When Ruth Webb died in 2007, she thought the story on her late brother, Jack Clark, her only sibling, had been written.
Lt. Jack Clark, a second lieutenant in the Army, disappeared on June 25, 1943, when his B-17 was hit during a bombing run over the North Sea while on the way to a target in Bremen, Germany. The remains of Clark, a Chattanoogan and the plane’s bombardier, were never found.
After a year, he was declared legally dead, and for many years Webb never knew what happened to her brother.
“For all those years,” she said in 1991, “It added to the sorrow of losing him not to know what happened.”
However, several members of the crew made it out of the plane alive, and Webb later made contact with one of them, John Brown, who said her brother “may have saved my life” by kicking open a sticky escape hatch door. Her brother, he said, also had been the best man at his wedding.