The aircraft was Serial No. 44-83325, fresh off the assembly line at Long Beach, California. It had never seen combat. It belonged to no squadron. It was being ferried, unassigned, from the United States to Gioia del Colle in Italy, where it would join the fight that everyone now knew was nearly over. The route was a standard wartime crossing: Bangor, Maine to Meeks Field in Iceland, then Meeks Field to RAF Valley on the island of Anglesey in North Wales, with Prestwick and Nutts Corner held in reserve as diversions. The first leg went without incident. The second leg crossed the North Atlantic cleanly. The crew checked in with RAF Stornoway on schedule and turned south to follow the east coast of Scotland down to Wales. They never made the turn cleanly. A high-pressure system across the British Isles had laid an unbroken sheet of low cloud across the Hebrides, and the Trotternish escarpment of Skye - a wall of basalt cliffs running for twenty miles - was hidden inside it.

First Lieutenant Paul Main Overfield, Jr. was in the left seat. In the right seat was Second Lieutenant Leroy Elmer Cagle. Second Lieutenant Charles Keith Jeanblanc was also up forward. Behind them were six corporals: Harold Duane Blue, the engineer; Harold A. Fahselt, engineer and gunner; and gunners Arthur W. Kopp, Jr., George Stroman Aldrich, Jr., John Henry Vaughan, and Carter Denning Wilkinson. They had grown up in homes scattered across the United States. The oldest was 23. They had flown the Atlantic together, once already. Most had probably never seen Scotland before the moment they did - a green ridge appearing suddenly through cloud, very close. Two months later the war in Europe would be over. They never knew that.

Beinn Edra is not an easy mountain to reach even in good weather. There is no road to the crash site, only a long climb up the eastern flank from Staffin through wet ground and broken basalt. The Inverness-based No. 56 Maintenance Unit was sent in to recover what could be recovered. Working on a steep face in early spring, they wriggled wreckage loose and let it tumble downslope to be collected at the bottom, dodging the rockfalls their own work was triggering. One man was struck by a falling oil cooler and injured. The bodies of the crewmen were brought down first. They were buried temporarily in the United Kingdom, then repatriated as their families requested. Four of them - Aldrich, Fahselt, Vaughan and Wilkinson - share a communal grave at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Missouri. Four were buried in their home states. Only Jeanblanc remained in Europe: he lies in the American Military Cemetery at Cambridge, England, among the rows of white markers for Americans who died in the European theatre.

For decades the crash was a local story, known to Skye hillwalkers who occasionally came across twisted aluminium high on Beinn Edra. In 2015, on the seventieth anniversary, the names of all ten airmen were added to the war memorial in Staffin village - a granite stone that already carried the dead of the Boer War, the First World War and the Second. A plaque was set at the crash site itself. The Skye Ecomuseum, run by Staffin Community Trust, now includes the wreck among the stories it tells about the Trotternish landscape. None of these men was from Skye. None had any reason to know it existed. But Staffin claimed them, the way small places sometimes do when something terrible happens on the hill above them and the only honest response is to refuse to forget.