Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Jack Harold Glenn was a World War II fighter pilot who was killed during a firefight as he flew a mission over Germany in 1944, his body coming to rest in a field in a rural village.
The silver bracelet Glenn was wearing was given to a 16-year-old boy who helped retrieve his body. He held onto the bracelet ever since, a remembrance of the fallen American airman.
Sixty-five years later, the bracelet is returning to Glenn's sister in Alaska thanks to an enterprising World War II veteran who uncovered the relic on a recent trip to the German village.
Helen Glenn Foreman of Anchorage says she will receive her brother's bracelet in a week or so and plans to send it to a museum in Matagorda County, Texas, where Glenn grew up.
Foreman heard of the bracelet for the first time last week from family and friends of 90-year-old Bernerd Harding, a New Hampshire man who traveled this month to Klein Quenstedt, Germany, a village southwest of Berlin, on a quest to find his pilot's wings.
His B-24 bomber was shot down the same day as Glenn's. Harding bailed out and was captured and held in a farmhouse. Fearing he'd be beaten or shot because he was a pilot, Harding dug a shallow hole in the dirt basement and buried his wings.
He didn't find the wings on the trip but he was handed the bracelet by Heinz Kruse.
On July 7, 1944, Kruse was planting potatoes in a field owned by his father when an American B-24 bomber appeared overhead. German fighters were close behind, raking the bomber with machine gun fire.
"It broke apart in the air, and fell to the ground," Kruse said.
An adult told him to help a schoolmate driving a horse-pulled wagon retrieve the body of a dead American airman that had landed in a field outside the town.
As they loaded the body onto the cart, the boys noticed the soldier was wearing the silver bracelet. They presented the bracelet to the mayor, who wrote down the name, Jack H. Glenn, and gave the bracelet back to Kruse.
