Air Force Museum
A Mission Remembered
On Sept. 27, 1943, en route back to England after a raid against Emden, Germany, a 91st Bomb Group B-17 nicknamed "Local Girl" was set on fire by an Me 109 fighter. Eight of the 10 B-17 crew members bailed out, but only six survived. One of the survivors was the radio operator, Tech. Sgt. Orlo Natvig.
In depth
History & service
On Sept. 27, 1943, en route back to England after a raid against Emden, Germany, a 91st Bomb Group B-17 nicknamed "Local Girl" was set on fire by an Me 109 fighter. Eight of the 10 B-17 crew members bailed out, but only six survived. One of the survivors was the radio operator, Tech. Sgt. Orlo Natvig. He landed in a small Netherlands town where the Germans quickly captured him. Natvig remained a prisoner of war until the end of World War II.
One of the propellers spun free from the crippled B-17 before the Flying Fortress crashed in a field. A German salvage crew found the propeller struck in the ground on William Ritsema's farm, located a mile from the crash site. A blade broke off when the Germans attempted to remove the prop from the ground and they left the remainder where it was. Later, Ritsema recovered the propeller and moved it to his yard.
In 1970 Natvig and another crew member visited the crash site and saw the propeller. On several occasions he hinted, unsuccessfully, that he would like to have it. Then, in 1980 Ritsema's son wrote to offer the propeller as a token of gratitude for what the Americans had done to free the Netherlands. After its arrival, Natvig had the cherished propeller mounted in the front yard of his home in Iowa and, later, in Arizona.
Aircraft change the battlefield
In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.
The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.
Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.
