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{"id":1950,"date":"2017-04-03T16:00:34","date_gmt":"2017-04-03T20:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thepastpresented.com\/?p=1950"},"modified":"2017-04-04T11:36:11","modified_gmt":"2017-04-04T15:36:11","slug":"the-missing-photos-ii-upon-an-endless-sea-a-b-24-liberator-shot-down-over-the-central-pacific-1944-an-addendum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thepastpresented.com\/index.php\/2017\/04\/03\/the-missing-photos-ii-upon-an-endless-sea-a-b-24-liberator-shot-down-over-the-central-pacific-1944-an-addendum\/","title":{"rendered":"The Missing Photos – II: Upon an Endless Sea – A B-24 Liberator Shot Down Over the Central Pacific, 1944 – An Addendum"},"content":{"rendered":"

The prior post – covering photographs of the loss of the 42nd Bomb Squadron B-24 Liberator Dogpatch Express<\/em> \u2013 ended on an uncertain note.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Both the Missing Air Crew Report and 42nd Bomb Squadron history present detailed accounts of the bomber\u2019s loss.\u00a0 However, both documents are ambiguous about the specific cause of the aircraft\u2019s loss, let alone what ultimately befell the few survivors of the plane\u2019s ditching.\u00a0 Given that PBY rescue planes later reported neither survivors nor wreckage at the site of the Express\u2019 <\/em>ditching, the Squadron history suggested that any surviving crewmen may have been captured by the Japanese, or, they were killed by strafing Zeros.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

There, the matter seemed to rest.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

A search for additional information about the \u201cGrey Geese\u201d and Dogpatch Express<\/em> yielded a new and rather unexpected account, which appears in the 1996 book 11th Bomb Group (H): The Grey Geese<\/em>.\u00a0 There, some fifty-three years after the Taroa bombing mission of December 21 1943, veteran Jesse Stay \u2013 whose account of the loss of Dogpatch Express<\/em> appears in MACR 1423 – presented an account of the event that fully and sadly clarifies what happened to the plane and crew.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Stay\u2019s account – presumably written in the 1990s – is presented below.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

It turns out that the plane was initially struck by anti-aircraft fire in the cockpit (oddly, not mentioned in either the MACR or squadron history), to the extent that Lt. Smith was forced to fly, and ditch, the aircraft unassisted.\u00a0 As for the survivors, the impression is given that they were strafed in the water by more than one Zero (again, not mentioned in the MACR or squadron history).\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Notably, Mr. Stay wrote that the pilot of the Express<\/em>, 1 Lt. George W. Smith, was filling in for the crew\u2019s regular pilot, Lt. Thompson, who was wounded over Wake on July 24, 1943.\u00a0 This may explain an aspect of the photo of the Express\u2019<\/em> crew, which appears both below, and in the prior blog post:\u00a0 The fact that a member of the plane\u2019s crew \u2013 probably having been wounded – is seated in a wheelchair.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Could this man be Lt. Thompson?\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/a>THE DOGPATCH EXPRESS AND THE BELLE OF TEXAS
\n<\/strong>By Jesse Stay<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

A mission out of Funafuti is worth remembering.\u00a0 It was on Dec. 20, 1943.\u00a0 We were bombing Maloelap Island in the Marshall group.\u00a0 This was shortly after we had taken Tarawa and the Japanese were able to bomb Tarawa from Maloelap.\u00a0 Our squadron was scheduled to bomb the target in three flights of three planes each.\u00a0 I was leading the second flight.\u00a0 We were to bomb from about 12 thousand feet at approximately noon.<\/span><\/p>\n

My right wing man was scheduled to be Les Scholar but he became ill and was scratched from the mission.\u00a0 With Les out of the formation, that left only two planes in my flight.\u00a0 The pilot of the second plane, Lt. Charlie Pratte, flying the \u201cBelle of Texas,\u201d also got sick and began to throw up right after take-off.\u00a0 He had a capable co-pilot, however, so they decided to continue the mission.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we reached Maloelap, the first flight went over the target and dropped their bombs without too much difficulty.\u00a0 We learned later that a 90 mm shell had come up through the open bomb bay doors, through another open door into the back of the airplane and out through the roof of the plane, directly over the heads of the two waist gunners and exploded harmlessly several hundred feet above the plane.<\/span><\/p>\n

I then led my flight of two planes across the target and we dropped our bombs.\u00a0 As we cleared the target, we were picked up by a dozen or so Zeros so we tried to close up with the first flight for our mutual protection.\u00a0 Our tail gunner then told us that the \u201cDogpatch Express,\u201d flown by Lt. Smith in the third flight, had been badly hit by anti-aircraft fire and was falling behind the formation.\u00a0 The Zeros were on him like a pack of wolves.<\/span><\/p>\n

I made a 360 turn with my flight and got in formation with the stricken airplane to try to give him some protection.\u00a0 At the same time, the leader of the first flight, Lt. Warren Sands, made a turn in the other direction and brought his formation up on the other wing of the plane that had been hit.<\/span><\/p>\n

Apparently an anti-aircraft shell had exploded inside the cockpit, killing the co-pilot and the top turret gunner.\u00a0 There was blood all over the cockpit.\u00a0 Two engines on the right side were out, one of which was on fire.\u00a0 We fought Zeros and tried to encourage Lt. Smith at the same time.\u00a0 His crewmen were throwing out all extra weight in the hopes that the plane could fly on the two left engines.\u00a0 It was too much for the pilot to handle, however, and he finally ditched the plane about 90 miles south of Maloelap.<\/span><\/p>\n

The plane sand in about 30 seconds.\u00a0 It appeared to us that some of the crew were in the water so we dropped our life rafts as close as we could to the crash site.\u00a0 The other flights had left by this time because of lack of fuel.\u00a0 I stayed around for a few more minutes circling below the clouds at low level, until the Zeros left to return to Maloelap.\u00a0 They were machine gunning the debris from the crash and any survivors.\u00a0 We were trying to discourage this with the few guns we had on our two plans.\u00a0 We were still under attack by the Zeros and there were times on this mission when I could see a hail of tracers coming between my airplane and the \u201cBell of Texas\u201d on my wing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Finally Charlie Pratte also had to leave and headed for Tarawa to re-fuel.\u00a0 He had over 300 holes in his airplane but didn\u2019t have one man wounded.\u00a0 On one pass the Japanese machine guns had stitched holes the length of his fuselage and had blown up the oxygen tanks which had knocked down the two waist gunners in time for the machine gun bullets to pass through the fuselage where they had been standing.\u00a0 I later found out that his hydraulic system was also shot out and he landed at the new strip at Tarawa with parachutes tied to the waist and tail guns and which the crewmen deployed as they touched down to slow the airplane because they had no brakes.\u00a0 We had talked about this possibility before but the crew of the \u201cBelle of Texas\u201d received a commendation from General \u201cHap\u201d Arnold, Chief of Staff of the Army Air Corps for making the first recorded parachute landing.\u00a0 This technique is now used for many of our high speed aircraft and on the space shuttle to slow down on landing.<\/span><\/p>\n

We called for Dumbo rescue but Smitty and the \u201cDogpatch Express\u201d were never found.\u00a0 There were no survivors.\u00a0 Lt. Smith was flying on this mission with the crew of Lt. Thompson who had been wounded over Wake Island on July 24, 1943.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lt. Pratte had his crew were lost on January 22, 1944 on a low level mine laying mission out of Guam over Chichi Jima.<\/span><\/p>\n

I landed on Tarawa on the old, bomb pocked strip a little later and after taking on 1,000 gallons of fuel from give gallon cans, we took off for Funafuti, a small atoll about six hundred miles to the south.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t want to waste fuel climbing to the south, so we decided to stay below the clouds.\u00a0 For this reason we couldn\u2019t get a fix on the stars and by this time it was dark so that we couldn\u2019t measure our wind drift from the waves below us.\u00a0 We navigated by dead reckoning for what we estimated to be six hundred miles and then started a square search for our little island.\u00a0 On our second right angle turn of our square search we saw some faint lights a few miles away and we were soon back on the ground after being gone for 19 hours with 17 hours in the air.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t have a single hole in our airplane when we examined it after landing.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reference<\/span><\/p>\n

May, Bob; Parker, Bud; Gudenschwager, Phil, 11th Bomb Group (H): The Grey Geese<\/em>, Turner Publishing Company, Paducah, Ky., 1996.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"