“War Baby/Ball of Fire Jr.”

On the morning of November 18, 1943, "War Baby" lifted off from Hardwick as part of a massive 8th Air Force strike against a Luftwaffe repair depot outside Oslo. It was her twelfth mission. The attack came off well, formations of nearly 100 aircraft hitting the target from 12,000 feet in clear skies. The trouble came on the way home.

Barely past the Norwegian coast, a force of Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Junkers Ju 88s intercepted the returning bombers. In the air battle that followed, six Liberators went down. Three more, War Baby among them, took damage too severe to risk the long water crossing back to England.

Her pilot, 1Lt F. Kilcheski, turned south toward neutral Sweden.

After circling the city of Örebro for some time, and dropping an ammunition belt over nearby Lake Hjälmaren, War Baby touched down on a small grass airfield at 13:25. The field at Gustavsvik measured roughly 200 by 200 meters, a postage stamp by any bomber standard. Kilcheski and his crew moved quickly to destroy the aircraft, dousing it with fuel and firing signal flares into it, but Swedish police and a guard who had pedaled out on his bicycle managed to stop them before the fire took hold.

The crew of ten, several suffering frostbitten cheeks and feet, were taken to the police station where the Swedes arranged a hot meal and a bath. The next morning they were transported by taxicab to an internment hotel in Dalarna.

War Baby sat at Örebro through the early winter, propped on wooden pallets to keep her from sinking into the clay. Swedish engineers built a timber bridge over a creek at the eastern end of the field to lengthen the runway. On December 16, 1943, Kilcheski and his crew returned, with Swedish Air Force personnel alongside, and flew her out to Västerås on the original field, not even using the extension. It was her last flight.

Twelve missions. Eleven bomb symbols on the nose, and one extraordinary end in a Swedish meadow.