Hey Moe had a distinguished career, it flew a total of 67 combat missions in 69 days of operation and its various crews claimed a total of four Nazi fighters. Keeping the aircraft flight worthy was no small feat. This earned Gaylord Ault, the Ground Crew Chief, The Bronze Star. Harvey Brown and Charlie Trumper regarded both Hey Moe and 42-78595 as two of the finest and easiest B-24s to fly.

On the 13th of November,  Charlie Trumper was asked to fly 42-51090  (which was recently re-named "Lois M") to a Royal Air Force Spitfire base in Northern Italy to pick up radar equipment from a "Mickey" B-24 that had made an emergency landing there the day before.

That same afternoon, some of the "older" pilots in the group flew it down to Bari, Italy to the PX there.  On landing back at the 451st, the pilot made a rather hard landing (which may have precipitated the demise of Hey Moe). No body knew that there was less than twenty minutes of flight time left.

Early the next morning a new crew who had recently arrived in Italy, took off in Hey Moe to fire air to ground gunnery practice. Just as the Trumper crew had done when they arrived in Italy. Shortly after take off, the left wing collapsed between engine one and two. The resulting crash  and fire killed all 11 people on board.  
 

Earlier in it's operational career, Hey Moe had sustained flak damage in the left wing and was repaired by the 60th Service Squadron.  Hey Moe flew an additional 28 combat missions with a total of 288 hours and 50 minutes after the wing repair. Hey Moe was not flying operationl missions on a regular basis when the crash occured.

The aircraft was so damaged, that Charlie could not identify any numbers on the airframe. Harvey would not find out for quite sometime that Hey Moe had crashed.