Black Nan

I didn’t know this plane or its story until a few years ago. Only happened across it while putting together photos for an article on WWII B-24 Liberator pilots I happened to be editing. Naturally I went scrounging through the databases of images provided by the Air Force, LOC, DoD, NARA, etc., and immediately snagged the arresting photo below, which most of you know.

The article was published, and a few days later I get a phone call from a reader. Thank you, he says. That picture means a lot to me, since I happened to be flying in the B-24 next to that plane, with the photographer who took the photo. The plane that was hit, he said, was called Black Nan.

The date was April 10, 1945. The location was somewhere over Lugo, Italy, the mission target. Ten of the eleven crewmen on Black Nan were killed either in the resulting crash, or, if they survived, by German forces. All of their bodies were later recovered.

The B-24 Liberator flew an absurd number of missions in the European Theater. It was large, held 8,000 or more pounds of bombs, and boasted hefty fuel tanks. When flak found these—as it did in the photo—explosions followed. Miraculously the B-24 could find its way home minus an engine, half a wing, most of a tail. The cockpit was tiny and preposterously cold. It smelled of gasoline.

Liberators performed famously in the skies over Ploesti, Romania, in August of 1943, by destroying oil refineries key to the Reich. There were a few snafus during the raid, and heavy aircraft losses of roughly 30 percent—not uncommon in the history of this plane. The refineries were only temporarily disabled, but five crewmen who flew that particular mission received the Medal of Honor.

So today when U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Sal Giunta received his Medal of Honor for extraordinary acts of valor in Afghanistan, one of the images that passed before my mind’s eye was this photo of Black Nan, going down. And one of the phrases that crossed my mind was C’est la guerre. It was a saying Americans had liked and borrowed. It was mocking, or snide, or self-deprecating, or just French. It rolled around on the tongue like champagne, and it pushed the deadliness away. It said, how can I be responsible for events that are bigger than I am? If there’s an answer to that question, I don’t pretend to know it. I only point out that the name Salvatore, like the phrase C’est la guerre, conjured up for me remote and romantic images of an old war.

The aviator who phoned me that day probably knew all about naïve and romantic notions of war, but he didn’t go into it. He was only calling about the plane, to tell me its name—Black Nan. Today after the medal ceremony I looked up the names of Black Nan’s crew, and sure enough, no Salvatores were on board. More’s the pity, since Salvatore means “savior.”