Larry Hewin.
The man.
2nd Lt. Larry M. Hewin was pilot of B-24J 42-100416 'Baggy Maggy' on the 18 September 1944 low-level supply mission to Allied airborne forces near Arnhem, Holland, part of Operation Market Garden. Reported missing in action after the aircraft was hit by ground fire and crash-landed near Castelré; status remained MIA on the original MACR.
Nineteen years old at the time, Hewin was wounded in the arm and both legs by an exploding 20mm round soon after the aircraft climbed to drop altitude. Radio operator Bill Kirlin applied tourniquets and morphine while co-pilot Richard Scott and bombardier George Sadler, working the controls and rudder pedals together, held the crippled aircraft up long enough to clear a series of hedgerows before crash-landing in a field near Castelré. Hewin credited Kirlin -- who gave up his own crash position to keep tending Hewin's wounds and was crushed by the top turret as a result -- with having saved his life.
Hewin spent eight months as a POW: a Dutch field hospital, a makeshift camp holding Russian slave laborers, Oflag 64, and Stalag Luft III, followed by a forced winter evacuation march and liberation near Moosburg by Patton's 14th Armored Division on 29 April 1945.
From the 2nd Air Division Association Yearbook: graduated Pilot Class 44-A. Flew a B-24 and crew overseas; requested assignment to the 93rd Bomb Group. Flew six combat missions and several supply missions with the 409th Squadron before being shot down while flying Baggy Maggy on 18 Sept. 1944 near Arnhem. Held as a prisoner of war in Poland, Stalag Luft III, Nuremberg, and Moosburg until liberation.
In September 1992, waist gunner Eugene 'Shab' Shabatura located Hewin through the Veterans Administration, ending 47 years without contact between the surviving crew. That reunion also connected the crew to Dutch amateur historian Jos van Roozendaal, who had been researching the crash since the early 1980s. Hewin wrote a detailed first-person memoir of the mission and his POW experience that September at their prompting; he was unable to travel to the Netherlands for the 1994 or 2004 anniversary commemorations at the Castelré monument due to his wounds from the crash.
Missions flown.
Before and after.
After repatriation, instructed in B-25s at Turner AFB and worked in base operations at Wright Field until separation in September 1946. Graduated from Clemson; joined NACA, later transferred to Army Aviation Research and Development. Retired 1974 as technical director, Aviation Laboratories, Ft. Eustis. Reserve flying until 1957 (departing as major). Holds MSA from GWU and doctoral degree from William and Mary. Married Barbara McKay Woods; children James Bryant Hewin and Julie McKay Hewin. Received Air Medal, Purple Heart, ETO with four stars, POW ribbon. Hewin met Barbara on a blind date at Wright-Patterson AFB; her father, Bryant Woods, had himself been a WWI pilot and POW, and had served as an air intelligence officer with the 93rd Bomb Group (including the Ploesti raid) a few months before Hewin's own crew joined the group.