Ralph Hendershot.

Ralph Hendershot served as bombardier with the 93rd Bomb Group, completing 35 missions over Europe between the fall of 1944 and the final weeks of the war. He joined the crew slightly later than the others — his first mission was September 10, 1944, aboard a different aircraft — and would end up finishing a few days after most of his crewmates, flying his 35th on April 10, 1945, with Helwig's crew to an airfield northwest of Berlin.

He celebrated his 23rd birthday in Northern Ireland on August 20, 1944, not yet knowing what the coming months would bring. Once operational, he kept careful track of every mission, maintaining a detailed map that would later serve as the basis for a written report reproduced in the Memoir of Walter F. Hughes. In 1983, he added to that record with a letter to Hughes reflecting on the manuscript — the perspective of a man looking back across four decades at what the crew had done together.

Not every mission went by the book. He missed the November 10, 1944 raid on Hamm/Hanau while hospitalized with the flu. On October 6, 1944, he flew the Hamburg/Harburg mission with a different crew to test an all-glass enclosed nose configuration. And on his own final mission, he packed the nose of the plane with every flak suit he could find — enough weight that pilot Helwig grew genuinely concerned about whether the aircraft was properly balanced for takeoff.

On the ground, life had its own rhythms. He and Pete Scott split the cost of a tandem bicycle and rode it around the base. He had borrowed $60 from Scott at some point and never quite managed to pay it back. The debt followed him home, and the money eventually went toward buying a crib for his son — a detail Scott apparently found more amusing than troubling. Hendershot appears in the crew photo taken March 24, 1945, seated in the bottom row.