Lieutenant William “Bill” Johnson

Lieutenant William “Bill” Johnson died on April 13, 1944, when the B-17 he was piloting, known as "Spare Parts," crashed near Hamstreet, Kent, U.K. Johnson stayed with the plane to give his crew time to bail out, and died after directing the stricken plane away from a populated area.

Johnson was written about in this article in 2014: https://www.kentonline.co.uk/ashford/news/hamstreet-marks-us-aviators-life-saving-15724/

I learned about Bill Johnson in the 1990s, when my parents bought a puppy from Johnson's sister, a dog breeder named Doris Omley. She had a small model of "Spare Parts" in her house, along with a fragment of wreckage that a young English boy had picked up not long after the crash. Years later, the boy (now a man) gave Omley the piece of wreckage when she visited the crash site. While Johnson had been gone for 50 years by the point I learned about him, he was very much alive in Doris' heart.