From the RIA Blog

The same day Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, Lt. Thomas R. Moss strained against the controls of his B-24 — named “Invictus” by his wife Margie — during a raid on the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania.

While Allied forces fought to overpower the defenses of “Fortress Europe,” Moss’s Invictus and the rest of his B-24 Liberator squadron of the 461st Bombardment Group of the 15th Air Force again tried to flatten Ploesti’s refineries in hopes of starving the Third Reich of fuel. Missions to heavily-defended Ploesti claimed more than 200 B-24 Liberators and more than 2,000 crewmen during the war.

The Invictus Singer, a rare Singer M1911A1 carried by Thomas Moss, pilot of the Invictus, a B-24 Liberator, on 35 missions in World War 2.

During the attack the Invictus lost an engine supercharger, making the already lumbering Liberator that much harder to control. Moss fought to maintain control and speed, in hopes of making it to Italy or at least Yugoslavia where if they had to bail out or crash land the crew might be taken in by partisans. Would he have to use the Singer Model 1911A1 he carried to stay alive in order to get back to Margie? For Moss the gun served as a tool for personal defense, but 80 years later, the rare firearm has become a highly-desired firearm among collectors.

Moss ordered his crew to jettison the B-24’s guns and other equipment to lighten the plane to keep up with the squadron’s protective formation. Away from the target, the Invictus broke formation and limped its way across the Adriatic Sea, landing at Foggia, Italy with only fumes left in the fuel tanks. The crew refueled the Invictus and the hobbled B-24 bomber made its way back to its home base at Torretta, Italy.

Moss, with the Singer 1911A1 as his sidearm, flew 13 more missions before completing his tour with his 35th on July 8, 1944. Moss’s pistol, nicknamed the “Invictus Singer” and carried on every one of his bombing runs over Yugoslavia, Romania, France, Italy, Austria, Hungary and Germany is available on Day Two of Rock Island Auction Company’s Aug. 23-25 Premier Auction. The gun, one of 500 made by Singer was kept by Moss until 2018, and still shines with 80 percent of its original blue finish. Moss died in 2020 at the age of 99.

Who Is B-24 Liberator Pilot Thomas R. Moss?

Moss was the son of musician parents, born in Spokane, Wash., but grew up in and around Baltimore and Washington, D.C. A student at Johns Hopkins University where he was in the engineering ROTC program when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Moss decided to control how he fought in the war. At an Army recruiting office he took the aviation cadet examination and passed, so he left college and entered the U.S. Army.

He recalled the decision he and a friend made to take the flight cadet test in a video interview in the Library of Congress, saying “If we don’t do something first, they’ll do it for us.”

Go to the link to read the rest of this lengthy post.

https://www.rockislandauction.com/riac-blog/an-unconquerable-singer-m1911a1