The ‘Lady Be Good’, Libya

Wreckage of the Lady Be Good in 1991
Lady Be Good wreckage as I found her in 1990
Lady Be Good wreckage as I found her in 1990

In 1990-91 I was fortunate enough to be assigned to work in the Calanscio sand sea in the Libyan Desert. Fortunate because a little to the east (in those days) lay the wreckage of the ‘Lady Be Good’, a WWII era Liberator Bomber. The plane failed to return to Suluq airbase after the crew’s first combat mission to bomb Naples on April 4, 1943. The wreckage was discovered from the air on May 15, 1959 and visited on the ground on May 26, 1959, more than 16 years after she was reported missing in action. The bodies of 8 of the nine airmen were found in 1960 – the body of the ninth has never been found. In 1994 the wreckage was removed from the desert crash site to a yard in Tobruk.

I had been interested in this wreck for many years having seen a film (that I now believe to be ‘Sole Survivor’, made for TV in 1970 and starring William Shatner) loosely based on the story of the ‘”Lady Be Good”. I don’t recall now where I got some of the details from but I do remember having been disappointed at not getting to the wreckage on my first tour of Libya from 1984 – 1986.

In 1990 I had been working on the Algerian border when I got an unexpected promotion to lead my company’s seismic exploration crew that was working on the eastern edge of the Calanscio sand sea close to the Egyptian border. The crash site was a little over an hour’s drive from our camp. I made one visit in 1990 and and second in 1991 before leaving the area.

The image was made with a Canon EOS 10 on Fujichrome Velvia.

Richard Davis March 2, 2010
Travel 3
Next Uphole rig, Libya
Uphole rig

3 Comments

  2. I can rember “the Lady” when she was on the flight line across the road fro my outfit During the war. As we were in a different outfit I did not know the crew.
    That fatefully morning I had written in my Diary l planes went out and some Did not return many years later I met a fellow from that oil exploration team and he said he was the first person to board the plane

    • Dear Donald,

      Thanks so much for your comment.

      I’m sure at the time the Lady was just another plane and crew that failed to return and there was little time for reflection before the next mission and the next missing aircraft. Now she has this mystique about here and I’d wager the names of her crew are more widely known than the names of the crews of the other planes that did not return.

      Upon learning I was going to Libya in 1984 I’d wanted to see the Lady but she was in such a remote location. For those two years she was just a square on our ordnance maps that indicated known minefields and other war hazards we occasionally would work through. On leaving Libya in 1986 I thought it wasn’t going to happen for me but then I found myself assigned back there again in 1990. And, after six months on the Algerian border I was called upon to lead a survey crew East of the Calanscio Sand Sea.

      We were working North-West of the Lady so on a day when we had an opportunity we set off to find her. Lots of souvenir hunters had been through by 1990 and large parts of the skin of the aircraft had been removed which is obvious if you compare my photos to those in either of McClendon’s, Martinez’s or Walker’s (The Liberandos) books.

      According to Martinez, the oilman you would have met would have been either Donald Sheridan, John Martin or Gordon Bowerman. In 1990 we were only just starting to use GPS systems in the field to fix our location but a lot of our navigation even then was still based on sun-shots and dead reckoning, same as Sheridan’s team used 30 years prior.

      I’m glad you retained your diary. I fear that my generation and especially my kids generation will not have diaries to look back on when they are older and any electronic memories they may be making now will be long since deleted. If Toner and Ripslinger had kept their diaries on an iPhone, no-one would have been able to read them some 18 years later.

      My only regret of the time was that I hadn’t researched anything about the Lady prior to my visit. But then, McClendon’s book and a Time magazine article would likely have been all I would have found in an extensive library search prior to 1990.

      Best Regards,
      Richard.