American War Hero · World War II · Notice Nearby
No rights-safe contemporary likeness is on file. The record is the service and the writing, not an invented face.
Willard O. Hunter
June 21, 1913 – unaccounted for since October 4, 1943
Born Linton, Greene County, Indiana
Loss location: North Sea / Westerschelde east of Ellewoutsdijk, Netherlands (loss location)
Staff Sergeant, U.S. Army Air Forces; tail gunner, 511th Bombardment Squadron, 351st Bombardment Group (Heavy); B-17G Flying Fortress 42-5807 (Rikki Tikki Tavi / Minor Ball), Frankfurt mission, October 4, 1943
Missing in action — DPAA lists Staff Sgt. Willard O. Hunter as Unaccounted For (Non-recoverable), profile a0Jt000001nzSepEAE (verified 2026-09-26). Tail gunner on B-17G 42-5807 lost October 4, 1943 after a Frankfurt mission; Fortress crashed in the North Sea near Vlissingen; two of ten crew later recovered and identified; Hunter not among them. Memorialized on the Walls of the Missing at Netherlands American Cemetery, Margraten. Birth date and Linton/Bloomfield, Indiana, places from Fields of Honor case 14285. Non-recoverable is an analytic category for a North Sea loss, not a recovered grave.
Willard Owen Hunter — "Red" to the people who knew him in Greene County — was born in Linton, Indiana, on June 21, 1913. He finished Linton-Stockton High in 1929, ran Red's Tavern in Bloomfield, and enlisted at Evansville in April 1942. By March 1943 he was overseas with the heavy-bomb groups out of England.
On October 4 he flew as tail gunner on B-17G 42-5807 — Rikki Tikki Tavi, also called Minor Ball — with the 511th Bombardment Squadron of the 351st Bombardment Group. The target was Frankfurt. On the way back, flak and fighters tore the Fortress up. It went into the North Sea near Vlissingen. Two bodies from that crew later washed ashore and were identified. Hunter's was not among them.
Months earlier, on a July mission that ditched in the water, he had stayed on his gun after prepare-to-ditch orders until the airplane hit. The Army Air Forces later put a Silver Star citation in his file for that fight. DPAA profile a0Jt000001nzSepEAE still lists him Unaccounted For, analytical category Non-recoverable. He is on the Walls of the Missing at Margraten. A finding of death closed a personnel file. It did not bring a body up from that sea.
- Publication
- NN-HERO-1941-021
- Content hash
- 3a1eff5d 57049986 abfd5b33 0a6c2297 362a4519 75e9a578 52cc7cdf 6554dd72
- Base anchor
- 0xad0292 7dfaf42d 0ad68d70 a135c56f 5a17022b 3e4d9abc e6f882d8 e8614e4c 33
Base stores the content hash, publication number, memorial id, and timestamp — not the full obituary text. The complete memorial remains on Notice Nearby. This is not a legal affidavit.