Reading the recent thread on 1980s war tech against 1940s war tech in The Final Countdown (and reading various older threads linked in the recent one) has brought to mind a question of my own about a very specific airplane from WWII that there may be some chance a doper can answer. (The question is at the bottom, after the story.)
My grandmother had a large twisted, mangled sheet of rusty iron. When I was a child, she told me the story connected to it. One day during the years of WWII, she was home sick from work when a bomber flying over experienced some type of problem. She wasn’t explicit in describing it (or if she was, I don’t remember it) but apparently it somehow resulted in the plane breaking up mid-air. The crew of the plane parachuted out and took cover behind the chimney of my great-grandfather’s house (which was next door to my grandmother) to shelter themselves from the airplane fragments and bombs exploding as they hit the ground. The military showed up and cordoned off the whole area and my great-grandfather had to argue his way past a guard to get to his house when he came home from work. The military spent some time cleaning up airplane and bomb parts, but for years afterwards, people clearing or plowing land would dig up pieces of debris from the crash.
I had no reason to doubt the truth of the story, but I still figured that the “bomb fragment” could be an unrelated piece of iron from some old machine of some type, so a few years ago (and after anyone—locally, at least—who would have remembered the circumstances was no longer around to talk about it) I examined the sheet of metal to see if there were any marks or characteristics that could be used to identify it. On one edge (inside of a curve) were a series of threads that told me that it was once a closed cylinder with something screwed onto the end. On the opposite face from the threads was a metal loop. A google image search proved the metal loop was indeed very consistent with a mounting lug for a bomb. (I realize that bombers deep inside the US weren’t likely to be carrying live bombs, but I read at the time about water- or sand-filled practice bombs, which I assume this to have been.)
So I then start googling attempting to find any information about the crash, figuring it would have been pretty big news at the time—only to find that there were literally thousands of military training crashes inside the US during the war years. I had no luck at the time digging up any information about this crash. Now that I’ve been reminded of it (and see how likely it is that there are dopers knowledgeable in the area) I’d appreciate any help I could get about more information on this particular crash. Anyone have any resources for details about it? (Short of suggesting that I dig through physical local newspaper archives—I need an on-line source.) This crash happened in a sparsely populated, mostly wooded area and unpaved road my family lived didn’t even have a name, so I’m guessing any location description would just be Anderson County, South Carolina. As for the year, my grandmother specifically mentioned that my mother was still nursing at the time, so we are taking some time after June 1942 but probably before the end of 1944. (There were no injuries on the ground and as far as I know no fatalities among the crew.)
I don’t see how this part of the story could be true. Parachuting crew would hit the ground well after the plane either crashed or parts of the plane hit the ground.
I suggest that the OP’s oral history be taken with a few grains of truth, for all the usual reasons; if a source event is uncovered, it’s likely to be different from the family story in key respects. (I believe the story and the event were real, just that the details have been jumbled and shouldn’t be used as hard filtering criteria to find the event records.)
Purely considering location and time, Greenville Army Air Base was a B-25 Mitchell medium bomber training base from mid-1942 to the end of WWII. The base is in Greenville County, which Wikipedia helpfully tells me is just adjacent to Anderson County.
If you assume a crash involving a locally-based plane is more likely than one involving one in a long-haul transit flight, I’d be willing to guess that the incident aircraft was a B-25.
So some googling dug up this list. which yields 3 crashes listed for Anderson, SC during the possible time-frame:
…date…plane…serial #
08/22/42…BT-15…41-10294
03/15/43…P-38G…43-2535
01/23/44…B-25D…41-29794
The one with the B-25D is listed as a “FLF”, or “forced landing due to fire in the air.”
The BT-15 was a taxing accident and the P-38G seems to have a single pilot who was “killed in crash”, so I guess the B-25D on Jan 1st 1944 looks to be the only option.
You mentioned practice bombs but stated the crew was hiding from explosions. Although as pointed out, they would have landed way after any falling pieces and parts.
Is the iron (steel, most likely) fragment still available?
Yep. Here are some photos taken just now with the lousy quality camera on my phone. Scale objects are a standard US yardstick and standard US housecat.
Also, the same lug would be used to hold external ,indeed disposable, fuel tanks.
These fuel tanks were often used to make billycarts and go karts, and motorbike side cars… all sorts of 3 or 4 wheel vehicles.
I have to say the story about the parachutists hiding from the falling wreckage is just totally totally wacko. They didnt hide from falling wreckage. They went their for privacy. ( Toileting, changing clothes, addressing any medical issues, that sort of thing. Calling in the crash with airmans vernacular… trying to avoid the locals, trying to avoid being invited into some house or another )
its not clear that owning the piece of metal meant it fell there,
and its not clear that the parachutists were from a plane that crashed in the same area of the houses…
They were rushing crew through training, and it was a bit of a Darwinian exercise… those who didn’t crash were good enough to pass.
Ah the guys may have said that they were sheltering from falling debris. That might be meaning to say it was their training and crash protocol to do this sheltering excercise. It would be a good thing to remember to do, because if they were actually in a war theatre, they could expect that there would be anti-aircraft fire , dropping bombs and debris from other aircraft. They wouldn’t just set up camp near the airport or target or other such.
But also, the field could have been used for recovery of dropped fuel tanks… which more planes would be dropping… Did they drop their external fuel tanks and accidentally shutdown their engines in the process ?
"We learn a lot from trial and error… You will follow the fuel tank switching protocol accurately and competely next time won’t you ?
(I was just reading how a pilot, in 1990’s, caused himself hypoxia by messing up the aircraft pressurisation procedure on that aircraft, and warnings of low pressure were missed due to various reasons . It was airforce and his passengers were of sterner stuff and got the plane onto autopilot and flying safely, etc,and got him onto oxygen masks and so pilot recovers and lands the plane.)
I’ve been searching through the archives for the Greenville News (the snippets, haven’t subscribed) and can’t find anything relevant about the crash. The other local newspaper (The Anderson Independent) isn’t archived there, so I can’t search that. I’m wondering if during the war years there was some sort of agreement that newspapers wouldn’t publicize details of military accidents stateside for propaganda reasons?
I don’t know about any ban on military plane crashes but it would not surprise me if the information about any crashes was limited
Searching through these archives do show quite a few military crashes but as you have mentioned, it does give more details than a B-17/B-24/B-25 crashed.
What I found interesting in these newspapers is that the Germans were called Huns and the Japanese called Japs. Part of the effort to dehumanize the enemy.
Sorry, but newspapers.com or the discontinued google news archive is all that I can suggest
