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front end and the radio operator’s compartment.
The radio operator and one of the waisy gunners
were killed by flak shrapnel. The oxygen line was
damaged. Murphy decided to continue attacking
the designated target. To leave the safety of the
formation at this point would have been tempting
fate way beyond reason. Few crews that found
themselves alone in such a situation managed to
return home safely. Just after laying her eggs, Lily
took another heavy hit. Flames erupted from the
right inboard engine and the right landing gear ex-
tended. The plane began to vibrate violently. There
was nothing left to decide and Murphy began to
carefully leave the formation. At least the surviv-
ing crew members who would leave the aircraft
would be less likely to be endangered by the other
aircraft still in formation and also, an explosion,
a good possibility by then, would be less likely to
damage friendlies. The crew members were more
or less successful in getting out of the burning
plane. While Thomas Murphy and Alvin Barker, in
the position of co-pilot, were trying to hold the
plane together so that they could eventually bail
out, the fuel tank near the number three engine
exploded, killing those who had not yet gotten out
of the plane.
Piccadilly Lily went down off Wesermünde, north
of Bremen, taking with her five crew members.
One more died after unsuccessfully attempting
to bail from the stricken aircraft. The 100th Bom-
bardment Group lost a total of 7 crews and aircraft
that day.
Bernie Lay, who flew on Lily to Regensburg on
August 17th, 1943, built a sort of memorial to her
and Thomas Murphy when, in the script for the
famous 1949 film ‘Twelve O’Clock High’, and the
book of the same title, he named the central plane,
piloted in the film by Gregory Peck, Piccadilly Lily.
Variant 2: Capt. Thomas E. Murphy crew351st Bomb
Squadron, 100th Bomb, Thorpe Abbotts, Great Britain,
21 September 1943
Variant 2: Capt. Thomas E. Murphy crew351st Bomb Squadron,
100th Bomb, Thorpe Abbotts, Great Britain, 21 September 1943
Capt. Thomas E.
Murphy was killed
along with three
other men of his
crew in a raid on
Bremen on Octo-
ber 8, 1943.
Capt.
Alvin L. Barker,
Operations Officer
of the 351st BS,
died as a Com-
manding Pilot with
the crew of Capt.
Murphy.
Murphy’s crew with Piccadilly Lily in her later form in
the second half of September 1943.
Twelve O’Clock High movie poster.
The story of Alice from Dallas is a prime example
of how entangled the fates of individual crews and
their planes can be if they served over the same
period with the same squadron and also how dif-
ficult it can be for historians to position all the
pieces of the puzzle to form a clear and accurate
picture, telling a story set in the time context with
events as moving and surreal as were the skies
over Europe in 1943.
B-17F Serial Number 42-5867 was one of the
original B-17s that was delivered to the 100th
Bomb Group in April, 1943, to Kearney Air Base,
Nebraska. She was assigned to crew No. 17, com-
manded by Lt. William D. DeSanders of Dallas,
Texas. Twenty-two-year-old Bill, a 1940 gradu-
ate of the New Mexico Military Institute, married
Alice Madeline Jones, a native of the same town,
in October, 1942. A few months later, he named ‘his’
brand new airplane after her. The white lettering
on either side of the front was supposed to bring
good luck to DeSanders and the remaining nine
men of his crew. Later, on both sides of the nose,
just in front of the pilot’s and co-pilot’s side win-
dows, there appeared a white drawing of a gremlin
type figure from the 350th Bomb Squadron em-
blem, releasing bombs from a chamber pot.
Alice from Dallas was unusual in her front end
configuration. As an aircraft built in the 30 F-se-
ries production block at the Vega factories in Bur-
bank, it carried one of the evolutionary stages of
the development of the nose gun on the left side of
the nose. The machine gun was placed in a convex
semi-bubble in the shape of a teardrop, which was
supposed to give the navigator, who was tasked
with its use, a better view of the space between
9 and 11 o’clock. However, development did not stop
there and a satisfactory designed was realized
only by a diagonally raised firing positions, such
as those found on aircraft from the late produc-
tion blocks of the F series. Thanks to this, Alice
from Dallas was quite unusual among the other
machines of the unit.
On May 29th, 1943, the crew initiated their move
to England with their Alice. They arrived at Thorpe
Abbotts on June 8th and took off together on their
first combat mission two weeks later. It was not
yet a bombing attack against German military tar-
gets, but a decoy mission to lure German fighters.
It was not a rule for 350th Squadron ground crews
to decorate the noses of their aircraft with mis-
sion markings for those they had flown, and Alice
was no exception. She was not decorated with
either bombs or duck symbols indicating partici-
pation in those decoy missions. Alice suffered her
first serious fighter inflicted damage during a raid
on Le Bourget on the 14th of July.
After a very long and difficult raid on Trondheim,
Norway, on July 24th, 1943, Bill DeSanders fell ill
with an unpleasant virus. The following morning,
his crew flew with a replacement pilot, the 350th
Bomb Squadron’s Operations Officer, Capt. Rich-
ard Carey. They flew in a B-17F borrowed from the
crew of Lt. Roy F. Claytor with the name ‘Duration
+ 6’. DeSanders’ men never returned from the mis-
sion to the port of Warnemünde. After heavy flak
Text: Jan Zdiarský
Color profiles: Michal Fárek
Photos: 100th Bomb Group Archives
Title photo: “Alice from Dallas” during a mission
to Warnemünde on 29 July 1943.
“Alice from Dallas” with her crew during the final
phase of the unit’s training in the USA. The original
name of the aircraft is repainted on the nose,
and the new name has not yet been applied.
ALICE FROM DALLAS
B-17F-30-VE 42-5867 LN
-
O
Speciál B-17F / The Bloody Hundredth 1943 INFO Eduard
35
June 2024