Ralph Henry Little

“My grandpa was funny, irreverent, hard-working, generous, and tough as nails. He was a master woodworker and could build or fix anything. He wasn’t a warm-and-fuzzy kind of guy, but he showed his affection by tickling his grandkids or giving us ‘noogies.’

I grew up living next door to my grandparents, and every time I went into their house, he’d let me grab a handful of M&M’s out of a big jar that he kept stocked. He called them ‘vitamins.’ He chewed Red Man tobacco his whole life, and that jar of M&M’s sat next to a glass coffee jar that he used as a spittoon. To this day, I can’t look at M&M’s or smell tobacco without thinking of him.”

– Shari Dunn, Sr. Executive Assistant, Chancellor’s Office

Ralph Henry Little, remembered by his granddaughter, Shari Dunn

Flying Fortress gunner Ralph Little survived a crash landing and endured time as a POW.

Ralph Henry Little was a gunner in a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. On May 29, 1944, during his third mission, Little and his plane came under fire. The bomber crash landed near the town of Grand-Leez in Belgium. Little and his fellow crew members were captured; he would spend the next year as a POW in Germany.

Little never really talked about his experiences in the war and the prison camp until a letter from Raoul Francois arrived in 1995. Francois watched the B-17 crash as an 11-year-old boy, and he remained curious about it. Fifty years afterward, with the help of the internet, Francois organized a reunion, a monument and an annual festival in Grand-Leez to celebrate Little and his crew from the Flying Fortress. Little began to share his war experiences with his wife and children, who had never heard about them previously.