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WASHINGTON (AP) - The families of two World War I enemies have been brought together by a small souvenir that a rookie American pilot took from the plane of a famous German ace.
Eighty-nine years after Walter Avery and Karl Menckhoff battled in the sky, Avery's daughter, Bette Avery Applegate, presented the remnant from Menckhoff's plane to the German pilot's son, Gerhard. The transfer was made during a ceremony Friday at a gathering of the League of World War I Aviation Historians.
"It's back home where it belongs, and I think my father would feel the same way," Applegate, 82, said of the large cloth "M" that her father cut from the side of the plane.
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