So I got a box of my uncle’s personal effects from my mother’s closet and went through it. I was visiting my parents in Missouri in 1990, and my mother still had the photograph of the crew on her dresser. What did they experience in the skies over Europe, and on the ground in their deployments? Beyond those questions, I wanted to know what these men were like as people.
As I would discover, the other families who had loved ones on this crew had similar questions. Initially, I wanted to answer the fundamental questions my mother had about her brother and his loss. How did those childhood memories lead to a larger investigation and a book project? It devastated her family, and the unanswered questions continued to haunt them for decades. My mother told me that the crew had disappeared during a mission over Austria in October 1943. One of the men in the photograph was my mother’s oldest brother, Technical Sergeant L.H. Army Air Forces B-24 Liberator at an airfield in England in August 1943. The black and white image showed ten men posing before a U.S. This project grew out of my childhood memories of a photograph that my mother kept on her dresser. Let’s start at the beginning: how did this project originate? The Black Mountain Institute-Kluge Fellow for 2015-2016, Jones sat down with Jason Steinhauer to discuss his project, his family connection to the tragedy, and the legacy of the lost WWII bomber crew.
Photo courtesy Gregg Jones.Īuthor and journalist Gregg Jones spent four months at the Kluge Center researching the American bombing campaign during World War II in an effort to better understand the circumstances surrounding the disappearance of the “Jerk’s Natural” over Austria in October 1943. The photo led journalist Gregg Jones on a lifetime investigation to reconstruct how the men lived and how they died. A photograph of the ten airmen aboard the WWII bomber “Jerk’s Natural,” which disappeared over Austria on October 1, 1943.