100th ARW honors WWII B-17 ‘Little Boy Blue’ on 80th anniversary of crash

Pieces of internal couplings from a B-17 Flying Fortress are recovered from a farmer’s field during an archaeological dig Sept. 19, 2023, in East Anglia, England. The aircraft – “Little Boy Blue” – crashed July 19, 1944, while on its way to bomb a ball-bearing factory and other industrial complexes in Schweinfurt, Germany. An archaeological team from Cotswold Archaeology, partners with the U. S. Defense Prisoner of War/Missing in Action Accounting Agency, led volunteers from a U.K. Ministry of Defence Infrastructure Organization program known as “Operation Nightingale,” on a Missing in Action/Killed in Action recovery operation of the World War II B-17 recovery crash site in September 2023. Eighty years later, July 19, 2024, U.S. Airmen from Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England, attended a memorial ceremony and laid a wreath to honor the crewmembers who perished that day. (U.S. Air Force photo by Karen Abeyasekere)