“Jerk's Natural”

This B-24 took its name from its original pilot, Capt. John L. 'Jerk' Jerstad, who went on to earn the Medal of Honor at Ploesti flying Hell's Wench. A painting commissioned by navigator Rollin Reineck later depicted the aircraft alongside Shoot Luke and Eager Beaver returning from a mission, with Jerstad at the controls. In North Africa, radio operator Sgt. Robert H. Harms was aboard when he watched Capt. Benjamin Riggs's aircraft, Double Trouble, go down and its crew bail out, an episode he later described from Jerk's Natural's radio position.

By October 1, 1943, the aircraft was flown by Lt. William F. Stein, a Ploesti veteran on his tenth mission, with co-pilot George B. Wilkinson. Returning alone from the Wiener Neustadt raid, it was attacked by three Me-109s that knocked out two engines and sent it into a nose-first spin. Stein and Wilkinson recovered the aircraft and attempted a downhill emergency landing on the Weissenbacher farm in Styria, Austria, but the plane crashed short of the field, the first American bomber to go down in that province. Nine of the ten men aboard were killed; navigator Lt. William W. Sykes was the lone survivor, spending nineteen months as a POW after parachuting clear.

Decades later, a nephew of one of the crew who died in the crash, tail gunner Larry White, visited the crash site near Heilbrunn and found that the Unterberger family, who had briefly held Sykes at their inn, were still using a bomb hoist salvaged from the wreck to lift hay bales into their barn.