Cpl. Charles Bojt
also known as Charley Boyt (variant reading — see name note)
Nose turret gunner of Robert Earl Wildermuth’s ten-man B-24 Liberator crew — the man in the forward-most position of the airplane, a glass-bubble turret sticking out ahead of the nose with twin .50-caliber machine guns covering the forward arc.
From Buffalo, New York — the same hometown as the crew’s radar bombardier Merwin Adler. Robert Earl introduces him in the Big One manuscript as “the baby of our crew”:
“Charley was the baby of our crew. He had just turned [age digit cut off in OCR — likely 18 or 19]. He was fearless and was always eager to climb in his nose turret with no qualms even though that turret stuck out in front of the airplane and in that position you seemed to just bore through the air and the rest of the airplane couldn’t even be seen. To make it even worse (if one was the least bit claustrophobic) once the nose gunner had entered the turret, the navigator closed some strong doors between the turret and the nose compartment and the nose gunner was locked in.”
The memoir names the ritual from the navigator’s side:
“The nose turret gunner and the man who climbed into his turret at the nose of the aircraft and then I would close the doors behind him was Cpl. Charles Bojt of Buffalo, New York.”
That the navigator was the one closing the doors behind Charley meant that Robert Earl himself was the one locking the youngest crew member into the nose turret on every combat mission — a small piece of the crew’s mutual-trust architecture the memoir surfaces only in this passing detail. Robert Earl probably opened those doors back up at the end of every mission, too.
His pre-war Buffalo life and postwar trajectory are open research. The path forward sits at Buffalo, NY local press of the late 1940s and the 90th Bomb Group veterans’ archive.
A note on the name: Robert Earl’s 1989 memoir names him “Cpl. Charles Bojt,” while the Big One crew sketch was read as “Charley Boyt.” This archive follows the memoir’s typed spelling and notes the variant. Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir; The Big One, Crew Members section.