Lately I’ve been trying to put names to faces in LIFE’s treasure trove of Margaret Bourke-White photos. I’m particularly interested in this crew posing with the 97th Bomb Group’s 41-24412, Flying Flit Gun. Margaret Bourke-White came up with the name of this plane and christened it with a bottle of Coca-Cola in October 1942.
So far I’ve only been able to identify two of the four officers standing – pilot Carl David Hoffmann is second from the left in the jacket with the 340th Bomb Squadron patch and co-pilot Jack Davenport is next to and slightly behind him. One of the other two officers should be navigator Charles C. Cutforth, who took the famous photo of All American from the nose of this plane.
I can only identify one of the five men seated – in the center is Sgt Gerald Freligh, ball turret gunner.
In a 1992 letter Dave Hoffmann wrote, “Frankly, neither the name nor the nose art pleased me at the time, but I am very tractable by nature and, the situation being completely beyond my control, I carefully kept my true feelings well hidden”.
LIFE never used this or any of the other photos of the plane and they were pretty-much inaccessible and forgotten until they were published online about fourteen years ago. I think it’s unlikely Dave Hoffmann or any of his crew ever saw any of them.