S.Sgt. Orland Young

He was the top turret gunner of Robert Earl Wildermuth’s ten-man B-24 Liberator crew — manning the upper-fuselage turret mounted on the roof of the airplane, twin .50-caliber machine guns covering the full upper hemisphere. (An earlier version of this page had him as the waist gunner from Akron; the June 2026 OCR pass through the Big One manuscript settles his position as the top turret and his hometown as Coldwater.)

From Coldwater, Ohio — a small village in Mercer County in west-central Ohio, near the Indiana border south of Lima. Robert Earl’s Big One manuscript opens his sketch with the warm shorthand of shared geography — “another good old Ohioan” — and gives him a brief, careful character note:

“Orland was very quiet and shy; a loner but absolutely dependable.”

He is one of the two Ohioans on the crew, the other being Robert Earl himself (Marietta). The Ohio connection is most of what the manuscript preserves of him.

His postwar trajectory is open. The path forward sits at the Coldwater / Mercer County, Ohio local press, Ohio state-veteran records, and the 90th Bomb Group veterans’ archive.

Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth, The Big One: World War II (typewritten manuscript, c. 1989), Crew Members section.