This could be one of my favorite World War II movie clips, from 1990’s “Memphis Belle.” These are B-17Fs, bereft of the forward chin-mount dual machine guns, a later correction, which meant that the boys inside these planes–and some of them were boys, sixteen-year-old liars–were fodder for any Focke-Wulf 190 pilot who attacked from head-on.

That’s how Clair Abbot Tyler, a co-pilot from Morro Bay, died in 1943. An FW-190 cannon round shattered him in his seat. He left a little girl behind him at home.

What the film producers couldn’t have known is the incredble impact our soldiers and fliers had on their surrogate children, who happened to be British, not American. Here is what I found out from researching the little book I wrote:

When B-17s like these took off on their missions, they, and their Hershey bars, and their brashness and unaffected friendliness, had so earned the devotion of British children that dozens of them would line the airfield perimeter to wave goodbye to their Yanks.

I learned this, too: The same fliers were perfectly aware that the German railyards they bombed were flanked by working-class neighborhoods, and so when they missed their aim points, which happened on every mission, they were killing children 25,000 feet below.

It was this realization, and not cowardice, that led many of them to freeze in their chairs at pre-mission briefings to become so rigid that it took three of their comrades to pry them loose and walks them them to the base hospital, to the squadron psychiatrist.

The great poet Randall Jarrell, an Eighth Air Force weatherman who never flew a combat mission, could never let go of those German children. This is what led him to walk very deliberately into the path of a car on a North Carolina highway twenty years after his war had ended.