Warbird Information Exchange

When a DHL truck pulls up in front of Diane Dimel’s Green Hills home this morning, she and her three siblings will receive a package that’s far from typical.

It’s not every day a World War II artifact with its own incredible story shows up at someone’s front door.

As Dimel, her sister and two brothers open up the crate they’ll receive, they’ll find a gun turret from the B-17 plane their father, James Dimel, flew in World War II as a lieutenant.

For them, the piece will represent not only their late father, but also the heroism he showed during his career in the military and the friends he made because of it.

“Within our family, we said it would be neat to have a piece of it for Dad,” Diane Dimel said.

The plane piece will get to the family nearly 69 years to the day after their father flew as part of an offensive into Germany on Nov. 10, 1944. Once in enemy territory, the B-17 was quickly pelted by Nazi gunfire that injured several of the crew and severely damaged the plane.

The damage forced Dimel to break formation and order all who could to parachute out. As he turned the plane around into Belgian territory, those left on the aircraft had to figure out how to escape.

“They decided the only way to save everyone was to try to land it, or really, crash it,” his daughter said.

James Dimel quickly found an open meadow near a village and braced the crew for a crash landing. Though the plane slammed into the meadow moments later, all on board survived.

After parts of the plane had been collected by local residents decades later, some became curious about those who had flown it. In 1999, friends Marianne Hubert and Robert de Saint-Georges reached out to Air Force officials and tracked down Dimel, then living in southern Florida. He and his family were invited to the town to celebrate his miraculous landing — and the three lives he saved, including his own — soon after.

Years after Dimel’s death in 2010, Saint-Georges offered them a piece of the plane that his family had kept in their chicken coop for decades. While the family quickly became excited over the gift, they knew their late father would make little of it publicly, Diane Dimel said.

“Over the years this has gone on, my father was really modest about it all,” she said. “He would probably laugh about this, but I think he was very happy about it.”

After years of planning, both sides began setting up shipping arrangements through DHL, which were expected to cost thousands of dollars. Once the Germany-based company got wind of what they were moving, it decided to waive all shipping costs involved, said company spokesman Robert Mintz.

“The folks from Europe were very interested in the history of it all,” he said. “Once the U.S. team heard about it, we thought we should give it as a gift.

“We just wanted to help them out and make it a meaningful Veterans Day for them.”

The call from Mintz informing the family of the free shipment was one Dimel almost missed.

“I just happened to pick it up,” she said. “It totally took me by surprise. We are really appreciative of the generosity of it all.”

Once the package finally comes today, the Dimels still have to figure out one last thing — what exactly they’ll do with it.

Diane, an interior designer and the appointed caretaker, has plenty of ideas about what to do with it. A sculpture, maybe, or perhaps a table or the centerpiece in a room.

“But I’m going to preserve the integrity of the piece,” she said.

No matter what it becomes, no one will be able to say that it isn’t a conversation-starter.