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445th Bomb Group

A Blizzard In The Bomb Bay

December 24, 1944 was a day that I will always remember. Our troops on the ground were taking a terrible beating as the Germans attacked in force during the Battle of the Bulge. The 8th Air Force made an all-out effort to help them that day by sending up a formation of 2,000 B-17 Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators. To protect the American air armada were an additional 900 P-51 Mustang and P-47 Thunderbolt fighters. Our mission was to destroy the communication center and marshalling yards outside of Bitburg, Germany.

I had never seen a sight like this before. There were B-17s and B-24s all over the sky - to the front and to the left and to the right as far as the eye could see. It was an endless stream of aircraft, laden with bombs and bristling with 50-caliber machine guns. Germany was about to be covered with snow and bombs that day.

Visibility was good with very little cloud cover. When we were about five minutes from the IP (initial point-target) there suddennly appeared in front of us a wall of thick, black smoke from the German anti-aircraft guns. The flak was bursting all round us. The German gunners sure had our range.

It was quite scary. I made sure to see that my chute was close by. In the distance to our right I saw a bomber get out of formation and slowly descend into a spin followed by a trail of smoke. The five to ten anxious seconds that it took for the chutes to open seemed like an eternity. It sure felt good to finally see those three white dots appear in the sky. I don't know if or how many of the others got out.

Then came the IP. We made it through what seemed like an impenetrable wall of flak and dropped our bombs. I looked around, and to my horror saw a blizzard in the bombay. In addition to our 500-pound explosive bombs, we carried two bombs containing leaflets.

Upon release one of the leaflet bombs hung up. The bottom casing of the bomb cracked open and Ieaflets flew out, caught in the slipstream. As they swirled about the bomb bay, the bomb itself failed to detonate and remained stuck, swaying precariously in the onslaught of rushing air.

I reported the problem and out came our bombardier, Lt. Marion Mechling, to the rescue. We were standing on the narrow catwalk at 22,000 feet, with freesing winds of -40 degrees that swirled up from the open bomb bay. Lt. Mechling released the bomb by hand while I carefully kicked it out. After what seemed like the second eternity of the day, the bomb was dislodged and fell through the bomb bay doors. I'm glad to tell you that our plane, a B-24 affectionately named The Bunnie, got us back safe and sound. Just a little excitement in the course of a days work.

Seymour Glass (445th). A Blizzard In The Bomb Bay. The Journal 2nd Air Division. Volume 44 Number 3, Fall 2005.

The Fatal Flight Of B-24 #42-50347

Vince Hamilton joined us as navigator in our training as a B-24 crew in the bitter winter cold of 1944 in Casper, Wyoming. He was our second navigator even though we had been formed as a crew for only a few weeks. Our first navigator had been shipped suddenly to Mountain Home, Idaho, and we wondered what he had done to deserve such punishment, because Mountain Home was known throughout the Army Air Forces for its great number of training accidents. We considered ourselves fortunate to not have been transferred with him, and we welcomed Vince with special enthusiasm.

Vince was about 19 years old like me. He was from Brooklyn. I was from New Mexico, so I was fascinated by having a crew member from the world of tough, hard-talking guys from the big city streets; although Vince did not fit the stereotype I had formed in my mind. Vince, in turn, found it odd that anybody could be from New Mexico. "Really," he would say, "Are you really from New Mexico? What do they do there?" And he would laugh.

We became roommates and shared adventures in Casper and in our journey to England through Topeka, West Palm Beach, Brazil, Morocco, and Wales until we arrived at the 445th Bomb Group in Tibenham in May of 1944, where we shared the same hut and non-working stove.

The Group needed lead navigators, so they pulled Vince as soon as we arrived at the 445th, and he began flying as navigator with lead crews. Vince continued to bunk with me and share in the life of our crew, but he never flew a mission with us.

With this loss of our navigator, I received a couple days of instruction in the radar Gee-Box, reviewed the navigation principles I had received in bombardier school and took over the navigation duties of our crew as a "bombinavigator." Since I often had to man the front turret, I was sometimes jokingly referred to as a "bombinavitriggerlator."

Vince and I flew with different crews, but, we lived in the same hut, so we kept track of each other and managed to be together in our social life at the officers' club, our evening pubbing by bicycles around Tibenham, our passes to Norwich and our three exciting leaves in London.

Vince completed his quota of 35 missions before our crew, but the 445th persuaded him to stay on for some undefined navigational duties. Our crew finally completed our 35 missions and began our return to the States. I was whisked out of England in September 1944 without getting a chance to say goodbye to Vince, and I never saw him again.

Back in the States about two months later, I learned by rumor that he had been killed, but I never found out how or where he had died. For sixty-one years I assumed that he had died in combat, flying one-too-many missions. Then, in April 2005, Alan Jones, a Welshman from Abergele, Wales, sent an email to me and Garl McHenry, the crew's radio operator, telling us that Vince had died in an air crash in northwest England at Landican in the region near Liverpool in October 1944. Jones had contacted us through our combat website, which told of our search for information about Vince.

A few days later, Jones sent us another email, attaching an excellent article by Dave Smith in Rapide, a Northwest aviation historical magazine (Issues 2 & 3, Year 2002). Smith's article contains everything there is to know about the crash that killed Vince Hamilton and 23 other American airmen. According to Dave Smith's article, a B-24 bomber exploded in mid-air on October 18, 1944, over Landican, England, near Birkenhead and Liverpool, killing all 24 on board.

Subsequent investigation revealed that it was a B-24H, aircraft number 42-50347 assigned to the 703rd Squadron of the 8th Air Force's 445th Bomb Group at Tibenham in Norfolk. The old bomber was being used as a taxi to return to Tibenham the crews who had ferried three other B-24s from Tibenham to Greencastle in Northern Ireland for overhaul or storage. Apparently Vince Hamilton had served as navigator on one of the three crews. According to witnesses, the B-24 was flying at about 1,000 feet in rain under a cloud cover when it broke up and fell to the ground and exploded. No parachutes were seen.

Among the witnesses was 16-year-old Doug Darroch of Oxton Road, Birkenhead. He saw the aircraft's final dive and later walked along the railway track to the wreckage site, where recovery was progressing under arc-lights. Young Darroch never forgot the accident and became determined to put up a memorial to the airmen who had died. In 1995, fifty-one years later, Doug Darroch and his family paid for and erected in Birkenhead a very impressive tribute - a rugged stone monument bearing a plaque engraved with the words:

IN MEMORY OF
THE 24 AMERICAN SERVICEMEN
OF THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE
WHO DIED WHEN THEIR AIRCRAFT
EXPLODED IN MID AIR
ABOVE THESE FIELDS ON
18. OCT. 1944.

Later, in 2001 after Darroch had learned the names of the American victims, he added a larger plaque listing the names, ranks and serial numbers of the airmen. The name of J.F. Simpson was included in the list by error. Lt. Simpson was killed in a P-47 Thunderbolt crash a few miles away in a separate accident.

The cause of the crash remains undetermined, but there are at least two theories. One theory is that of a test pilot, Ralph Stimmel, who had flown that same B-24 to Ireland and had reported that, there was a strong odor of gasoline in the plane indicating the possibility of a leak. Stimmel passed this warning to the pilot before the ill-fated flight back to Tibenham. Another theory is that the B-24 iced up in the low clouds and stalled. The pull-out from the dive that followed the stall stressed the airframe so much that it caused the aircraft to break up and plunge to the ground, where it exploded.

Ironically, this was the second tragic event for the 445th Bomb Group in one month. Three weeks before, on September 27, the 445th suffered the highest group loss in Eighth Air Force history when 35 of its 37 B-24s were shot down in a matter of minutes in an attack by FW-190s and ME-109s during a mission to Kassel, Germany with a loss of 117 airmen, 112 of them later confirmed as killed in action.

The tragedy of the B-24 crash over Landican near Birkenhead was that most, of the 24 victims had already survived more than 30 combat missions against the Nazis, only to die as idle passengers on a routine flight in an old bomber crashing in an English field far from the flak-filled skies high over Europe. All honor must go to Doug Darroch, his family and his community for their tribute to the American armen - truly a gesture of friendship and appreciation by a grateful and sympathetic people, initiated by a 16-year-old boy in 1944.

Fred Becchetti (445th). The Fatal Flight of B-24 #42-50347 And the Death of Vince Hamilton and 23 American Airmen of the 445th Bomb Group, Tibenham, October 18, 1944, Over England. The Journal 2nd Air Division. Volume 45 Number 1, Winter 2006.

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Wings of Morning The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II. Childers. On April 21, 1945, the twelve-member crew of the Black Cat set off on one of the last air missions in the European theater of WWII. Ten never came back. This is the story of that crew - where they came from, how they trained, what it was like to fly a B-24 through enemy flak, and who was waiting for them to come home. The author, nephew of the Black Cat's radio operator, has reconstructed the lives and tragic deaths of these men through their letters home and through in-depth interviews, both with their families and with German villagers who lived near the crash site.

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