William Kirlin

T/Sgt. William H. Kirlin Jr. was radio operator aboard B-24J 42-100416 'Baggy Maggy' (recorded as 'Baggie Maggie' in MACR 9810) on the 18 September 1944 supply mission near Arnhem, Holland, part of Operation Market Garden. He was 24 years old, from Shillington, Pennsylvania. The MACR gives serial 15099531; the DB carries 13099531. His status column on the original MACR shows no PWW or RTD options checked, only MIA recorded (noted twice).

When pilot Larry Hewin was badly wounded by ground fire, Kirlin administered morphine and applied tourniquets and refused to take his own crash position so he could keep tending him. In the crash landing, the aircraft's top turret broke loose and crushed him; Hewin, who had been lying in the spot Kirlin then occupied, is understood to have owed his survival to Kirlin's sacrifice. The Germans set the wreck on fire the next day with his body still inside.

Kirlin was buried at the crash site, moved to Baarle-Nassau after liberation, and roughly a year after the war reinterred at the Netherlands American Cemetery at Margraten, where he rests today. A wooden cross marked the crash site from September 1945, the first anniversary of his death, erected by Castelré policeman Adriaan Van der Hoeven and unveiled by the mayor of Baarle-Nassau; it deteriorated and disappeared by the mid-1950s, leaving the site unmarked for decades. In the early 1990s, Dutch researcher Jos van Roozendaal's work led to the bronze-plaque monument that stands there today, and to an annual memorial ceremony. Kirlin's sister, Gertrude Stuber-Kirlin, attended the 60th-anniversary observance in September 2004; she recalled being 'the two youngest of six children' with Bill and said not a day had passed since 1944 that she hadn't thought of him.