Declan Curran from Richmond, Virginia, neees help identifying the WWII crew members in this photo.

One of the crew, Leonard Hersch, was from Brooklyn. Declan asks, "Would it be too much to ask for a one-liner on your blog – perhaps there may be family still living in Brooklyn and they could identify him?"

I love doing this kind of thing on OTBKB. Here is info from Declan’s blog as to why he’s doing this:

Several weeks ago my eleven year old son Alec had to do a school project, an essay about members of his family. Being a war buff he decided to focus on members of the family that had gone to war. There were several on my wife’s side of the family that I already knew of but we discovered another – Victor Ratliff – front row, right, in the photograph above. Hand written on the edge of the photo is “Victor + crew killed April 18 1944”. My wife found out that Victor was buried in Arlington Cemetery but that’s all we really knew.

A search on the internet found that “Good Pickin”, serial no. 42-6153, was used as a trainer with the 452 Bomb Group and was stationed at several bases in Texas so I’m assuming that’s where Victor received his training and that the others in the photo were his crew mates.

Over Spring Break Alec and I headed for DC. Arriving at Arlington Cemetery we inquired at the visitors center. With just a first and last name and the year of interment (we assumed that he was buried the same year he was killed) a kind member of the Arlington staff started going through microfilm records and within 5 minutes had a Victor Ratliff, grave marker 4520 in section 34. Needless to say, Alec and I were elated to have a “hit” but were also aware that given the number of WWII buried in Arlington it was possible that the Victor Ratliff we were looking for was not the one we were about to find.

After a brisk walk to section 34 we found the grave marker and were amazed to discover that the marker had more than one name and more than one date, but it did have Victor Ratliff and the date April 18, 1944. (Click here to see enlarged image of grave marker) The names on the marker were; Albert C. Joyce, Anthony C. Formato, Leonard Hersch, Eugene J. Harpster, Victor B. Ratliff, Leon J. Sarnowski, Robert D. Stetler, Pete N. Rayhawk and James T. Finch. There were 4 other names with the date of May 24, 1944.

You can read the rest at at Declan’s blog.