World War II, wreckage of desert planes and 8 remains
It is not uncommon for the frequent occurrence of air crashes on the battlefield of the World War II. Only the U.S. Army Air Force lost more than 18,000 aircraft and killed 43,000 crew members during the three-year strategic bombing of Germany.
It is common for aircraft to be destroyed during the war, but a US bomber and nine crew members who disappeared mysteriously during World War II were discovered by accident 16 years later. The wreckage of the plane and the remains of the crew were scattered all over the desert where it was impossible to reach. It took two years for the searchers to retrieve only the remains of eight of them. In addition, there is a diary with scribbled and brief contents.
Why did they end up on this barren desert? What kind of aerial catastrophe did they experience? Sixteen years after the plane crashed, when the bomber sacrificed for the country had also been forgotten, the truth suddenly surfaced.
Plane wreck on the desert
On November 9, 1958, an oil exploration aircraft flew in the Libyan desert as usual. This is a British Darcy oil plane with a British geologist and pilot on board. Their mission is to find traces of oil-bearing rock formations in the desert.
However, in an almost unobstructed desert, before they found the oil-bearing rock formation, they were surprised to find some strange black spots. I thought it was a bare rock in the desert, but upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the wreckage of a crashed plane.
The Libyan Desert is located in the northeast part of the Sahara Desert, and is 620 kilometers away from the nearest city. If it wasn't for oil exploration, how could a plane fly into this desert? Geologists intuitively thought that the emergence of the plane was unusual.
When their plane circled the wreckage, they recognized that it was a large military aircraft of the US Army during World War II. It has been more than a decade since the end of World War II, and the abrupt aircraft wreckage on the desert vaguely conveyed an unknown story to them.
The oil company's exploration team immediately reported the discovery to Wheelers Air Force Base in the United States, but unfortunately the Air Force base was unwilling to take over the investigation of the crashed aircraft. They claimed that there were no records of American aircraft lost in the area, and they refused to send people to the scene to inspect the wreckage.
Until a few months later, on February 27, 1959, BP people again came near the wreckage of the aircraft. This time there was an oil surveyor Gordon Bowerman and two geologists. The purpose of their visit was to determine the exact coordinates of the wreckage.
You know how exciting it is to have an obvious marker in the endless desert, mapping out the coordinates will save a lot of trouble for future exploration. So this time they switched to off-road vehicles and trucks. It also brought them closer to the mysterious wreckage of the plane, to find out what happened.
This time, when they approached, they discovered that the crashed plane was not seriously damaged. The wreckage was not rusted from the inside to the outside, even the engine could rotate normally, the machine gun on the aircraft could fire bullets, and the radio switch had not been turned off. Thanks to the extremely dry conditions of the desert, these machinery and equipment have been almost completely preserved.
The most important discovery was a clear record of the flight log for the time of mission "April 4, 1943", as well as a maintenance manual marked with the source of the aircraft and clothes with the names of the crew members. But there was no one in the cabin, and the survival equipment, food, water and other survival equipment on the plane disappeared. It seemed that the crew members had parachuted before the plane crashed.
Coincidentally, Surveyor Ballman knew the commander of Wheelers Air Force Base, Lieutenant Colonel Walter B. Cobbs. Ballman immediately wrote a letter to the commander, including the names of the crew they found in the wreckage of the aircraft, the aircraft maintenance inspection records and other information.
The Air Force Base believed that the crashed aircraft did come from the US military. They found that it was a bomber that disappeared 16 years ago during World War II! But strangely, the crash site was deep in the Sahara desert, and it was 708 kilometers away from the closest base at the time, far from any possible battlefield. Why did this plane appear here?
This is a pink B-24 bomber, which was once the most widely used bomber by the US military during World War II. Because pink is more difficult to identify in desert environments, the aircraft was painted pink.
The US Army has a tradition of naming military aircraft with female names, so people used a song and dance movie of the same name, "Lady Be Good" (hereinafter referred to as LBG), to name the aircraft.
However, the bomber, with its beautiful meaning, was buried in the desert mysteriously, along with nine soldiers who went to the battlefield. What exactly happened to the crew and where are they now? Investigators could only come to the crash site to find the truth.
A B-24 bomber
On April 4, 1943, LBG took off from Soluk, Libya. The purpose of this flight was to cross the Sahara desert and rush to Naples, Italy, for a bombing mission. The bombering aircraft formation originally arranged 25 B-24 bombers and went in two batches. The first 12 had already departed, and the remaining 13 had unfortunately encountered a dust storm after taking off.
Nine of these aircraft temporarily suspended their mission due to engine failure caused by a sand vortex in the Libyan desert, so only four remaining aircraft continued to fly. During the sand storm, the LBG engine also sucked in some sand, but the operation was normal, so they decided to continue to complete the task.
However, the disaster they face next will make them regret it. During the flight, the aircraft was gradually deviated from the course by strong winds, and separated from the bomber group they were traveling with. In the thick cloud layer, the LBG lost its way and even the positioning equipment failed.
At this time, the crew quickly contacted the base via radio to request support, but they did not receive a response to the position report. Soon, the unknown LBG fuel was about to run out. They always thought they were flying over the Mediterranean Sea, so they released their bombs into the Mediterranean Sea and continued to fly on dangerously low fuel.
9 crew members
But considering that once the fuel is exhausted, the planes will crash, and the Mediterranean below the clouds apparently reduces their chance of survival directly to zero. So 9 people decided to abandon the plane with insufficient fuel, and bring in little food and water, and then parachute to escape.
However, if the picture is switched to the third perspective at this time, a dramatic scene will appear: After the 9 crew members parachute through the clouds, they will see that it is not the ocean below, but a vast desert. In other words, if the aircraft is forced to land manually, there is no problem, but the wrong judgment makes them lose the wireless transmission equipment and the aircraft is intact.
The people who landed on the desert found each other in the desert by firing their guns. But at this time they made another wrong judgment. They did not know that the plane crashed was only about 26 kilometers away. And they estimated that they should be no more than 160 kilometers away from the base, and they believed that walking northwest would return to Soluk Air Force Base.
So they set off toward the imaginary base, in fact, the direction is indeed northwest, but the distance is up to 708 kilometers. This is the end of these nine soldiers who were met with unexpected accidents and are doomed to survive. However, after more than a decade people were rediscovered in the desert, but only the remains of eight crew members were found.
The remains of the victims who were covered with the American flag after being found
After BP's second visit to the scene to confirm the identity of the crashed aircraft, the United States Wheelers Air Force Base finally dispatched a rescue team to investigate. In May 1959, the rescue team first arrived at the crash site and found a prominent "Lady Be Good" sign on the front fuselage. After three months of rigorous search, the remains of any crew members were not found. They only found some parachute and flying boots and other equipment.
It was not until February 1960 that the rescue team embarked on a second search operation. This time around 129 kilometers north of the crash, they found the remains and personal belongings of five crew members, including a daily exile diary recorded by Colonel Robert Toner.
The diary briefly describes the general situation of 8 days from the plane crash. After landing, they meet with their companions, but they never find a member named John. The remaining eight people consumed only a small amount of rations and water extremely sparingly every day, and endured the severe weather in the desert to move slowly. Later, everyone became weaker and weaker. In the blindness of the eyes and the pain of the wind and sand, the companion died gradually.
Colonel Robert Toner's Diary in Exile
Since then, the US Army and Navy have jointly launched a "climax operation" to speed up the search for other victims nearby. Sure enough, two other crew members were found 34 kilometers northwest and 42 kilometers north of the first members.
In August 1960, BP found the body of another crew member. When found, his parachute was still hanging. It seemed to have failed during the evacuation process. The parachute failed to open, causing him to fall to death. But in this case, he has never experienced the pain of exile and desert, and he is perhaps the luckiest of all pilots. To this day, one person has never been found.
According to a search operation that lasted more than a year, people roughly restored the scene after the LBG crash 16 years ago: when it was found that the aircraft was about to run out of fuel, and then based on the wrong coordinates, 9 crew members decided to abandon the aircraft and parachute; 1 of them The pilot had fallen dead when he landed. Seven crew members landed about 26 kilometers away from the crash site, and the remaining one remained unknown. After the seven people merged, they decided to go north and thought they were only 160 kilometers away. Actually it was a military base of 708 kilometers; but after walking 100 kilometers, 5 people gave up their lives, actively or passively, and died in the same place. The remaining two people also couldn't escape death after walking a certain distance.
Repatriation of dead body found to the United States
When the truth came out, the wreckage of LBG was recovered and taken to a Libyan military base for safekeeping. The other parts of the aircraft are scattered all over the place, and some of them are put on display in the National Museum of the United States Air Force. Some of them are in private collections, and some of them are re-used on other US aircraft after technical evaluation.
A WWII bomber that bizarrely appeared in the desert involved a missing plane 16 years ago. When the truth was finally restored, we felt sorry for the nine young victims and regretted the lives lost.
But they may be fortunate. Countless soldiers killed in the war. After 16 years of the accident, there is still a chance for future generations to understand the truth at that time and pass the story down. It is also very rare. Their bodies were not buried in the wind and sand, but were covered with flags and transported back to their homeland, which was a belated honor.