That’s a very sad story Deryk, but this scramble for the fragments of history is full of them!

Seriously, it shouldn’t be this difficult because those early B-17s were so well documented . . . photographers like Robert Capa with the 301st, and Margaret Bourke-White with unfettered access to the 97th.

I dream of the questions that would be answered if we could get into the Magnum and LIFE archives and see the photographers’ contact sheets, rather than the relatively few photos – some retouched to censor details – that appeared in print (and more recently online).

I’m pretty sure that Society Gal was 41-24400, (which may or may not have been re-named Little Bill before it was condemned following the Lorient mission), but I still hope to prove it.