On April 25, 2016 the citizens of Pavone del Mella came out to honor the Bum's Rush crew by dedicating a memorial plaque in their name. This comes a year after the first screening of the Bum's Rush documentary
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PLEASE NOTE: I know this is a long-ish post and it’s sort of a continuation of THIS TUMBLR POST that I really encourage you to check out. It's the best way I know how to give you an idea of the things that lead up to this site and I think if you give this a go and plow through it you’ll come out on the other end thinking it’d been worth it. I really do. I'm Jason McHenry and my Grandfather is Harry L. Cunningham. He was the waist gunner on the Bum's Rush, a B-17F Flying Fortress, which was shot down on October 6, 1943 in the little town of Pavone del Mella, Italy. Harry has always been the most important person in my life and I've missed him just non-stop since he died. Genealogy has always been something I really, really dig. I think since I was a kid I’ve loved it after hearing stories and tales about my family from my family. I started keeping track of this stuff just for the sake of posterity and memory and for the fun of it. After the internet it became easier and I fund more information in a month of using Ancestry.com than I probably did in the decade prior. I go at it in spurts and every couple of years I’ll sign up for another round of the paid websites and grab all of the new info I can find and then give it a rest for a while. Recently I was at it again and I had been looking around for new information about my Grandfather. He was the only real hero I’ve ever had and he was a waist gunner on a B-17 in World War II. The name of the plane was “Bum’s Rush” and it was shot down and my Grandfather was captured and he spent years in a POW camp before being liberated and coming back home. I had some of his papers and letters and one in particular was fantastic. It was a letter to him from another crew member on his plane. Some of the crew parachuted too but they managed to escape to Switzerland and avoided being taken prisoner. The letter explained what had happened to the rest of the crew on that day and in the days to follow and it was a monumental thing to read. The letter was just 4-5 pages and I have read it close to a hundred times and I also scanned and transcribed it to post on one of my websites. Between then and now there have been some really disastrous losses of data and the long and the short of it is that I don’t really have any of it anymore. I can only seem to find the first page of the thing. [There is still an old hard drive that may be able to pan out if the right person has a look at it. I am not the right person.] |
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