombardier S/Sgt Jerome E Charbonneau, working perilously on the slippery, burning catwalk in the wide open bomb bay, directed the waist gunners and the the radio operator as they defused the bombs and made them safe. Midway over the North Sea two engines died from fuel starvation, but the crippled bomber finally made it to Woodbridge, Suffolk, where Bosko ordered the crew to bale out. He couldn't leave the controls himself because the plane was so badly damaged that it would have fallen out of the sky the moment he released the controls. He finally succeeded in safely landing one of the most badly-damaged B-17s to make it back to the UK.
