1 Rest in Peace

2 <S>

3 I believe they discovered Robert Toner's diary and it was published. Rod Serling did a "Twilight Zone" episode loosely based on this incident. RIP.

4 How did they "bail out"? [clicks] Oh. Good Lord, marching 85 miles north through Sahara. I'd have stayed on the plane and died quicker

5 Whatever you do, whenever or however you do it, remember that


......you owe; you are obligated to earn and deserve this

6 Liz Warren immediately claimed she was descended from all 9 of them.
 
Then she asked for a military discount on meals.

7 RIP

8

May they rest in peace.

 

It's amazing that they found all of them, but one. ....Sad story, all the way around. ....It's good that they were brought back home.

 

"....At the end of this massive search operation, search teams had covered an area of approximately 6,300 square miles."

 

Damn.  That's a lot of territory to cover...and with primative technology to search with, compared to what we have to work with today.

9

3 I believe they discovered Robert Toner's diary and it was published.

 

Rod Serling did a "Twilight Zone" episode loosely based on this incident.

 

----------

 

I thought the story seemed familiar. ....Thanks. 

10 There was also a 1970 made for TV movie about this incident starring William Shatner - Sole Survivor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065007/).

11 Parts of that plane are at the Air Force Museum in Dayton. Legend has it that it is one of the two haunted exhibits at the base, along with a helicopter from Vietnam. Parts of the plane were salvaged and used on other planes, only to have bad luck and/or crashes plague all of them. Interesting story.

12 Incredible story.  Brave, tough men.  RIP.

13 I read a story (maybe q book) and saw a History channel-type show about 19th century British sailors who wrecked on the N. African coast, were taken as captives by camel traders (?) And marched through the desert. I think it's a well known story, but the title/names are eluding me. It was pretty brutal, not all of them made it.

14 Probably the best book about the incident was "Lady's Men" by Mario Martinez. It also features material about how the plane and bodies were discovered. One of the crewmen was killed when his chute malfunctioned. The others died...later. They never had a chance. I think one of the bodies was found 80 miles from the bailout point. As for the one who wasn't found, several years before the plane was discovered, an unidentified body was found and buried in the desert by an oil exploration crew. That may or may not have been the missing crewman.

15 Posted by: Mætenloch at May 12, 2012 05:03 PM (VDusq)

Sole Survivor was a great made for TV movie.

16

11 There was also a 1970 made for TV movie about this incident starring William Shatner - Sole Survivor (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065007/).
 

 

----------

 

I think I've seen this movie.... The ghosts of the crew are looking on, while the investigators are trying to piece together what happened. ....Some good actors in it. ....Sad though.

17 I have an old issue of Life magazine from 1959 or 1960 that has an article, and the pages from Toner's diary. His description is very sparse, but I think that within a couple of days they knew they weren't going to make it.

18

King Nine will not return

19 http://is.gd/ZcXrFe

20 One of my favorite eps of Twilight Zone is about the commercial jetliner that cant find its way back to its timeline.

21 The Odyssey of Flight 33

22 2Lt Robert Toner from N Attleboro was memorialized by a street and shopping plaza in his home town.  I once had a Mailboxes Etc address on Robert Toner Blvd.

23 Did his descendant invent the inkjet cartridge?

24 just passin through

25 Still watching El Dorado (see comment #239 in What if Obama gave a speach and nobody came thread).  The PC police strike again.  They cut out a scene where Caan wraps a blanket around his shoulders, puts a flower pot on his head and imitates a "chinaman" to get close enough to a bad guy to knock him out.  Now he says "I have and idea" goes for the blanket and then cuts to Caan knocking out the guy.

26 just flyin in circles above you

27 They used the British "Gee System" for navigation during WWII in North Africa IIRC. Some pilots I used to work with speculated that the crew passed over the base at night and traveled into the deep desert. The Gee System had pairs antennas broadcast a preciaely timed pulse from the antenna pair. On the plane the navigator had an oscilloscope to time the arrival of the pulses. If the pulses arrived at the same time, they were on the correct course. However, if they passed over the pair of antennas at the base, they had no way of knowing. It would appear that they were still on course. One of the guys who had flown over North Africa said that visually sand and ocean can look almost the same, so he figured that the crew (who were possibly on radio silence during a mission) had overflown the base.

28 Ugh, they broadcast a precisely timed pulse.

29 I think I've seen this movie.... The ghosts of the crew arelooking on,while the investigators are trying to piece together what happened. ....Some good actors in it. ....Sad though.
Posted by: wheatie at May 12, 2012 05:13 PM (vKg3c)

Yep. I happened to see it as very little kid and it made a huge impression on me. I'll always remember the crewmen ghosts perpetually playing baseball in the desert, not quite realizing that they're dead. In fact it took me years to track down the movie and verify that it was real and not something I imagined which I covered here - http://minx.cc/?post=292854

30 Maet, thanks a heap for that link to your earlier post about Sole Survivor which has the link for watching the movie online. I too saw the movie as a kid and haven't seen it since, and now I finally will be able to see it again.

31

In fact it took me years to track down the movie and verify that it was real and not something I imagined which I covered here - http://minx.cc/?post=292854

 

Posted by: Mætenloch at May 12, 2012 05:37 PM (VDusq)

 

Wow, that was three years ago....you've been creating killer good ONT's for quite a while. ....I lurk and read them most nights, too sleepy to make any comments.

 

Have to confess, that what made me watch that movie years ago....was jonesing for a fix of Captain Kirk, since they had cancelled Star Trek....and it was a few years before they started making the movies.

 

But once I got into it, it was a good movie. ....They deviated from the true story, in the part of the storyline about the Captain bailing on the crew, though. ....But it made for some good drama, I guess.

32

In the movie, Sole Survivor.....didn't some of the crew ghosts figure out a way to help the investigators figure out what happened?

 

Or am I mis-remembering that part.

33 The story recounted in Toner's diary is a fine testament to human endurance.  Martinez's book and web site detail this incredible story.  Lets never forget ordinary men doing extraordinary things.
http://tinyurl.com/7ompcmm

These images are probably the last images of the B-24D Liberator Lady Be Good.  Taken in 2009. Present fate unknown.
  http://tinyurl.com/7p2xaz8

And thank you for the hat-tip Dave in Texas.

34 Didnt Bill Shitner play a pedo in a tv movie?

35 THE DEVIL'S RAIN A star-studded lousy cheesy 70's horror flick with Ernest Borgnine, Shatner... the trailer is on yootoob...very cool

36 ditto what SantaRosaStan wrote at No. 5

37
Can anybody plz direct me to the "P-40 story?"

38 Ed, click on my name in the post.  It will take you to that post about the P-40.

Here is the Telegraph's story on the P-40. http://tinyurl.com/dxuuujc

39

My uncle was a navigator in the same squadron of the 376^th and (briefly) knew the crew of the Lady Be Good. He said he said they were the best equipped crew when it came to records, magazines, and other creature comforts.

40

You know never go with the alpha version of anything--wait for the beta test model.

Lt. Hays was not the only young navigator in the Air Force who did not survive his first combat mission.  And he's not the only young navigator who got lost, or at least couldn't figure out where he was.   When that happened--as it did--the whole crew sometimes paid with their lives.

 

That sort of stuff still happens.  Just last week a Russian regional jetliner on a "demonstration flight" in Indonesia crashed into a mountain side killing everyone on board--several dozen people.

41 The B-24 was notoriously difficult to fly.  It was the plane Louis Zamperini was a navigator on that went down in the Pacific leading to his (and others) capture and torture in a Japanese prison camp.  Unbroken is his story and has a lot of detail about the problems with the plane.  That said, they flew a lot of missions and killed a lot of enemies.

42 My Father flew as both navigator and at times bombardier in a B24 Liberator for the 8th Air force in England 1943-44. He washed out as a pilot during flight training, but flew 19 missions over Germany as crew. The missions were 19 hours and the temperature was minus 40 degrees inside. The B24 had a Laminar flow wing which was advanced for the time period, but very unforgiving. Each bomb group would take off in series and then circle for almost an hour to achieve a formation. They would then head across the English channel in hundreds and never be turned back despite 25% losses. After every mission 25% of the bunks in the barracks were cleaned out for new crew men. Although today our men in uniform are still the bravest, I doubt if this country's populace could stomach the same losses today.

43 Sole Survivor is on Youtube.  This is part 1 (the rest are in 10 minute chunks).  <br>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6A_qNAQCGU&feature=relmfu <br>

I remember watching this when it was on TV.  I think I was 12, and it made a big impression.  Rest in peace.

44 In my school days when I was in to model building I remember a great project from Sheperd Paine's book "How to Build Dioramas" in which he built an amazing model of the plane in the desert complete with scratchbuilt engine detailing front nose bubble. I just checked Amazon and it's still available.

45

Was "Sole Survivor" a remake of something else?  I seem to recall a slightly different version of this movie.

One where you don't find out that they're all dead until the very end.

And one guy is under the tail section?

I watched the ending of Sole Survivor on a google video, and the ending seems different than what I recall.  Also, in Sole Survivor, the characters seem to know that they're dead already, and that's different from what I remember.

Anybody know what I'm talkin about?

46 One where you don't find out that they're all dead until the very end. And one guy is under the tail section? That's how I remember it. "They're all staring at me!" IIRC, the movie ended with the slight hope that the last man would be found. Wasn't Shatner driving back to the plane at the end?

47

Shatner was driving back @ the end in "Sole Survivor"... but I don't recall Shatner being it the version I'm thinking about.

The key thing I remember was being shocked to find out they were dead, as were the characters.  Sole Survivor seems to me that the characters know it already.

I also recall the last guy left is freaked out that they don't see him or find him and he's under the tail section where they don't find him.  This is a different ending than in Sole Survivor....

 

 

48 42 The B-24 was notoriously difficult to fly. It was the plane Louis Zamperini was a navigator on that went down in the Pacific leading to his (and others) capture and torture in a Japanese prison camp. Unbroken is his story and has a lot of detail about the problems with the plane. That said, they flew a lot of missions and killed a lot of enemies.

Posted by: huerfano at May 12, 2012 06:46 PM (bAGA/)

 

Yep.

The B-24 was a handfull from takeoff to landing.  You didn't just trim it and kick back.  You were constantly trimming it.

49 There was a Sole Survivor movie in 1983 where a woman survived a crash in the Amazon, but shouldn't have and the dead start stalking here.

50 Yeah that's the focus of this post, Shatner with some women under the tail of a Hollywood Prop filming "Sole Survivor." Now I have met the mindless generation of fools and I must say you all deserve what will become of our soon to be bankrupt economy. Hey you are going to learn about soup lines!!! Cool, you can text people where you are in the soup line and send videos to your friends of the people who were not well enough to make it to the end of the soup line. Cooool!

51 You mad, bro?

52 That aircraft flew into the ground having been abandoned by the crew and look at her! God they were tough. Guys that know way more than I ever will about flying B24s mentioned that they needed constant trimming to stay aloft. I was a private pilot and trimmed Cesnas. I don't think they'd survive a ground strike at all well but look at that bomber! Sans a hand to make a dead stick landing in the desert. It look like it was landed doesn't it?

I saw those movies and the really scary one in animation that came out as one of a series back in the late 70s. Scared the hell out of me.

lost 62 B17s on just the one raid. we had to watch 12 O'clock High for leadership purposes oh a long time ago. I'll be brutally honest. Real leaders don't demand that kind of pointless sacrifice for no reason at all. Should they, well, I'm not following. To read the Strategic Bomb Surveys in both Europe and Japan and see that all of that sacrifice was mostly in vain. Hard reading. One may download both surveys in .pdf form. They're available on the web. They were declassified ages ago.

53 Obama is a stuttering clusterf*ck of a miserable failure.

54 The third guy in line, 2d LT Hays, was a neighbor of my grandparents. When the plane was found in 1958, it created a minor stir in our neighborhood. I think some of the remains were recovered in 1960,which again got a lot of attention. A really good Twilight Zone episode had Bob Cummings flipping back and forth from fantasy to reality, the sole survivor of the crash. In real life, an armrest from the plane shown was fitted into a Libyan deHavilland DC-3 Otter. The plane later crashed in the Gulf of Sidra. One of the few debris that washed ashore was the armrest from the B-24 Lady Be Good.

55

I believe about half of the B-24s were built at the home plants of Consolidated Aircraft, in San Diego (the last B-24 bldg. still stands, now updated a bit, painted white, and the HQ of a Navy electronic facility - but still with the weird jagged saw-tooth roof, easily noticed when driving by on Interstate 5 just north of downtown SD.  I recall when the whole eastern end of the  Lindbergh Field had buildings like that (for a while, after the Convair buildings were demolished, imported Japanese cars were stored there on huge lots .....).

 

I believe only two B-24s crashed soon after takeoff from SD (contractors would fly them to an Army Air Corps base in Arizona to be equipped with guns and sensitive items).  One went into the drink off Pt. Loma; the other only made it just past the Naval Training Center off the end of the runway, and crashed in a small canyon in a residential area (one of the first residential "developments" in the US, and I believe the first in CA).

 

Another odd thing - one version of the B-24 (not sure if it was the regular one or the maritime patrol version designated PB4Y, the Privateer) required little people (midgets) to finish some of the internal metal work in the rudders or tails.  Can't recall the details, but normal-sized people couldn't fit in the space.

 

The B-24, as noted by many above, was not easy to fly.  I've heard stories of the young pilots coming back exhausted, their arms useless, after wrestling with the plane for hours.

 

As to the bombing surveys, I'm a bit skeptical about their conclusions WRT effect on enemy production.  Germany was undergoing a revolution in industrial organization and efficiency in the last few years of the war, under Speer's direction.  Bombing may have been highly effective, and production still would have risen.  Can't see how the attacks on transport, fuel, and a few other targets can be said to have not aided the Allied effort.  The diversion of resources to home air defense alone was a boon to the Allies as they advanced on the ground.

 

56 It's small things in warfare sometimes. Someone finally had the bright idea to use drop tanks on fighters, when coverage was available for the full flight casualty figures dropped greatly. They had used them to transport fighters, but not in combat. Then bombing truly did make a difference in resource and time priorities in Nazi Germany. The B-24 raids on Ploesti were especially deadly missions for American bomber crews. Low level I think and no fighter cover and the densest AA defense. Trying fly a railroad car with wings into that.

57 I never knew the B-24 was a tough ship to fly. My dad (B-29 top gunner, P-61 pilot trainee) told me the most infamous to learn on was the B-26 Marauder. "One a day in Tampa Bay" and "widow maker" were some of it's nastier nicknames, but it was a great ship in the hands of an experienced pilot. The Liberator's wing was called a Davis wing and was an advanced design for the time; very slender in contrast to that fat fuselage which always puzzled me. Ploesti was an absolute suicide mission. There were foul ups with the timing of each wave, as well as the lead navigator missing the IP, so the Germans and Romanians were waiting for them. Gaggles of Me 109's, IAR 80's, and deadly 88's camouflaged in haystacks and on railway cars. One wave came in 50 feet off the deck. Something like half the attacking force was lost. Along with Schweinfurt and Regensburg, August and October of '43 were brutal for the 8th and 9th AF's. As for the effectiveness of the bombing campaign, the results are debatable at best. By 1944 Albert Speer had dispersed so much production that total arms actually increased over the previous 3 years. However, they were never able to replace aircrew and lost the cream of their pilots through attrition, when they would have been better off grounding them and having them become instructors. Speer did say that had the RAF repeated the bombing of Hamburg over several raids, and the USAAF repeated Schweinfurt, they would have lost the war. In the event, both did not have the capacity and the USAAF was severely mauled and effectively grounded until the advent of the P-51. Also January through May of 44 had all air forces diverted to isolating Normandy for the invasion. Switching gears, I also recall a weird 70's TV movie with Doug McClure as a downed P-40 pilot and Lloyd Bridges as a Nazi tank commander chasing him across the desert. The P-40 couldn't fly, but McClure was able to taxi it across the desert. "Death Race" was the title. Reminds me of "The Beast" with Jason Patric and George Dzundza driving a lone Soviet tank in the Afghani.

58 Didn't mean to say that the strategic bombing results were debatable (I pulled a Biden). Speer himself said that thousands of artillery pieces and tremendous numbers of men were kept in Germany to defend against air raids when they were sorely needed against the Soviets. So to that end, yes it was effective. I think RAF Air Chief Marshal Harris said it best at the beginning (paraphrasing) "there are those who say that bombing alone cannot win a war, to which I say, it hasn't been tried yet." Bottom line, it had to be done.

59 I got the following dates from the book Lady's Men: The wreck was first spotted from the air by a civilian oil survey team on May 17, 1958. It was first visited by a ground search party, led by some of the people who had seen it from the air, on February 27, 1959. The U.S. military was notified, and the story became public in June 1959. By then it was known that the crew was listed as missing and presumed dead. There was much speculation in the media about what happened. A three-month search was mounted, and although some pieces of clothing, parachutes, and other personal effects were found, no crew remains were discovered. A CBS TV documentary was aired on February 2, 1960. It detailed the facts as they were known and concluded that the crew members had walked north into the sand dunes and that their remains were probably covered with sand and may never be found. Just nine days later, on February 11, five sets of remains were found, again by a private drilling party. They were Hatton, Toner, Hays, LaMotte, and Adams. Their bodies were found 78 miles from the rally point (which would be discovered later). The Army organized another search for the remaining crew members, but came up empty. Life magazine published photos and the Toner diary in its March 7, 1960 issue. The sixth body, Shelley, was found on May 11, 1960 by yet another group of oil surveyors. It was 115.5 miles from the rally point. The Army searched the area between the five-man group and the location of the sixth body, and found the seventh, Ripslinger, on May 17. He had made it 104 miles from the rally point. The eighth, Woravka, was found on August 11 by more oilmen only 16 miles from the plane's location. He was the one who had been killed on impact when his parachute failed to open. This led to the discovery of the rally point 0.4 miles away, where the other eight crewmen assembled and began walking. It was marked by piles of discarded parachute harnesses and other equipment. The Twilight Zone episode "King Nine Will Not Return", the first episode of the second season, aired on September 20, 1960.

60 There was an exhibit on the "Lady Be Good" at the Ft Lee (VA) Museum, with a lot of the story, and some artifacts. Of course, this was back in 1979, when I retired. If the items are not on exhibit, the information and material are probably still in storage there.

61 I'm somehow related to Vernon Moore on my mother's side - I believe that was her uncle, though she wasn't born years after he died.

62

I wish I could identify the source, but it stated that the navigator never took another sighting to identify their location after they left the Italian coast on the way back to Libya; his logbook was found at the crash site filled with doodles.

And that was a great episode, "King Nine Will Not Return."