When Germans Cut His B-17 in Half at 24,000 Feet — He Kept Shooting All the Way Down

He Fell Four Miles Without a Parachute — and Kept Fighting: The Unbelievable Survival of WWII Tail Gunner Eugene Moran

At 24,000 feet above Nazi Germany, most men would have accepted death.

Staff Sgt. Eugene Moran did not.

On the morning of November 29, 1943, Moran, a 19-year-old farm boy from rural Wisconsin, was manning the tail guns of a B-17 Flying Fortress over Bremen when German anti-aircraft fire and fighter attacks ripped his bomber apart. When the fuselage split and the aircraft disintegrated in midair, Moran found himself trapped in the severed tail section, his parachute destroyed, both arms shattered by cannon fire.

He was falling nearly four miles toward the ground.

And he was still shooting.

Moran’s story — long unknown outside military records and family memories — stands as one of the most extraordinary survival accounts of World War II, a war defined by impossible odds and staggering losses. Military historians confirm that only three Allied airmen survived falls of comparable distance without a functioning parachute during the entire conflict. Moran was one of them.

A teenager at war

Moran enlisted in the Army Air Forces the day he turned 18. Raised on a dairy farm near Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, he had grown up watching aircraft pass overhead and dreaming of flight. The war, however, had other plans. The Army needed gunners — young men with sharp eyesight, steady hands, and the ability to endure cold, fear, and isolation.

By late 1943, Moran was assigned as a tail gunner with the 96th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, based at Snetterton Heath in England. His position was the most isolated on the aircraft: alone at the very back of the bomber, separated from the rest of the crew by nearly 40 feet of aluminum fuselage.

It was also the most dangerous.

German pilots had learned that attacking from directly behind a B-17 exposed them to fire from only one man — the tail gunner. Those gunners, in turn, became priority targets.

The mission to Bremen was Moran’s first combat sortie.

More than 300 American bombers crossed the North Sea that morning to strike factories, shipyards, and submarine pens in one of Germany’s most heavily defended cities. Losses were already severe. Just two months earlier, the infamous Schweinfurt raid had cost the Eighth Air Force 60 bombers in a single day.

“Milk runs to hell,” bomber crews called these deep missions into Germany.

A bomber torn apart

After releasing its bombs, Moran’s aircraft — the B-17 Ricky Ticky Tavi — turned for home. It never made it far.

Flak crippled one engine, causing the bomber to fall behind the formation. German fighters immediately moved in. Messerschmitt Bf 109s and Focke-Wulf 190s attacked in coordinated waves, targeting engines and gun positions.

Moran fought back, firing his twin .50-caliber machine guns until spent casings piled around his knees. He shot down at least one fighter, watching its wing disintegrate under his fire.

Then German cannon rounds found him.

Both of Moran’s arms were shattered. Blood soaked his sleeves. Control cables snapped overhead. Worse still, he discovered that cannon fire had torn holes through his parachute.

If he bailed out, he would fall to his death.

One by one, the rest of the crew fell silent. The pilots were dead. The flight engineer, radio operator, ball turret gunner, and waist gunners were gone. Only Moran in the tail and navigator Jesse Orrison in the nose remained alive.

Moments later, the aircraft broke apart.

The front section fell away, carrying wings, engines, and eight crewmen toward the earth. Moran’s tail section separated and began tumbling through the sky.

Fighting all the way down

At terminal velocity, a human body falls at roughly 120 miles per hour. The tail section of a B-17 weighed several thousand pounds and fell even faster.

Moran had perhaps 90 seconds to live.

Instead of surrendering to panic, he did something that stunned even the German pilots circling above. As the wreckage spun violently, Moran grabbed his guns and fired at fighters that came too close. Tracers arced wildly through the air.

One German aircraft took hits and peeled away trailing smoke.

The tail section’s broken stabilizers acted like crude wings, slowing the fall. The spinning eased. The descent became almost a glide. Trees rushed upward.

The wreckage slammed through a pine forest at nearly 100 miles per hour, snapping trunks and shedding metal before crashing to the frozen ground.

Moran survived.

Barely.

Captured, then abandoned

His injuries were catastrophic. Both forearms were broken in multiple places. Ribs were shattered. A head wound left part of his skull missing, exposing brain tissue. Hypothermia threatened to finish what gravity had failed to do.

German soldiers found him hours later and took him prisoner. With little medical care available, Moran lay for days on a concrete floor, feverish and infected. Gangrene set in. Doctors expected him to die.

He might have — if not for two Serbian physicians held as prisoners themselves. With almost no anesthesia or equipment, they performed a seven-hour surgery, cleaning infections, setting bones with wire and pins, and covering Moran’s exposed brain with salvaged tissue and a crude metal plate.

Against all odds, he lived.

Seventeen months of captivity

Recovery was slow, painful, and incomplete. Moran spent the next 17 months as a prisoner of war, enduring starvation rations, disease, and repeated transfers between camps. He survived a notorious “hell ship” crossing of the Baltic Sea, packed into a lightless cargo hold where men died standing up.

In early 1945, as Germany collapsed, Moran was forced onto the infamous “Black March” — an 86-day forced march of thousands of Allied prisoners across frozen Germany. Guards shot those who fell behind. An estimated 1,500 prisoners died.

Moran kept walking.

On April 26, 1945, American troops intercepted the column. Liberation had come.

Moran weighed 93 pounds.

A quiet life after war

He returned to Wisconsin later that year, married, raised nine children, and worked his farm. He rarely spoke about the war. The headaches from the metal plate in his skull never fully stopped. Cold weather brought pain to his arms and ribs for the rest of his life.

Recognition came slowly. In 2007, Wisconsin honored him with its first Veteran Lifetime Achievement Award. His story was later documented in the book Tailspin.

Eugene Moran died in 2014 at age 89.

His philosophy, noted in his obituary, was simple: “I would rather wear out than rust out.”

On November 29, 1943, alone in the tail of a falling bomber, Eugene Moran lived by those words — and kept fighting all the way down.