Good Pickin and the crew of 42-97242
 
Click on the photo for a larger view

Winston Churchill immortalized the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain by stating " Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few"

For the bomber crews the United States Army Air Corp the toll would be much heavier. This is the story of one of those crews

 
The photo above shows the crew standing in front of Good Pickin at the completion of their training
Back row, left to right
Ben C. Wassell - Schenectady, New York - Pilot
Albert C. Joyce - Salem, Massachusetts - Co-Pilot
Anthony C. Formato - Bronxville, New York - Navigator
Leonard Hersch - Brooklyn, New York - Bombardier
Front row, Left to right
Robert D. Stetler - Van Wert, Ohio - Waist Gunner
Eugene J. Harpster - Furnace, Pennsylvania - Radio Operator
James T. Finch - Wantagh, New York - Tail Gunner
Pete N. Rayhawk - Sharpsville,Pennsylvania - Waist Gunner
Leon J. Sarnowski - New Britain, Connecticut - Ball Turret Gunner
Victor B. Ratliff - Hellier, Kentucky - Engineer & Top Turret Gunner
   
There was to be more than one bomber named Good Pickin but the one pictured above, seriel number 42-6153, a B17-F, was used as a trainer and never left the USA
   
On the morning of April 18th 1944 a B17-G Flying Fortress, serial number 42-97242, took off from Station 153 at Parham, Suffok, England. She belonged to 568th Squadron of the 390th Bombardment Group, US 8th Army Air Force. She was just one of hundreds of bombers from multiple air fields that took of that morning in the hopes of dealing another crippling blow to Nazi industry and supply chains.
 
Control Tower at Parham airbase

42-97242 was manned by Crew 12, the crew pictured above. This was their sixth mission, the first had been just 10 days ago on April 8.  Their target was the Heinkel Aircraft Factory near Oranienburg Germany, just a stone's throw from Sachenhausen, the first Nazi concentration camp, and about 20 miles from Berlin.
At left a photo of the Heinkel Aircraft factory during WWII and at right a present day view
   
At 2:40 that afternoon, directly over their target, they were hit by heavy anti-aircraft fire. The entire tail section, from the waist gunners back, was completey torn off. Official records indicate that no parachutes were seen as the plane went down.
Date
Mission
Target
44-04-08
081
Quackenbruck, Germany
44-04-10
083
Maldegem, Belgium
44-04-11
084
Rostock, Germany
44-04-12
085
Leipzig, Germany
44-04-13
086
Augsburg, Germany
44-04-18
087
Oranienburg, Germany
German records state that there were no survivors and list only 4 crew names in their reports (indicating that 4 sets of dog tags were found). One of the crew member's remains appears to have been found during salvaging of the wreck, after the remains of the other nine had been buried. 
On May 24 1944 a B17 (sn 42-39924) from the 95th Bomb Group was shot down in the same area of Oranienburg/Germendorf. Eight of the ten crew members perished. Four of the crew were buried in the same common grave as the 9 crew members from the April 18 mission.

In 1952 the remains of Ben C. Wassel, Pilot and 1st Lt., were re-interred in the Ardennes Military Cemetery in Belgium, C/23/3. 

The remains of the other 9 members of Crew 12 and 4 members of the B17 from May 24th were brought back to the US and were intered in Arlington Cemetery, Washington DC. The image below was taken on the day of interment.
   
   

The United States War Department kept records of aircraft that went missing. Known as MACRs (Missing Aircrew Reports) they documented information about the aircraft, the crew and how the plane was lost. These reports were not made available to the public until 1996. Each link below is to a page of MACR 4014 for B17 42-97242. Most MACR were eventually saved on 16mm film so the quality of these pages leaves a lot to be desired.

The first 3 pages would have been generated shortly after the squadron returned to base, one of the pages is dated 04-19-44. The last four pages, although generated around the same time, would not have been attached to the MACR report until much later. They are transcriptions / translations of original German documents generated by the Reich Air Ministry and were either captured after the war or were provided by the German Red Cross.
Page 1   Page 2   Page 3   Page 4  Page 5   Page 6   Page 7
   

Many bombers were equiped with large format reconnaissance cameras which enabled them to bring back photos of their bombing efforts
so command could assess the success of the raid and determine the need for additional bomb runs.

One such camera-equiped bomber was B17 42-97503 "Princess Pat". She belonged to the 381st Bombardment Group and on April 18th 1944 she was just a few minutes behind B17 42-97242
In the heat of battle the crew was probably not aware that their camera had got a photograph of the burning wreck of 42-97242 just after she had hit the ground. B17 "Princess Pat" in flight over southern England
Smoke from the crash site of 42-97242 can be seen in the above photo, about 1 inch in from the left and 1 inch down from the top. The Heinkel Aircraft factory is in the center of the photo. Note the fuel storage tanks to the right of the factory.
 
Mario Schulze lives in Oranienburg and is a member of AG Fliegerschicksale Oranienburg, an organisation dedicated to locating graves and crashsites of Allied crewmen from WWII. Mario knew from locals about 42-97242 but time had taken its toll on the knowledge base of the exact location of the crash site. Then in early 2000 he came across the photo taken by Princess Pat and knew in his heart he had found the site. The suspected site was a field of wheat and so he had to wait until after the harvest to conduct a search
 

The image to the right is an enlargement of the "Princess Pat" photo and is rotated 90 degrees. The Heinkel Aircraft factory used slave labor from the Sachsenhausen camp and actually had its own subcamp on the factory compound.

click on the photo for a larger view

During this same raid, the subcamp got hit killing several hundred people and completely demolishing the kitchens.
   
The delay in searching the wheat field was not in vain as amoung various bits and pieces of metal and 50 caliber rounds Mario found an ID braclet. The name on the braclet was Robert D. Stetler, waist gunner of 42-97242. The following year as a crop of potatoes was being harvested Robert, Mario's son, found a dog tag and it too had the name of Robert D Stetler.
   

In March of 2008 my son, Alec, was given a homework assignment to write an essay about someone in his family. Being a WWII buff he decided to write about a family member who served during the war. It was then that we discovered my wife had an uncle, Victor Ratliff, that was killed in the WWII. The Good Pickin photo with the inscription "Victor and Crew killed April 18, 1944" and that Victor was buried in Arlington was all the information we had at the time.

 
The search for information led me to Mario Schulze, Victor B. Ratliff II, son of Top Turret Gunner Victor Ratliff, Emeline and Tracey, sister and nephew of Radio Operator Eugene Harpster and Leon and Carol, nephew and niece of Ball Turret Gunner Leon Sarnowski.
 

Mario had never been able to find any family of Robert Stetler so when he told me about the braclet
and tags I took up the challange. I soon found Dudley Stetler, Robert's brother, still living in Van Wert, Ohio. His brothers tags and bracelet have been returned to him.

Right, Robert Stetler

Shown below are presentation boxes given by Mario Schulze and his associates of AG Fliegerschicksale Oranienburg. The Stetler box contains a George V English Penny recovered beside the dog-tag, probably change Robert got on his last trip to the local local pub.

The Ratfliff box contains a trigger from one of the top turret 50 cal machine guns - Victor Ratliff was the top turret gunner.

The third box contains an intact 50 cal. round with a piece of plexiglass window melted on.

 
 

Above - id plate from the Norden Bombsight /Sperry Autopilot recovered from the crashsite.

The Sperry C-1 Autopilot was an electro-mechanical system used to lessen pilot fatigue by automatically flying an airplane in straight and level flight. It could also be used to fly the aircraft through gentle maneuvers. When combined with the Norden Bombsight, it created the stability necessary to bomb targets accurately from high altitude.

The C-1 Autopilot essentially consisted of two spinning gyroscopes located in cases attached to the airplane. One gyroscope, called the Flight Gyro, was located near the aircraft's center of gravity and detected changes in roll and pitch. The Directional Gyro, located in the bombsight stabilizer, detected changes in yaw. Using a series of electrical signals, the C-1 Autopilot controlled the aircraft with servos connected to the control surfaces. Either the pilot or the bombardier could control the aircraft.

The bombsight allowed a bomb to be dropped at exactly the right time needed to hit the target. It used a mechanical analog computer consisting of a system of gyros, motors, gears, mirrors, levels, and a telescope.

The bombardier would provide the computer with the air speed, wind speed and direction, altitude, and angle of drift. With this information, the bombsight would calculate the trajectory of the bomb. As the airplane approached the target, the pilot would turn the plane over to the autopilot that would fly the plane to the precise location and release the bomb over the target. Supposedly, use of the bombsight could place a bomb inside a 100-foot (30-meter) circle from four miles (six kilometers) high
 
If you have any information about any of the crew members you can contact me at info@poorhousephotos.com