Lady Be Good — the ghost bomber of the Calanscio Sand Sea

OVERVIEW

Lady Be Good was a new B-24D Liberator of the 514th Bomb Squadron, 376th Bomb Group, based at Soluch near Benghazi, with an all-new crew. On 4 April 1943, on their first mission — a raid on Naples — it was believed lost at sea. In fact it lay 710 km (440 mi) inland in the Calanscio Sand Sea.

HISTORY

Returning alone after midnight, the pilot, Lt William Hatton, radioed that his direction finder was not working. The crew overflew their base without seeing its flares and flew on south for two hours; at 2 a.m., out of fuel, they bailed out, and the empty aircraft glided another 26 km and belly-landed. A sea search found nothing. A Silver City Airways crew sighted the wreck from the air on 16 May 1958 and a BP oil team on 9 November 1958; on 27 February 1959 BP surveyors reached it. It was in two pieces but immaculately preserved: working machine guns and radio, food and water, a thermos of drinkable tea — no bodies, no parachutes. In 1960 the US Army found five bodies together, then Guy Shelley, Harold Ripslinger and John Woravka (whose parachute had failed); Vernon Moore was never officially found. The co-pilot Robert Toner's diary records eight days in the desert on one canteen of water; the survivors walked about 130 km north, the last two far beyond that, thinking the coast was near.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The official explanation: the navigator probably took a reciprocal bearing off the base's single-loop direction finder, so the pilot flew deep into the desert thinking he was still over the sea. Had they walked south instead they might have reached an oasis — or found the aircraft, its water and its working radio. The 'ghost bomber' got a further reputation from what followed: parts salvaged from it were fitted to other aircraft. A C-54 with its autosyn transmitters had to jettison cargo to land; a C-47 with its radio receiver crashed into the Mediterranean; a US Army Otter carrying one of its armrests crashed in the Gulf of Sidra, and one of the few pieces that washed ashore was that armrest. The article records these as events and draws no conclusion from them.

VISITING

The crash site is deep in the Libyan Desert; the wreck itself has been removed to a Libyan air base. Parts and crew items are at the National Museum of the US Air Force and the US Army Quartermaster Museum.