John, a close friend of the Moran family, initially refused to write Gene's story. In the next seventeen months, Gene would endure some of the worst episodes of the American prisoner of war experience in occupied Europe, including the infamous "Hell Ship" and European Death March.įor more than sixty years, Gene said little about one of the most extraordinary stories of World War II until he met the author, John Armbruster. He was alive! Gene fell four miles without a parachute and survived. The cartwheeling tail section slammed into a forest and dumped Gene onto the cold ground. His parachute shredded by enemy fire, Gene awaited the inevitable. The mangled wreckage plunged four miles toward German soil. In November 1943, in the skies over Nazi Germany, a wounded American tail gunner, Gene Moran, lay in the severed tail of his Flying Fortress bomber.
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