As a kid, I used to love reading about military aircraft and all the heroic missions they went. It rarely occurred to me that there were actual human beings on the other ends of these bombing missions and fighter aircraft.
But I'm not a kid anymore, so I can no longer appreciate what these tools were used for. However, I can still love the designs and the fact that some managed to survive (and save a lot of people who didn't better). B-17s are still one of my favorite WWII aircraft for precisely those reasons. Here's a B-17 called the "Nine-O-Nine"
Beautiful plane and its story of survival is quite amazing, actually: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine-O-Nine