He thought he was dead, but then he could feel the ground and twigs.”Īrmbruster said Moran was saved by a pair of Serbian physicians at the POW camp who sewed a flesh plate from a deceased Russian soldier over his exposed brain with rudimentary equipment to prevent infection and save his life.Īfter the war, Moran returned to Soldier’s Grove, married and the couple had nine children. “Gene emerged from the tailpiece of the plane and was blind due to G force pushing blood into his eyes. “I have no rational explanation,” he said. Moran slid out of the wreckage suffering broken ribs, shattered arm bones and a busted skull that exposed part of his brain.Īrmbruster, a history teacher at North Crawford Schools, Soldiers Grove, who worked 11 years on “Tailspin,” told Monday’s audience of about 100 that nobody really understands how Moran could have survived his fall. The chunk of airplane hit a tree, breaking Moran’s fall.

Moran, resigned to dying as he plunged to earth in the tail end of the airplane, said the Catholic Rosary. The Germans riddled Rikki Tikki Tavi, the name of the B-17, with bullets, both hitting Moran, disabling his parachute and, eventually, causing the craft to disintegrate into pieces as it fell to the ground from above the clouds.Ĭrew members were Benny Cipresso, Linwood Langley, Donald Curtis, Jesse Orrison, Walter Reed, Sam “Pee-Wee” Amatulli, Anderson King and Edmund Swedo. Moran was part of a crew of nine flying with a group of other American bomber airplanes over Germany in 1944 when his plane inexplicably left the formation and was prey for Nazi fighter planes. He explained his capture by the Nazis and his 18 month confinement as a German prisoner of war. John Armbruster, author of “Tailspin,” told the tale of Gene Moran, a Soldier’s Grove native, who fell out of the sky without a parachute into a tree.

The remarkable story of a Wisconsin tailgunner who survived a four mile fall to the earth in the shot-up tailpiece of a B-17 Flying Fortress over Germany during World War II was retold in a Walk In Their Shoes lecture on Memorial Day in the Edgar Public Schools auditorium. Moran fell four miles without a parachute and lived

Tailspin by John Armbruster