“Thar She Blows”

Chuck Merrill's regular aircraft, Thar She Blows was among the ships flying early conventional and instrument-bombing work in the Eighth Air Force's first months. On March 8, 1943, with Major William Cowart at the controls in Merrill's place, the ship came back from a Rouen strike badly shot up, its undercarriage wrecked and one engine gone. On a later mission, at 28,000 feet with the temperature at 50 below, a sliver of flak clipped a flywheel and drove splinters through the fuselage. Merrill banked down hard to rejoin the lead squadron for protection as fighters worked over the stragglers, then brought the crippled ship home without hydraulics or cable control, sliding to a stop in the mud at the end of the runway.

Thar She Blows flew the low-level Ploesti mission on August 1, 1943, with Merrill again at the controls. Crossing low over the Romanian countryside, he watched a young girl abandon her bicycle and dive into a roadside ditch as the formation thundered overhead. 'She'd heard us coming, abandoned her bike, and hurried into a small ditch,' he recalled. 'Good thing. We were so low we'd have blown the little girl away.' The aircraft came home from Ploesti with roughly 300 gallons of fuel remaining, the widest margin of any Circus ship that day.