When Germans Cut His B-17 in Half at 24,000 Feet — He Kept Shooting All the Way Down

The Indomitable Spirit of Staff Sergeant Eugene Moran: A Tale of Survival in World War II

At 11:32 on the morning of November 29th, 1943, Staff Sergeant Eugene Moran knelt in the tail section of a B-17 Flying Fortress named Ricky Tikitavi, watching German fighters swarm toward his bomber like angry hornets. At just 19 years old, a farm boy from Wisconsin, this was his first combat mission over a heavily defended target. The Eighth Air Force had dispatched over 300 bombers to destroy Bremen’s factories that morning. German defenders had already shot down six Flying Fortresses in the first hour, and Moran’s position was the loneliest on the aircraft.

The tail gunner sat on a bicycle-style seat at the very back of the bomber, separated from the rest of the crew by 40 feet of fuselage. His only company was a pair of .50 caliber machine guns and the German fighters trying to kill him. The B-17 carried ten men: the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit, navigator and bombardier in the nose, flight engineer in the top turret, radio operator behind the bomb bay, two waist gunners standing at open windows, and Moran alone in the tail. His job was simple: protect the bomber’s most vulnerable angle. German pilots had learned early in the war that attacking from directly behind a B-17 put them in the firing arc of only one man—the tail gunner.

The Harsh Reality of Bomber Missions

By November 1943, the Eighth Air Force was losing bombers at a catastrophic rate. The mission to Schweinfurt two months earlier had cost 60 Flying Fortresses in a single day, resulting in 600 men killed or captured in just one afternoon. Bomber crews referred to deep missions into Germany as “milk runs to hell.” The mathematics of survival were brutal; a bomber crew had to complete 25 missions to return home, but statistical analysis showed the average crew lasted only 15 missions. Some groups were losing half their aircraft every month.

Moran had enlisted the day he turned 18, growing up on a dairy farm near Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin. He had watched aircraft pass overhead and dreamed of flying. The Army Air Forces needed gunners—young men with quick reflexes and steady nerves. Gunnery training taught him to track fast-moving targets while compensating for wind, altitude, and the speed of his own aircraft. He learned to fire in short bursts to prevent his barrels from overheating and memorized the silhouettes of enemy fighters like the Messerschmitt BF 109 and Focke-Wulf 190.

However, no amount of training could prepare anyone for the reality of combat over Germany. At 24,000 feet, the cold dropped to 40 degrees below zero, causing frostbite to claim fingers and toes. The thin air made every movement exhausting, and the German fighters came in waves, firing 20 mm cannons that could tear through aluminum like paper. Ricky Tikitavi took off from Snetterton Heath in England that morning as part of the 96th Bomb Group, targeting Bremen, an industrial city on the Weser River known for its shipyards, aircraft factories, and submarine pens. It was one of the most heavily defended cities in Germany.

The Attack Begins

As the bomber formations crossed the North Sea in tight defensive boxes, each B-17 was positioned to provide overlapping fields of fire. The theory was simple: pack the bombers close together so their combined firepower could drive off enemy fighters. However, the reality was that a direct hit on one aircraft often damaged those flying beside it. Bremen’s anti-aircraft defenses opened fire as the formations approached, and black bursts of flak filled the sky. The bombers could not maneuver; they had to fly straight and level for the bomb run. Shrapnel tore through wings and fuselages.

Moran watched a B-17 in the formation ahead take a direct hit. It folded in half and dropped from the sky. Ricky Tikitavi released its bombs over the target—4,000 pounds of high explosives tumbling toward the factories below. Mission accomplished. Now they just had to survive the flight home.

As the bomber formation began its turn toward England, they had 200 miles of hostile airspace between them and safety. That was when Ricky Tikitavi’s number two engine took a direct hit from flak. The propeller windmilled uselessly, and the aircraft began losing speed. A damaged bomber falling behind the formation was a death sentence. German fighter pilots watched for stragglers; a lone B-17 without the protection of mass defensive fire was easy prey.

Moran saw them coming—dozens of Messerschmitts climbing from below and another group of Focke-Wulfs diving from above. Ricky Tikitavi was about to fight alone against overwhelming odds, and in the tail gunner position, Eugene Moran would be their first target.

The Battle in the Skies

The first Me-109s came in from the 6:00 low position, directly behind and beneath the bomber. Moran pressed his shoulders against the steel chest plate behind him and squeezed the triggers. His twin .50 calibers roared to life, tracer rounds streaking toward the fighter. The German pilot broke off his attack and rolled away, but there were more—many more. The Focke-Wulfs attacked in pairs. One would draw the gunner’s attention while the other lined up a killing shot.

Moran swung his guns from target to target. Spent brass casings piled up around his knees, and the smell of cordite filled the cramped compartment. At 24,000 feet, the temperature inside Ricky Tikitavi was 43 degrees below zero. Moran wore an electrically heated flight suit, but the cold still seeped through. His breath formed ice crystals on his oxygen mask, and the machine guns grew hot from continuous firing while his fingers went numb inside his gloves.

The German pilots were professionals—Luftwaffe veterans who had been fighting since 1939. They knew exactly how to kill a B-17. Target the engines first. A bomber with damaged engines could not keep up with its formation. Then work on the gunners to eliminate defensive fire. Finally, pour cannon rounds into the fuselage until something vital broke. Moran heard the impacts before he felt them—20 mm cannon shells punching through aluminum, the sound of tearing metal.

Somewhere forward, one of the waist gunners stopped firing, then the other. The intercom filled with static and fragments of voices. Moran could not tell who was speaking or what they were saying. The bomber shuddered as more rounds struck home. He kept firing. There was nothing else he could do. A Focke-Wulf came in from the 4:00 position. Moran swung his guns and pressed the triggers. The fighter’s wing disintegrated, spiraling downward, trailing black smoke. His first confirmed kill. But he had no time to celebrate.

Cannon rounds ripped through the tail section. Moran felt something slam into his left forearm, then his right. Both arms had been hit. Blood soaked through his flight suit sleeves. The pain was immediate and intense, but his hands still worked. He could still grip the triggers. More impacts. The vertical stabilizer above him took multiple hits. Control cables snapped and whipped through the air. The tail section began vibrating violently. Something was very wrong with the aircraft.

Moran glanced down at his parachute. Every airman wore one—a silk canopy packed into a canvas container strapped to his chest. If the bomber went down, the parachute was his only chance of survival. He saw holes in the fabric. Multiple holes. Cannon rounds had shredded it. His parachute was useless. If he had to bail out, he would fall four miles to his death.

The attack continued. German fighters made pass after pass. Moran counted at least 15 of them circling the crippled bomber. Ricky Tikitavi was bleeding altitude and speed. The remaining engines strained to keep the aircraft airborne. The forward section was still intact, and navigator Jesse Orrison was still alive, albeit wounded. The pilot and co-pilot were dead at the controls, and the flight engineer was dead in his turret. The radio operator was dead, and the ball turret gunner was dead. Of the ten men who had taken off from England that morning, only two were still breathing.

The Fall and Survival

Then came the moment that would change everything. Another cannon round struck the bomber. This one hit something critical. Moran felt the aircraft lurch. A grinding sound echoed through the airframe. The vibration intensified until his teeth rattled. Then came a sound he would never forget: the shriek of tearing aluminum. The B-17 was breaking apart. The fuselage split just forward of the tail section. Moran watched the front of the aircraft separate and fall away. The wings, the engines, the cockpit, the bodies of his crewmates—all tumbling toward the German countryside four miles below.

He was alone now, trapped in a severed tail section, wounded in both arms, his parachute destroyed, 24,000 feet above enemy territory, falling. The laws of physics offered no mercy. Terminal velocity for a human body is approximately 120 mph. The tail section of a B-17 weighed several thousand pounds. It would fall faster, much faster. Eugene Moran had perhaps 90 seconds to live.

The severed tail section tumbled through the sky, spinning end over end and throwing Moran against the walls of his compartment. His wounded arm screamed with pain. Blood sprayed across the interior. The wind howled through the torn fuselage where the rest of the aircraft had been. Moran should have been paralyzed with fear. Instead, he did something that defied all logic: he kept fighting.

The German fighters were still circling. They saw the tail section falling and moved in for a closer look. Perhaps they wanted to confirm the kill. Whatever their reason, they made a fatal mistake. They flew within range of a wounded tail gunner who refused to die. Moran grabbed his machine guns. The spinning tail section made aiming nearly impossible. The G-forces pressed him against his seat, then threw him toward the ceiling. His arms were bleeding. His parachute was destroyed. He was falling four miles to certain death, and he was still shooting.

Tracers arced wildly through the sky as the tail section rotated. The German pilots scattered, having never seen anything like this: a man in a falling coffin firing back at them with everything he had. One Messerschmitt took hits across its fuselage, and the pilot broke off and dove toward the ground, trailing smoke. The altimeter in the tail section was shattered, but Moran could see the ground growing larger through the gaps in the torn metal. Fields, forests, roads—a patchwork of German farmland rushing up to meet him.

The tail section’s aerodynamics saved his life. The vertical stabilizer and horizontal stabilizers acted like crude wings, catching the air and creating drag. Instead of plummeting straight down, the wreckage began to glide. The spinning slowed, and the descent became almost controlled. Almost.

Moran estimated he was falling at approximately 100 feet per second. Fast enough to kill him on impact, but slower than a human body in free fall. The stabilizers were buying him time—seconds, perhaps a minute. Time he used to keep firing at any German fighter that came close. The ground was 5,000 feet below, then 3,000, then 1,000. Moran braced himself against the steel chest plate. He wrapped his wounded arms around the ammunition boxes. There was nothing else to hold on to.

The tail section struck the top of a pine tree at approximately 100 mph. The impact snapped branches as thick as a man’s arm. The vertical stabilizer caught on a trunk and tore away. The wreckage cartwheeled through the forest canopy, shedding pieces of aluminum with each impact. Moran’s head slammed into the steel framework above him. His vision exploded into white light. He felt his ribs crack. Both arms bent at angles they were never designed to bend. The tail section hit another tree, spun sideways, and crashed into the frozen ground. Then silence.

Eugene Moran was alive—barely. He lay in the wreckage, unable to move. Both forearms were broken in multiple places, compound fractures with bone protruding through skin. His ribs were shattered. Every breath brought stabbing pain. Blood poured from a wound on his head where a piece of his skull had been torn away. His brain was partially exposed to the freezing air. The crash site was in a forest near the German town of Psych, 15 miles south of Bremen, enemy territory.

Captivity and Survival

Moran crawled toward the opening where the tail section had separated from the aircraft. Each movement sent waves of agony through his broken body. He pulled himself onto the frozen ground and looked up at the gray German sky. He had survived a four-mile fall without a parachute. But survival meant nothing if he bled to death in a German forest.

German soldiers emerged from the trees with rifles raised. They surrounded the wreckage and stared at the American lying in the snow. One of them shouted orders. Another ran back toward the road, presumably to summon an officer. Moran could not resist. He could not fight. He could barely breathe. The soldiers searched him roughly, ignoring his screams of pain as they moved his shattered arms. They found his dog tags, rank insignia, and ruined parachute. They left him lying on the frozen ground while they examined the tail section.

An officer arrived within the hour. He looked at Moran’s wounds and shook his head. The American was clearly dying. Transporting him anywhere seemed pointless, but orders were orders. Downed airmen were to be captured and interrogated if possible. Dead airmen provided no intelligence. They loaded Moran onto a wooden cart—no stretcher, no blankets, no medical attention. The cart bounced along frozen roads for what felt like hours. Every jolt sent fresh agony through his broken ribs and fractured arms.

The wound on his skull had stopped bleeding, but only because the cold had frozen the blood into a dark crust. The cart delivered him to a German military facility. Moran could not identify what kind. His vision blurred. Consciousness came and went in waves. He remembered being carried inside. He remembered lying on a concrete floor. He remembered German voices discussing him as if he were already a corpse. No doctor came. No medic. No one offered water or bandages or morphine.

The Germans had limited medical supplies, and they were not about to waste them on an enemy airman who would probably die anyway. Moran lay on that concrete floor for two days. His wounds became infected. The exposed brain tissue began to swell. His broken arms turned purple and black. Gangrene was setting in. Without surgery, he would lose both limbs. Without antibiotics, the infection would spread to his blood. Without intervention, he had perhaps 48 hours to live.

The German guards watched him deteriorate. Some seemed indifferent. Others appeared almost sympathetic, but none had the authority or the resources to save him. American bombers had been destroying German cities for months. Medical supplies were scarce. Doctors were overwhelmed with German casualties. And enemy airmen ranked far below German soldiers and civilians on the priority list.

On the third day, Moran was transported again, another cart. Another agonizing journey over frozen roads. This time, his destination was a prisoner of war hospital, a converted building somewhere in occupied territory where wounded Allied airmen were held until they recovered enough to be sent to permanent camps. The hospital was understaffed and undersupplied. German military doctors performed triage on incoming prisoners. Those with survivable wounds received treatment. Those deemed beyond saving were left to die.

Moran’s injuries placed him firmly in the second category, but the hospital held a secret. Among the prisoners were two Serbian doctors, military physicians captured on the Eastern Front. They had been pressed into service treating wounded POWs, performing surgeries with inadequate equipment and almost no anesthesia. The Germans allowed this because it freed their own doctors for more important patients. The Serbian doctors examined Moran and made a decision: they would try to save him.

The Fight for Survival

Not because anyone ordered them to, but because he was a wounded man and they were physicians. The surgery lasted seven hours. They worked with instruments designed for field operations, using local numbing agents that barely dulled the pain. Moran drifted in and out of consciousness as they set his broken bones with metal pins and wire. They cleaned the infected tissue from his wounds, removed bone fragments from his skull, and covered the exposed brain with whatever tissue they could salvage.

The Serbian doctors attached a metal plate to Moran’s head. Crude by modern standards, effective enough to keep him alive. They splinted his arms with wooden boards and wrapped them in bandages torn from sheets. They did everything possible with almost nothing available. When the surgery was over, they told him the truth: the next 72 hours would determine whether he lived or died. His body had to fight off the remaining infection. His bones had to begin healing. His brain had to avoid swelling further. There was nothing more they could do.

The fever came on the first night. Moran’s temperature climbed to 104 degrees. His body shook with violent chills despite the sweat pouring from his skin. The Serbian doctors monitored him as closely as their limited resources allowed. They changed his bandages, forced water between his cracked lips, and waited. Infection was the great killer in military hospitals. Antibiotics existed, but were almost impossible to obtain in a German POW facility.

The doctors had cleaned Moran’s wounds as thoroughly as they could, but bacteria had already entered his bloodstream. His immune system was fighting a war inside his own body. The second night was worse. Moran slipped into delirium, calling out for his mother and screaming warnings to crewmates who were already dead. The other wounded prisoners in the hospital ward listened to his ravings, wondering if he would survive.

The Serbian doctors took turns sitting with him. They had no medicine to offer, only their presence, only cold cloths pressed against his burning forehead, only whispered encouragement in accented English that he probably could not hear. On the third morning, the fever broke. Moran opened his eyes and recognized his surroundings for the first time in days. He was alive. The infection had not killed him. His body had won the battle that medicine could not fight.

The Serbian doctors examined his wounds and found the first signs of healing. The tissue around his skull plate was beginning to close. The broken bones in his arms were starting to knit together. Recovery would take months, perhaps years. The damage to his body was extensive. But Eugene Moran was going to survive.

Word spread through the hospital. The American who fell four miles without a parachute. The tail gunner who kept shooting as his bomber disintegrated around him. The man who should have died a dozen times but refused to stop breathing. German guards came to look at him. Other prisoners asked to hear his story. Even the hospital administrators seemed impressed by his impossible survival.

The Serbian doctors had saved his life, but they could not protect him forever. Once Moran was stable enough to travel, he would be transferred to a permanent prisoner of war camp. The hospital was only a way station, a place where wounded men were patched together before being sent into the German POW system. Six weeks after the crash, Moran could walk again. His arms remained in splints, and the metal plate in his skull caused constant headaches. His ribs ached with every breath, but he was mobile. He was conscious. He was ready for transfer.

The Long Road to Freedom

The Germans processed him with bureaucratic efficiency. Name, rank, serial number, service branch, unit assignment. They photographed him for their records—a thin young man with hollow cheeks and bandaged arms staring into the camera with eyes that had seen too much. His first permanent camp was Stalag Luft IV in Pomerania, a compound specifically designed to hold captured Allied airmen. Barbed wire fences, guard towers with machine guns, wooden barracks that offered little protection against the brutal Eastern European winter. Thousands of American and British airmen filled the camp. Pilots, navigators, bombardiers, gunners—men who had been shot down over Germany and occupied Europe.

Moran found a strange community behind the wire. Prisoners organized themselves into units, maintained military discipline, created libraries from donated books, held classes in everything from mathematics to foreign languages, and built secret radios to monitor BBC broadcasts. They planned escapes that rarely succeeded. The camp provided minimal rations: thin soup, black bread, occasionally potatoes or turnips. Red Cross packages supplemented the diet when they arrived, but deliveries were unpredictable. Most prisoners lost 20 or 30 pounds during their captivity.

Moran’s body continued healing. His arms regained function, though they would never be as strong as before. The headaches from his skull injury became less frequent. The nightmares about the crash never stopped. He was alive, surviving, but 17 months of captivity still stretched ahead of him, and the worst was yet to come.

In the summer of 1944, the Germans transferred Moran to a new facility. The journey took him across occupied Poland in a cattle car packed with 60 prisoners. No room to sit, no sanitation, no food for three days. Men collapsed against each other and prayed for the train to stop. The destination was another camp, then another. Over the following months, Moran passed through four different POW facilities as the Germans shuffled prisoners across their shrinking empire. Each transfer brought new hardships, new guards, new diseases, and new ways to suffer.

The worst came in the autumn of 1944—the hell ship. German authorities decided to move several hundred Allied prisoners across the Baltic Sea. The vessel was an aging freighter, never designed to carry human cargo. Guards forced the prisoners into the hold below deck, a dark metal cavern with no ventilation, no sanitation, and no space to move. Moran descended into that hold with 200 other men. The hatch closed above them, and the nightmare began.

The hold was completely dark. Prisoners could not see their own hands. They could only hear groaning, coughing, and retching. Men suffering from dysentery could not reach the single bucket designated as a latrine. The stench became unbearable within hours. The crossing lasted four days. Prisoners died in that hold. Their bodies remained among the living because there was nowhere else to put them. Men went mad from the darkness and the smell and the constant rolling of the ship. They screamed, fought, and prayed. Some simply stopped responding and had to be checked for a pulse to determine if they were still alive.

When the hatch finally opened, Moran climbed out into gray daylight with eyes that had forgotten how to see. He was alive, but the journey had taken its toll. His clothes were soaked with filth, and his body had shed more weight than it could afford to lose. The metal plate in his skull caused constant headaches. His ribs ached when storms approached. The hellship delivered its surviving cargo to another camp in Prussia. More barbed wire, more guard towers, more thin soup and black bread, more waiting for a war that seemed like it might never end.

But the war was ending. By January 1945, Soviet forces were advancing from the east. Allied armies were pushing from the west. Germany was being crushed between two unstoppable forces. The prisoners could hear distant artillery. They could see German guards growing nervous. Something was about to change.

On February 6th, 1945, the change came. Soviet troops were approaching the camp. German commanders ordered an immediate evacuation. All prisoners would march west on foot. Destination unknown. Duration unknown. Refusal meant execution. The prisoners assembled in the frozen compound. Temperatures had dropped to 20 degrees below zero. Many men had no winter coats, no gloves, no proper boots. They had been surviving on starvation rations for months. And now they were expected to walk across Germany in the coldest winter in decades.

The column stretched for miles—thousands of Allied airmen trudging through snow and ice. German guards marched alongside with rifles ready. Anyone who fell behind would be shot. Anyone who tried to escape would be shot. The message was clear: walk or die. Moran had survived a four-mile fall from the sky. He had survived catastrophic injuries, crude surgery, and the hellship. Now he faced 600 miles of frozen roads with a body that had never fully healed.

The march would later become known as the Black March—one of the longest forced marches of Allied prisoners in European history. Eighty-six days of walking through blizzards and freezing rain, sleeping in barns filled with animal waste, drinking from ditches contaminated with human sewage, eating whatever could be stolen or scavenged from the devastated countryside. An estimated 1,500 American and British airmen died during the Black March—pneumonia, dysentery, typhus, frostbite that turned to gangrene, and bullets from guards who decided a straggler was not worth waiting for.

Moran kept walking. He had not survived a four-mile fall to die on a frozen road. He had not endured the hellship to surrender to exhaustion. Something inside him refused to quit. The same stubborn determination that had kept him firing his machine guns as Ricky Tikitavi disintegrated around him.

Liberation

By April, the column had covered nearly 500 miles. The prisoners could hear Allied artillery growing louder each day. American and British forces were closing in from the west. Soviet armies were advancing from the east. Germany was collapsing. Liberation was coming.

On April 26th, 1945, the march ended. American soldiers from the 104th Infantry Division intercepted the column near the Elbe River. The German guards threw down their weapons and surrendered. The prisoners stood in stunned silence, unable to process what was happening. After years of captivity, after months of marching, after countless moments when death seemed certain, they were free.

Moran weighed 93 pounds. He had entered the army at 150. The crash, the surgeries, the camps, the hellship, and the march had stripped away nearly 40% of his body weight. He looked like a skeleton wrapped in skin, but he was alive.

Medical personnel rushed to treat the liberated prisoners. Many required immediate hospitalization. Typhus had spread through the column during the march. Pneumonia was rampant. Frostbite had claimed fingers and toes that would need amputation. The doctors worked around the clock to stabilize men who had been systematically starved and brutalized for months or years.

The army processed Moran’s case with growing astonishment. His service record documented the impossible: shot down over Bremen on November 29th, 1943; aircraft destroyed by enemy action; fell 24,000 feet in a severed tail section without functional parachute; survived impact; captured by enemy forces; held as a prisoner of war for 17 months; survived forced march of approximately 600 miles.

Military historians would later confirm that only three Allied airmen in the entire Second World War survived falls of comparable distance without parachutes. Eugene Moran was one of them.

A Legacy of Resilience

The army awarded Moran two Purple Hearts for the wounds he sustained during the attack on his bomber—one for each arm shattered by German cannon fire. They gave him the Air Medal with oak leaf cluster for his service with the Eighth Air Force, the European Theater Medal, and the Good Conduct Medal. They gave him an honorable discharge on December 1st, 1945.

The 96th Bomb Group had lost 938 men during the war—206 aircraft destroyed, thousands of missions flown over the most heavily defended targets in Europe. Moran’s survival was a statistical anomaly in an organization defined by catastrophic losses. News of his fall had spread even during the war. Radio operators had intercepted German broadcasts describing an American who fell four miles and lived. The story reached Wisconsin, where Moran’s family had spent months not knowing if he was alive or dead.

Anonymous letters arrived describing what the radio operators had heard. Hope mixed with uncertainty until official confirmation finally came. Staff Sergeant Eugene Moran returned to Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, in late 1945. The farm boy who had dreamed of flying while watching planes pass overhead now had memories he could never fully escape—the roar of engines, the chatter of machine guns, the sound of aluminum tearing apart at 24,000 feet.

Moran rarely spoke about the war. Not to his wife, not to his nine children, not to anyone who asked. The experiences were too painful, the losses too profound. Eight of his crewmates had died on Ricky Tikitavi. Countless friends had perished in the camps and on the march. Talking about it meant reliving it, so he stayed silent for more than 60 years.

The physical wounds never fully healed. The metal plate in his skull caused headaches for the rest of his life. His arms remained weak and prone to pain in cold weather. His ribs ached when storms approached. His body carried the evidence of November 29th, 1943, until his final breath.

Conclusion

Eugene Moran’s story is one of extraordinary resilience in the face of unimaginable adversity. He survived a catastrophic fall, endured the horrors of war, and emerged with a spirit that refused to yield. His legacy serves as a powerful reminder of the courage displayed by countless individuals during World War II.

As we remember Moran and the sacrifices made by so many, let us honor their stories and ensure they are never forgotten. If this story moved you, consider subscribing for more untold military history. We must keep these memories alive, celebrating the bravery and determination of those who fought against overwhelming odds.