I started with a few old family photos and a name.
The trail led to Robert A. "Bob" Cary, a U.S. Army Air Forces airman listed with the 444th Bomb Squadron of the 320th Bomb Group, flying B-26 Marauders near the end of World War II.
The records place his unit in France, striking bridges, rail yards, ammunition sites, and German defensive networks as the war pushed toward its final months. They also connect him with Hartwell Davis, another 444th airman who appears in both wartime and postwar memory.
The most powerful lead so far centers on Christmas Day 1944. The 320th set out from Dijon to bomb the Singen railroad bridge in Germany. Some of the B-26s misidentified the target area and accidentally bombed Thayngen, Switzerland, a neutral town just across the border. Swiss sources later connected both Hartwell Davis and Bob Cary to that event and to return visits decades later.
Hartwell went back to Thayngen in 1984 because the bombing had stayed with him every Christmas. In 1985, he returned again with Bob Cary. They came back not as conquering veterans, but as older men willing to face the place where a wartime mission had gone wrong.
There are still open questions. We still need evidence showing exactly where Bob's ship sat in the formation and whether it dropped on Singen or Thayngen. But the story already has a shape: a young B-26 airman, a hard war, a mistaken bombing in neutral Switzerland, and two veterans who returned forty years later to look the past in the eye.