In this case I mean the airplane, not the lapel pin. Each has its own history. The plane, a B-25 bomber, was about to fly on the Doolittle Raid in 1942. According to its pilot, Ted Lawson, while practicing takeoffs and landings on land there was a minor accident during which the plane’s tail scraped the ground on takeoff. Lawson landed the plane and when he came back to it he discovered someone had scrawled “ruptured duck” on its fuselage. Inspired, he found a crewman who could draw, a Corporal named Roger Lovelace, and got him to paint the famous Ruptured Duck caricature on the nose of the plane. In an odd twist, Lovelace had a minor accident and didn’t fly on the Tokyo raid.

You can see the insignia on the side of the fuselage above the two standing figures behind my right shoulder. This is not Lawson’s plane; that one was ditched in the East China Sea. The Japanese later recovered the nose section and displayed it in Tokyo.

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