WOONSOCKET — Five gleaming brass .50-caliber machine gun bullets, somewhat battered and mounted on a brass plate, nestle with a pair of small wooden plaques holding buckled shards of aluminum in a custom-made wooden box on a coffee table in Ray Noury’s living room.

This is detritus from Noury’s mighty B-24 Liberator bomber, clawed from the sky 65 years ago Sunday over what is now the Czech Republic.

Of the nine-member crew, Sergeant Noury alone survived — and in a manner that few are likely to duplicate. He tumbled 15,000 feet, essentially without a parachute, to slap down on the slope of a ski run covered by fresh snow, where he skidded for “half a mile.”

Despite the passage of time, the incident has by no means been forgotten by those on the ground. The plunge of Noury and his bomber is to be commemorated Sunday, as it has been annually for many years, in the Czech town of Blovice, where the flaming wreckage of the Liberator descended. The site where some of the scattered metal remnants came to rest had been marked by a stone cross since 1992. Now the townspeople have erected a 20-foot monument on Dubec Hill, topped by the white U.S. star that adorned the fuselages of American aircraft in World War II.

“It has a stone for every member of my crew,” said Noury, now 86.

But the monument was not ready for unveiling on the anniversary. Noury said he expects the ceremony will take place next month.

Noury and his crew were based in Lecce, Italy, part of the 343d Bomb Squadron of the 98th Bombardment Group. Their target that day was the concentration of ball-bearing factories in Regensburg, Germany. Ball bearings were vital to the German production of aircraft, submarines, tanks and other vehicles. That day’s attack was part of what the Allies called the “Big Week,” a combined attack with Americans bombing by day and the British by night.

Beginning Feb. 20, 1944, more than 3,800 American bombers and 2,351 from the Royal Air Force deposited 20,000 tons of bombs, approximately the same explosive power deployed by the uranium bomb that would destroy Hiroshima the next year. While the weeklong operation caused heavy damage, the Germans scrambled to adjust, and it only set back ball-bearing production for a couple of months. On the debit side, it was a costly affair. The British lost 157 Lancaster bombers. The Americans lost more than 250 heavy bombers, among them Noury’s ill-fated Liberator.

Noury was a radioman, but he liked taking a waist-gunner position now and then, and that was his job Feb. 22, 1944, when his squadron sailed over Regensburg and unloaded.

The Germans unloaded, too. Their 88mm flak guns sliced into one of the Liberator’s four engines, setting it afire.

Pieces of shrapnel buried themselves in Noury’s body. Several remain today.

“A couple of other planes were crippled, too,” he said, recalling his experiences a few days ago. “We were all straggling along when the Messerschmitt 109s really did a job on us. They jumped us. One plane went down. I didn’t see anyone get out.”

The ball turret gunner, whose cramped, spherical mount descended from the belly of the plane, was trapped. Noury struggled to free him.

“My oxygen bottle ran out and I began to feel faint,” he recalled. “I reached over for my chute and put one clip on, and that’s the last thing I remember.”

He woke up “going sideways through the air, fast.”

Wondering what was wrong, he looked up to see the last thing any parachutist wants to see: flapping fabric, riddled by bullet or flak holes, Noury knows not which. “The chute was gone,” he said. “The ripcord was there, but there were just strands.” [A half-century later, Czech villagers would present him with a length of a woven silk riser, which connected the parachutist with the canopy. They had kept the remnant safe all those years.]

“I reached for my crucifix,” he said.

“I hit the ski slope and skidded for a half mile down the slope. It was a quarter-mile wide. There was nothing around there, all bare, all snow.”

The impact ripped away one of his flying boots.

Noury was wearing an electrically heated suit, which succeeded the bulky sheepskin garments worn through much of the war in the unheated bombers, which flew at high altitudes, so high that the temperature could fall to minus 50 degrees.

When plugged in, the suits kept the wearer warm. When unplugged, they weren’t much good.

“The only thing I could do was curl up,” he said. “I made a little thing of snow to cover me, because with that electric suit I didn’t have much on.”

Noury found out later that a wedding party had looked up to see wreckage falling from the sky. But it took two days of searching to find the half-frozen Noury.

“Two of them came,” he said. “They were on skis.”

His very survival seems incredible. Besides splinter wounds, Noury had “a busted chest.” He added, “It wasn’t until 50 years later, when I had an MRI, that they found out I had a broken neck, too.” Just after the crash a German doctor, after learning of Noury’s amazing plunge through the atmosphere, told him that he was lucky he had such a slight build. He spent a week in a medical building before the Czechs turned him over to the Germans, he said.

For the rest of the war, he languished in POW camps for Allied airmen — Stalag Luft III, IV and VI.

The villagers gathered up what body parts remained of Noury’s fellow crewmen.

“They couldn’t tell one body from another,” he said.

The villagers buried them in a common grave. After the war the casket was moved to a U.S. war cemetery in France. Noury thinks the remains might have been returned to the United States after that, but he isn’t sure.

The people of Blovice built a museum after the war to display one of the propellers and other parts of Noury’s doomed Liberator. Over the years searchers found rings that belonged to the pilot and the navigator, and were able to return them to their next of kin.

Noury was surprised when he went back in 2004 for the annual ceremony.

“They treated me better than the president of the United States,” he said with wonderment. “They had a 50-piece brass band.”

Besides the silk parachute cord they also presented to Noury the leather gloves he had worn that day. He keeps these souvenirs in his living room with a collection of scrapbooks and photos, which include a group shot of his fellow crewmembers posed alongside their aircraft, and scenes of the annual ceremony going back decades.

Long retired from the Chapel Market he ran at Four Corners in Cumberland, Noury still keeps his hand in — in September he took a ride in a B-24 Liberator that flew into North Central State Airport, part of a fleet of historic aircraft that tour the country via the Collings Foundation, a nonprofit educational organization. It was his first trip in a Liberator in 65 years. For that occasion he wore his original Army uniform — he still fits easily into it.

But he sometimes has twinges as he ponders the days when he and his brethren were small cogs in the biggest wheel in history, World War II.

He thinks particularly of one man in his squadron. The man needed one more mission to complete his allotted 50 missions and go home. He signed on to a new aircraft for that last effort.

And it turned out to be truly a last effort, for it was Noury’s aircraft that he boarded, 65 years ago this day.

tmorgan@projo.com