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TEXAS BRONCO
41-24589 B-17F-27-BO
91/323-R OR-R

Very little has been established about the service record of Texas Bronco but it is known that the plane was one of the original ships assigned to the group in September 1942 at Dow Field, Bangor, Maine. In line with many of the earlier B-17F models, Texas Bronco carried a starboard cheek gun arrangement in which the forward window was considerably enlarged and fitted with a .50 caliber machine gun mounting. This arrangement became standard on later production models but the early ships required field modifications. Painted just below this gun position was the name "Pauly". A photo of the right nose shows six mission symbols displayed and five enemy aircraft kill markers above the side window. One of those yellow swastikas denoted the Fwl90 confirmed as destroyed on the group's second combat mission, on 8th November 1942. Another may have been the 'probably' Fwl90 claimed on the 17th November. The nose art itself, was thought to have been painted in the USA prior to deployment to England and is typical of earlier artworks in that it is relatively small by comparison to many of the later, more elaborate, paintings that were applied by Tony Starcer and his contemporaries.

Records of early 323rd Squadron missions are not as comprehensive as they could be and it is difficult to establish precisely which missions Texas Bronco flew and with which crews. The ship was assigned to Eugene Ellis and it was his crew that was flying it on 4th February to the marshalling yards at Hamm. Poor weather over the Ruhr diverted the formation to Emden to bomb the rail yards and port facilities there. The bombers were attacked heavily by the Luftwaffe and twin-engine fighters. Mell0's and Ju88's, were reported to have joined the attackers. The group lost two planes on this mission and Texas Bronco was one of them. Eugene Ellis managed to crash land the ship onto the beach at Terschelling, Holland and saved eight of his crew but two men were killed. Luftwaffe salvage teams dismantled the aircraft and transported it to Utrecht, possibly with a view to rebuilding it but it was eventually scrapped and turned into ingots of aluminium. Those same ingots might well have ultimately been turned into sheets and then been used to build new generations of fighters for the Luftwaffe.

This was one of the Original Nine B-17 Flying Fortresses that formed the 323rd Bomb Squadron of the 91st Bomb Group.