Sharked nosed B-26 Marauder.Obviously posed.(rudeerude) 

Sharked nosed B-26 Marauder

war in pacific

USAAF’s B-24 Liberators of 15th Air Force flying over Alps in front to a thick cloud’s layer. The plane in foreground, "Maiden America", a B-24G-16-NT (s/n 42-78356) of the 723rd Bomb Squadron, 450th Bomb Group, crashed in Switzerland on the Christmas Day 1944. Took off from his base of Foggia Airfield Complex, Southern Italy, on December 25,1944, for a mission over Austria, after bombing the West Marshalling Yards in Innsbruck, was heavily damaged by Flak and overlapped in the Swiss airspace. With the plane further damaged by Swiss AA fire the crew was forced to bail out. The B-24 crashed at Wuerenlingen in Swiss territory. The pilot, 1st Lt. Vincent Fagan, remained with the aircraft to guide it away from the village of Wuerenlingen. The fate of three of the crewmen was tragic: the co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Nicholas MacKoul, drown when he came down in a nearby river, the navigator, 2nd Lt. Martin A. Homistek, was killed when his chute got caught on the horizontal stabilizer and the left waist gunner, Sgt. Ralph L. Coulson, refused to leave his position and died in the crash. The rest of the crew, including Lt. Fagan, survived and were interned in Switzerland. Victor Sierra