Lady Be Good (aircraft)


Lady Be Good is a USAAF B-24D Liberator that disappeared without a trace on its first combat mission during World War II. The plane, which was from 376th Bomb Group, was believed to have been lost—with its nine-man crew—in the Mediterranean Sea while returning to its base in Libya following a bombing raid on Naples on April 4, 1943. However, the wreck was accidentally discovered inland in the Libyan Desert by an oil exploration team from British Petroleum on November 9, 1958.
Investigations concluded that the first-time crew failed to realize they had overflown their air base in a sandstorm. After continuing to fly south into the desert for many hours, the crew bailed out when the plane's fuel ran out. The survivors then died in the desert trying to walk to safety. All but one of the crew's remains were recovered between February and August 1960. The wreckage of the Lady Be Good was taken to a Libyan Air Force base after being removed from the crash site in August 1994.

Circumstances

Mission

In 1943, the Lady Be Good was a new Liberator bomber that had just been assigned to the 514th Bomb Squadron on March 25. The squadron was part of the 376th Bombardment Group based at Soluch Field in Soluch in Libya. The plane, which had the AAF serial number 41-24301, had the group identification number 64 stencil-painted on its nose. Its given name, Lady Be Good, was hand-painted on the starboard, front side of the forward fuselage.
The Lady Be Good crew were also new as they had only arrived in Libya a week before on March 18. On their first mission together, they would be flying one of the twenty-five B-24s assigned to bomb the harbor of Naples late in the afternoon of April 4 in a two-part attack. A flight of twelve B-24s would go first followed by a second wave of 13 planes, including the Lady Be Good. After the attack, all planes were expected to return to their bases in North Africa.

Operation

The plane, which was one of the last to depart, took off from Soluch Field near Benghazi at 2:15 pm. It joined the formation and continued on to Naples.
The sandstorm caused eight B-24s to return to Soluch, leaving four aircraft to continue the operation. But when the Lady Be Good arrived over Naples at 7:50 pm at, poor visibility was obscuring the primary target. Two B-24s attacked their secondary target on the return trip while the other two aircraft dumped their bombs into the Mediterranean to reduce weight and save fuel.

Disappearance

Lady Be Good flew back alone from Italy on its return trip to its home base in Libya. At 12:12 a.m. the pilot, Lt. William Hatton, radioed to say his automatic direction finder was not working and asked for a location of base. The crew apparently overflew their base, failing to see the flares fired to attract their attention. They continued southward over North Africa, deeper into the Sahara Desert, for the next two hours.
At 2 a.m., as fuel became critically low, the crew parachuted to the ground. The abandoned Lady Be Good flew a further before it crash-landed into the Calanscio Sand Sea.
Largely because it was believed that the aircraft had probably crashed at sea, a subsequent search and rescue mission from Soluch Air Base failed to find any trace of the aircraft or its crew. The disappearance of the Lady Be Good became a mystery.

Discovery

Wreckage: 1958

After the crew abandoned the aircraft, it continued flying southward. The mostly intact wreckage, and evidence showing that one engine was still operating at the time of impact, suggests the aircraft gradually lost altitude in a very shallow descent, reached the flat, open desert floor, and landed on its belly.
The first reported sighting of the crash site was on November 9, 1958, by a British oil exploration team working for British Petroleum in the northeast of Libya's Kufra District. The team contacted authorities at Wheelus Air Base, but no attempt to examine the aircraft was made as no records existed of any plane believed to have been lost in the area. The location of the wreckage was however marked on maps to be used by oil-prospecting teams that were due to set out to explore the Calanscio Sand Sea the next year.
On February 27, 1959, British oil surveyor Gordon Bowerman and British geologists Donald Sheridan and John Martin spotted the wreckage near, southeast of Soluch, following up the first sighting from the air on May 16, 1958, by the crew of a Silver City Airways Dakota, piloted by Captain Allan Frost, and another on June 15. A recovery team made initial trips from Wheelus Air Base to the crash site on May 26, 1959.
Although the plane was broken into two pieces, it was immaculately preserved, with functioning machine guns, a working radio, and some supplies of food and water. A thermos of tea was found to be drinkable. No human remains were found on board the aircraft nor in the surrounding crash site, nor were parachutes found.
Most of the evidence from the wreckage indicated that the men had bailed out. However, the log book of the navigator, 2nd Lt Dp "Deep" Hays, which was still on board, made no mention of the aircraft's movements after the crew commenced their return leg from Naples. Hays had been on his first combat mission.

Crew remains: 1960

In February 1960, the United States Army conducted a formal search of the area for the remains of the crew. Five bodies – those of Hatton, 2nd Lt. Robert F. Toner, Hays, T/S Robert E. LaMotte and S/Sgt Robert E. Adams – were found on February 11. The team concluded that other bodies were likely buried beneath sand dunes after finding evidence that at least three of the surviving crew members had continued walking northward.
With the news that five bodies had been recovered, the US Air Force and US Army started an expanded search called Operation Climax in May 1960. The joint operation used a USAF C-130 cargo plane and two Army Bell H-13 helicopters. However, it was a British Petroleum exploration crew that found the remains of S/Sgt Guy E. Shelley, on May 12, 1960, northwest of the recovered five bodies. A US Army helicopter found the body of T/Sgt Harold J. Ripslinger on May 17, 1960, located northwest of Shelley's body, over from the crash site, but still from Soluch airbase. These two bodies were the only ones found during Operation Climax. Another British Petroleum oil exploration crew discovered the remains of 2nd Lt John S. Woravka in August 1960. His body was then recovered by the US Air Force.
The remains of one of the air gunners, S/Sgt Vernon L. Moore, have never been found.

Analysis and conclusions

Subsequent examinations of the remains and personal items showed that eight of the nine airmen managed to parachute safely down to the desert from the aircraft. They then located each other by firing their revolvers and signal flares into the air.
However, one crew member, Woravka did not rendezvous with the others. The configuration of the parachute found with his body suggested that it did not fully open, and that Woravka died as a result of an overly rapid descent.
A diary, recovered from the pocket of co-pilot Robert Toner, recorded the crew's suffering on the walk northward. It indicated that none of the men were aware they had been flying over land when they bailed out, or that they were inland. It has been speculated that the dark and empty desert floor may have resembled open sea.
The crew members who survived the descent had died while walking northward, because they believed they were fairly close to the Mediterranean coast. As they walked, the group left behind footwear, parachute scraps, Mae West vests and other items as markers to show searchers their path.
The diary also says the group survived for eight days in the desert, with only a single canteen of water to share. After walking from the crash site, the location of the remains of the five airmen shows they had waited behind while the other three set off north, to try to find help. The body of S/Sgt Shelley was found away while further on were the remains of T/Sgt Ripslinger.
The body of S/Sgt Moore has never officially been found. However, his remains may have been recovered and buried by a desert patrol of the British Army in 1953. As they were unaware that any Allied air crews were missing in the area, the human remains were recorded but then buried without further investigation.
The official report in the American Graves Registration Service states:
The navigator on the Lady Be Good thought he was flying on a direct path from Naples to Benghazi. But the base's radio direction finder only had a single loop antenna. As the plane's direction finder could not distinguish between a signal in front or behind the aircraft, there was no way to identify reciprocal readings. The same bearing would be returned whether the plane was heading inbound from the Mediterranean or outbound inland.
The crew might have survived if they had known their actual location. If they had headed south the same distance they walked north, the group might have reached the oasis of Wadi Zighen. After the crew bailed out Lady Be Good continued flying south for before coming to land, and there was also a chance that the crew might have found the aircraft's relatively intact wreckage, with its meager water and food supplies. The aircraft's working radio could have been used to call for help.

Legacy

Parts and crew items

After the Lady Be Good was identified, some parts of the plane were returned to the United States for evaluation while the rest of the wreckage remained. In August 1994, the remains of the craft were recovered by a team led by Dr. Fadel Ali Mohamed and taken to a Libyan military base in Tobruk for safekeeping. They are now stored at Jamal Abdelnasser Air Force Base, Libya.
Over the years pieces of the plane were stripped by souvenir hunters. Today, parts can be seen at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. A propeller can be seen in front of the village hall in Lake Linden, the home of Robert E. LaMotte. The U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum at Fort Lee, Virginia has a collection of personal items, such as watches, silk survival maps, and flight clothing from the crew members who were recovered. Several of these items are on display. An altimeter and manifold pressure gauge were salvaged from the plane in 1963 by Airman Second Class Ron Pike and are on display at the March Field Air Museum just south of Riverside, CA. A Royal Air Force team visited the site in 1968 and hauled away components including an engine for evaluation by the McDonnell Douglas company.
After some parts were salvaged from the Lady Be Good and technically evaluated, they were reused in other planes belonging to the American military. However, some planes that received these spares developed unexpected problems.
A C-54, which had several autosyn transmitters from the Lady Be Good installed, had to throw cargo overboard to land safely because of propeller difficulties. A C-47 that received a radio receiver crashed into the Mediterranean. A U.S. Army de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter with an armrest from the bomber crashed in the Gulf of Sidra. Only a few traces of the plane washed ashore and one of these was the armrest from the Lady Be Good.

Memorial

A stained-glass window in the chapel at Wheelus Air Base commemorates Lady Be Good and her crew.

Television and film portrayals

The Lady Be Good incident was indirectly referenced in a couple of television shows and movies: