SSGT Jack Ramsey Amos

Jack Ramsey Amos was born in 1925, in Greensboro. He was a graduate of Rankin High School and attended State College in Raleigh for one year before entering the U.S. Army Air Forces on September 27, 1943.

He married in 1944 in Chesterfield, S.C and the couple had one son.

Trained as a nose gunner aboard a B-24 Liberator heavy bomber, Amos served as a vital member of his aircrew. The nose-gunner’s position demanded steady nerves and precision—stationed in a cramped compartment at the very front of the bomber, Amos was the first to face enemy fighters and anti-aircraft fire during each mission.

His assigned aircraft was B-24 Liberator tail number 42-78455, a bomber that flew missions as part of the Fifteenth Air Force, operating from bases in southern Italy. From these airfields, American crews launched deep-penetration raids into Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Germany. The missions were long, frigid, and deadly—requiring the bombers to fly more than a thousand miles round-trip over hostile territory.

By 1944 and early 1945, the Fifteenth Air Force was striking strategic targets throughout Austria, including the vital oil refineries at Vienna, Wiener Neustadt, and Linz, as well as aircraft factories and rail junctions critical to the German war effort. These heavily defended targets made every mission a perilous undertaking. German flak batteries and Luftwaffe fighters awaited the American formations with deadly efficiency, and losses among bomber crews were high.

It was during one of these perilous missions on January 31, 1945 that Jack lost his life. Initial notification of death related Austria as location of death, but newspaper accounts in 1949 reflect that his Liberator was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed at Marburg/Drau Yugoslavia while returning from a bombing mission on the oil refinery at Moosbierbaum, Vienna, Austria.

In 1949, the remains of Sergeant Amos were exhumed from the European burial location and returned to the United States. He is buried in Greensboro.