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

U.S. Air Force Senior Master Sgt. Christopher Staton, left, former 100th Operations Group senior enlisted leader, and Maj. Scott Platow, 351st Air Refueling Squadron director of operations, both Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England, hold a recovered aircraft part from a B-17 Flying Fortress uncovered in a farmer’s field in East Anglia Sept. 19, 2023. 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. (U.S. Air Force photo by Karen Abeyasekere)