Fragment of Damon's Demon (2.5 by 4 inches)

Remy Chuinard is a frenchman who was 17 at the time of D-Day, living in Normandy. He remembers well the airmen who helped to recapture his homeland from the Germans and has made it his avocation to be a historian and friend to the fighter groups who supported the Allied ground advance. When I contacted him in 1995 he was aware that my father's aircraft had crashed near Granville, Remy's boyhood home, in 1944.

In 1996 to my astonishment Remy sent me pieces of my father's P-47!

He had pin-pointed the crash site through US Air Force records and an eye-witness, then had visited the site and dug until he found a cowl flap, several pieces of aluminum tubing, shards of plexiglas, a piece of electrical cable, a 50 caliber shell, a buckle from the safety harness, and assorted small pieces of twisted metal.

In his words: "Could you imagine that this little bit of metal has been waiting for 51 years and six months in the ground before to become a modest but symbolic and precious keepsake of George Rarey's plane..."