With the aircraft almost out of fuel and just flying on one engine, the crew of the lady Be Good baled out into the night sky. Since they were probably thinking they were still over the sea, finding themselves landing on the desert floor must have been quite a shock.
Co-pilot Robert F. Toner and Tech. Sgt. Harold J. Ripslinger both kept diaries. Their diaries indicate they jumped at around 2:00 am on April 5, 1943. With a top speed of 290 mph and being almost 450 miles inland from the coast, it's certainly possible that they were overhead Benghazi around midnight, two hours earlier. Of the nine crew members, all but Bombardier John. S. Woravka met at the assembly point. The plane flew on for about another 12 miles after they crew had baled out before crashing into the desert.
Woravka's parachute malfunctioned. His body was found on August 11, 1960, lying on his back, dressed in high altitude flying gear with his parachute shrouds tangled above him. On his waist belt he had nearly a full canteen of water and in his hand he held a first aid kit. Martinez speculates that Woravka was the first to bale out, possibly because of his location to the North of the assembly point. I'm guessing had he baled out somewhere else in the sequence it's more likely one of the others would have come across his body than if he baled out first. Despite being closest to the downed bomber, Woravka's was the last body to be found.
The assembly point was found about 700 yards South West of Woravka's body – a small area with several sheepskin-lined high-altitude jackets, pants and boots, discarded life preservers, and used signal flares. I think it unlikely they would have jumped with life preservers had they known they were over land.
Toner's diary entries for April 4 and April 5 were:
SUNDAY, APR. 4, 1943
Naples- 28 planes. Things pretty well mixed up- Got lost returning. out of gas, jumped. landed in desert at 2:00 in morning, no one badly hurt, can't find John, all others present.
MONDAY April 5, 1943
While Ripslinger's corresponding entries were:
SUNDAY, April 4, 1943
Mission to Naples, Italy. T.O. 3:10 and dropped (sic) bombs at 10:00. Lost coming back. Bailed out at 2:10 A.M. on dessert.
MONDAY, April 5, 1943
It's clear that they were not well prepared for the desert hike and that they didn't know how long a trek they had ahead of them. They could well have used the water in Woravka's canteen.
It's interesting that in my desert survival classes we were always, always instructed to remain with the vehicle if lost or broken down. For one, its far easier to spot a vehicle than a single person, for another the vehicle provides shelter of a sort. Had Hatton's crew followed the bomber, they would have had water and, more importantly, they would have been able to radio for help, since the radios were found to be working when the plane was discovered. Counter to that, though, they likely would not have found the wreckage given it's spiral off course once the crew had baled out and they would have had no idea of how well the plane had survived impact.
Having seen the wreck from the air on June 15, 1958 and again on February 7, 1959, D'Arcy geologist Don Sheridan had made up his mind to get to the downed bomber on his upcoming land survey. Sheridan, along with Don Martin, who had also seen the plane on the February 7 flight, were assigned along with Gordon Bowerman to make a ground survey. They were to construct a map and collect rock samples to help decide how much of the concession BP would bid on for exploration. On February 20 they set off from Kufra oasis with three Libyan assistants Sayid Bin Ramadan, Ali Shariff, and Abul Gaelil; driver, cook and mechanic respectively. The team had three vehicles, a land Rover, a Dodge Power Wagon and a Bedford truck.
Their navigation system was ‘dead reckoning'. This is a process of determining where you are now by estimating based on speeds or distance, time, and course, relative to a previous known location. The method is subject to errors and, from my experience in the desert, it's very difficult to actually drive in a straight line for any real distance as the surface features get in the way. We used dead reckoning when I was in the desert. I found it immensely liberating to be able to point my own Land Rover in a direction and just take off, un-restricted by pesky things like roads, fences, owned property, and the like. You either hit your target or you hit some other land feature from which you could make a course correction. But, of course, in the mid-1980s when I first went to Libya, the desert was already pretty well mapped thanks to people like Sheridan, Martin and Bowerman. Bowerman would take fixes from the stars as they camped each night to determine their starting point for the next day. When I was in the desert, pre GPS, our surveyors would use sun shots and a solar position table to determine location – basically using the sun instead of the stars.
The team was hoping to find the wreck on February 26 but were unable to and by mid-day had to move on to their next geological objective, blockhouse rock, on the edge of the sand sea. On one of the my two visits to the wreck of the Lady Be Good, I also stopped by Blockhouse Rock.
Disappointed at not finding the wreck, the team decided to look again late on February 27 and, scouring the landscape through binoculars as the sun was going down, Bowerman saw a reflection of light that led them to the bomber.
The team waited overnight before entering the bomber on the morning of February 28, 1959. They had anticipated finding bodies in the wreckage but soon realized there were none. Martinez claims that the name ‘Lady Be Good' was painted on both sides of the nose but in the photo below from the QMS team, taken on or shortly after May 26, 1959, there's no name evident on the port side of the nose, just the squadron identifier for the aircraft, the number '64' in white paint. You can also tell from this photo where the darker patches are that the desert pink paint coat was already eroding to reveal the olive drab coat below it.
The team spent a few hours crawling through the wreckage, noting personal items left by the behind by the crew and making observations such as a Thermos still containing coffee, an ash tray with cigarette butts in the navigator's space, Hatton's Colt revolver sitting on the pilot's seat and the navigator's tools, still neatly boxed, maps of the raid route to Naples and a maintenance log with the last entry on April 3, 1943. Their souvenir hunting was the start of a trend that saw the aircraft slowly dismantled over the following years by other oilmen working in the area, such as myself.
Since the US Air Force, still then with a base in Tripoli, had shown no interest when the finding of the bomber had previously been reported, the team helped themselves to some souvenirs before heading back to their geological survey later in the morning. During this process they opened the hatches on the roof above the wings just rear of the top turret and found canteens full of water as well as life rafts and other marine survival equipment. There's a video on YouTube of an intentional ditching of a B-24. It's not at all clear to me the, particularly if ditching in the sea, anyone would have been able to get out of the plane and retrieve those items in the event of a real ditching experience. With it's high-wing configuration, although empty fuel tanks would provide some buoyancy, most of the fuselage would be under water and, in my view, would have quickly filled with water while all but the pilots would have been disoriented after the violent impact.
Now the plane had a serial number and name the US Air Force were able to find records and became interested in the wreck. A team from the Quartermaster Mortuary Service (QMS) was sent out on May 24 to land at the site and start looking for the crew, all listed still as MIA, presumed dead. One of their two aircraft encountered mechanical problems so they couldn't use it to reconnoiter for the crew as intended but both aircraft were able to land near the wreck. In the photo below taken on May 24-25, 1959, the SC-47 aircraft from this visit can be seen behind the wreckage.
Below is another shot from that QMS visit, from the front of the aircraft showing wreckage from the landing including part of the #4 engine, the nose wheel, parts of the bomb bay doors, stripped off as the aircraft skidded to a halt and corkscrewed around to face back in the direction from where it came. The #4 engine itself came to rest just in front of the #2 engine having rolled across the desert floor having been ripped from the airframe.
Landing in the desert required some nerves as the hardness of the surface was difficult to judge. The QMS team had some indicators though, the tracks left by Sheridan's visit and some WWII tracks left by Italian and British trucks. Tracks would stay in the desert for a long time. If the Google Earth images of this section of desert were the same as the resolution of my house, where I can make out both my trash can and recycle can in the image, then you'd likely see the tracks in this area also and I'd be able to see for sure where my camps were. But the resolution here is crappy.
In the sequence below I show our resupply flight landing on one of our Libyan Desert landing strips (from the traffic cones I know this is not near the Lady Be Good as there we used oil drums. This one is most likely on the other side of Libya, near the Algerian border). We were given instructions on the depth a Land Rover could penetrate at a certain speed to judge the firmness of the strip. Note the absence of features on this gravel plain.
Our Southern landing strip, about 60 miles North-West of the Lady Be Good looked more like this:
Note that birds such as this one who landed were as doomed as the crew of the Lady Be Good. Having fallen out of the upper air currents that take them North and South across the desert they never had the energy to once again gain those heights.
Later in our survey we moved about 30 miles to the North-East which would have put us within about 15 miles of where the bodies of Hatton and four others were discovered, possibly in the same valley. Our landing strip there was much softer, even though we would water the surface to harden it. One day our MedAvia CASA C-212 Aviocar resupply flight got stuck in the sand and we had to tow it out with a M.A.N 6×6 water tanker. The crew were extremely nervous about the towing operation and after that refused to land at that strip again, forcing us to make the 60-mile round trip to the old strip once per week. To help the pilots find the landing strips we'd set a fire of old tired and oil soaked rags when they thought they were within 50 miles. Then they could look for the black smoke which would also tell them about wind direction and speed at the landing strip.
By the time we got to the Lady Be Good wreckage in 1990, while the plane was still identifiable pretty much everything that could be easily taken had been.
More images to come in my next post.
I have a photo book containing several of my images of the Lady Be Good available through Blurb, below:
