When I was growing up we had Frank, a Boeing engineer, who lived a couple of doors down the street. During the war he was a waist gunner in a Fort. One day he was visiting with my Dad who was showing him some photos my Father took in Normandy shortly after the invasion. So after he and my Dad shared a few beers, Frank came back with some of his own pictures. One was of what appeared to be a wadded up ball of aluminum foil in a field. There were perhaps a dozen additional pictures from different angles. They all looked the same to me, twisted metal in a ball -unrecognizable as anything else. Well, it turned out to be what was left of Frank's B-17 when it got back to the field in England. Because Frank was severely wounded, he apparently couldn't jump with the others and elected to "go in with the ship". The pilot, because he refused to leave Frank, elected to try to land the crippled bomber alone (apparently something very difficult under the best of circumstances). The result was the wadded up ball of metal in the pictures. Somehow they survived but it was the end of the war for both. As a result of what Frank decided was his "Boeing good fortune" he promised himself he was going to go to Seattle to work for them. Twenty years later, he was part of the team of Boeing engineers that built the Saturn V rocket that went to the moon. It's one of those things as a kid, you never forget.
