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While I was impressed with the investigative research done by Chuck Dunning, I could not help noticing a factual error concerning the plane and crew of Piccadilly Lily. This B-17F of "The Bloody Hundredth" (100th Bomb Group) perished on October 8, 1943, over Bremen–rather than on November 8, 1943, as stated in the article. On that day, Lieutenant Murphy and 2nd Lt. Marshall F. Lee (co-pilot) were killed after attempting to keep the aircraft steady for the crew to bail out. It should be pointed out that the whole major battle sequence at the end of Twelve O’Clock High that Mr. Dunning refers to is almost verbatim from the Saturday Evening Post article Beirne Lay, Jr., wrote, not just a few passages. If Lay had not switched planes at the last minute on the Regensburg mission, courtesy of a suggestion by a squadron CO, we would not have this brilliant book or movie. The aircraft Lay should have flown in was hit by fighters and exploded.

The book and movie played a major part in keeping the history and memory of the Eighth Air Force and the B-17 alive and well. Now would someone please publish a new hardbound edition of Twelve O’Clock High, complete with photos from the movie, out-take photos, etc., and both this article and the one by John Farmer in American Aviation Historical Society Journal as a tribute to the 50th anniversary of the book?

Michael Faley
100th Bomb Group Photo Archives
Studio City, Calif.

The author responds: You are correct that Piccadilly Lily was shot down on October 8 rather than November 8, 1943. That was my mistake. There is a book that gives quite a bit of detail on the final moments of Piccadilly Lily called We’re Poor Little Lambs: The Last Mission of Crew 22 and Piccadilly Lily, by Paul Andrews. According to Andrews, on that mission, Lieutenant Murphy’s co-pilot was Captain Alvin L. Barker, the 351st Squadron’s operations officer. Lieutenant Marshall Lee actually flew in the ball turret, and the ball turret gunner manned the radio room gun. The plane carried 11 crewmen that day. After Murphy ordered the crew to bail out, Lieutenant Lee returned to the cockpit to see if he could help. Lee, Barker and Murphy were still there when the fuel tanks exploded. Piccadilly Lily was leading the low squadron that day; the 100th Bomb Group and the 13th Wing was led by Major John Kidd and Captain Everett Blakely in Just A Snappin’.

You are also correct about Beirne Lay’s changing planes before the Regensburg mission. According to Harry Crosby’s A Wing and a Prayer and Richard LeStrange’s Century Bombers, Lay was originally assigned to Roy Claytor’s B-17, Alice From Dallas, which was flying in the last element of the low squadron. However, Major Gale Cleven put himself into the low squadron that day, and, according to Crosby, he had Lay moved to Piccadilly Lily in another squadron so that he, Cleven, would be the ranking officer in the low squadron. Mortally crippled by flak, Alice From Dallas was one of the first 100th BG planes to go down that day. Two crew members were killed, three became POWs, and five, including Claytor, evaded capture and made it back to England.

I should like to add some information and make a slight correction to Chuck Dunning’s fine article. When Colonel Lay took command of the 487th Bomb Group at Alamogordo, many of us had read his I Wanted Wings or had seen the much different movie version. Some of us were a bit leery that we might become material for future works. It didn’t work out that way.

I was a couple of hundred feet behind him when his B-24 and three others were shot down by flak over Châteaudun on May 11, 1944. I certainly never expected to see him again, but early in August he turned up at the officers club at Lavenham wearing a red beret. He had a flair for the dramatic. I remember no signs of guilt on his part. Indeed, there was not much reason for him to feel any. The reason we took a beating over Châteaudun was that we had been assigned an altitude of 12,000 feet. We were new to combat, but even we knew that was stupid. It was not Colonel Lay’s decision.

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