1944 - An Addendum

Scott Hollifield and I read the articles we wrote in 2021 after we found the B-24.

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SPEAKER_02 0:38

Hello. I'm Jim Williams, and you're on the porch. A few days ago we aired a podcast that was about a group of us going into the Blue Ridge Mountains and searching and finding the location of a B-24 bomber that crashed in 1944. That program was primarily about how each of us felt upon finding it and our reactions to the hike and the overall discovery. But associated with that podcast were two articles written in the McDowell News in March of 2021. Since the podcast, I've had several requests to republish those articles. Well, these days, as you all know, it's easier to publish electronically than it is in the paper format. So I've decided to give you those two articles that were in the McDowell News, and maybe that'll also give you another angle onto our adventure into the mountains. Those two articles will be read by those who wrote the article. The first one was written by Scott Hollifield, who was the editor of the McDowell News, and the second article I wrote myself, and I'll read that to you. I hope you enjoy the articles, and I hope you'll go to the original podcast so you can understand the emotions of those of us who went on the hike. You're probably going to recognize some of the words because we read from these articles in our original broadcast. Please pardon the duplicity. Now enjoy the addendum, and here we go.

SPEAKER_00 2:14

This is the column that I wrote in 2021 as an introduction to Jim's story. Twenty-five or so years ago, in the back of the newspaper building, where old furniture and outdated equipment too cumbersome to haul away or stored, I rifled through an abandoned desk to see what treasures I could find. Among the black and white photos of people and places from long ago, I discovered a yellow clipping that told the tragic and harrowing tale of what occurred on June 13th, 1944, in a rugged section of McDowell County. A quote from the clip. Army Air Force officials disclosed yesterday. Continue with a quote: The plane was identified as a B-24 bomber on a combat training flight from Chatham Field, Savannah, Georgia, and the bodies of eight men had been recovered at this time. Officials said a normal crew of the bomber was 10 men, and soldiers from Air Forces were searching for the two remaining bodies. End quote. No follow-up clippings, no photos. I searched through dusty bound editions, those hardbacked versions of a year or six months of papers compiled for the sake of history. But I turned up nothing else. I saved the lone clipping, hoping that one day I would learn more. As the years went by with the explosion of the internet and a seemingly infinite amount of information at my fingertips, I would probably once a year devote a couple of hours to research trying to learn more. All I found were a couple of similar accounts of what was in that clipping. No names, no investigation results, nothing more. How could the deaths of ten men in a mountainside plane crash in western North Carolina receive what seemed to be so little attention? Then last year I found that others had the same questions. Do you know about this? My longtime friend Walt Baggle sent in a message. I sent along with some of the same information that I'd found. I've known for years, I said, but I've not turned up much more than this. It seems that I was not the right man for the job. Jim Williams was. Jim, with certain government connections and dogged determination, began an effort to find out more. I would say that Jim has a shadowy past, but that would border on libel. So I will say he has a mysterious and interesting past. I was happy to join his investigative team. How he proceeded and what we found is a tale masterfully told by Jim as his part of this project. And I answered the question I asked many years ago: how could the deaths of ten men in a mountainside plane crash in western North Carolina receive what seemed to be so little attention? The sad truth is it was not an uncommon occurrence. On June 13th, 1944, the day the B-24 on a combat training mission lost its way and crashed into the North Carolina mountainside, there were more than 70 other reported military crashes at stateside, according to the aviation archaeological investigation and research. More than 70 on a single day. That tragically was not out of the ordinary as the fight for freedom raged. In all, according to historical and aviation experts, 15,000 airmen were killed in training in World War II. We cannot forget their sacrifices, just as we cannot forget the sacrifices of those who gave their lives at Pearl Harbor, Normandy, or Okinawa. I was proud to be a part of Jim Williams' quest to learn more, document the site, and honor the memories of those who died.

SPEAKER_02 6:12

Along with the three other identical engines across a 110-foot wingspan of the B-24E Liberator, performance was being produced as designed in the manufacturing plant in San Diego. The turbocharger wastegate lollipop handles on the left side of each throttle were set to bleed off excess gases and prevent the turbo from overspinning. The machinery was performing as anticipated. The new shorter ring cowlings on each engine of the E model permitted the use of the wider Hamilton standard sixty four seventy seven A-Zero variable pitch paddle blades. These new, more efficient blades were adding to the overall performance of the aircraft. They were an improvement over the older toothpick blades of the earlier B twenty four models. Inside the cockpit, the instrument panel emitted a soft red glow. Behind and below the pilot and copilot, the navigator's table lamp was on, just enough light to see the flight charts. Outside the running lights were lit, but all else was dark. The round robin navigation training flight from Chatham Field, Georgia to Raleigh, North Carolina was headed home, but they were off course. After recent thunderstorms, the clouds were scattered at about four thousand to six thousand feet, but visibility was unrestricted. Flying the heading of two hundred and seventy degrees, the glow of wartime Asheville could be seen far ahead. Hopefully, that flanked glow would allow the pilot and navigator to reorient themselves and get back on course and head for home. But the sky was dark, too dark. The blue ridge was dark, too dark, and the B twenty four E with a full crew was low, too low. A hard hit somewhere on the left wing. A tall tree? A sharp spin into the left, no control from the cockpit. Impact. The craft plunged down the steep hillside and then oblivion. In a tiny moment of time, ten souls who never left the shores of the United States added their names to those lost in World War two. Is that exactly the way the final moments unfolded? Maybe. Maybe not. Everything else is based on the actual accident reports for june thirteenth, nineteen forty four. Somewhere on the Blue Ridge, the hardest walk. The investigation. As an Appalachian child, I have most of my life heard of the warplane that crashed in McDowell County. Many, many years later, as an adult and now a writer of trail articles, I thought this would make an interesting trail to explore. However, when I started trying to locate the accident using the usual internet sources, I found no evidence of such a crash. Finally I went back to the old method of investigation. I headed to the Marion Public Library. With the help of Patty Holda, who operates the Abe Simmons Genealogy and North Carolina History Room, we poured over page after page of microfish photos of the McDowell News and the Marion Observer, starting with the issues from nineteen forty three. We searched each front page article until we found the front page of McDowell News dated june fifteenth, nineteen forty four. The very small article briefly described the loss of life and the approximate location of the accident site. There was no follow up article. The sad truth was that the loss of a few lives and another air disaster just wasn't that unusual at this stage of the war. The reading public was still reeling from the bold and expensive in loss of lives Normandy invasion just a week before. The relatively tiny number of ten men lost on the hillside in McDowell County fell far short in the shadow of what would become more than seventy three thousand lost, killed and missing in Normandy. The ten lives were, however, beginning to mean something to me. As a veteran, I feel the very least we can do to pay back those women and men who die in the service to our country is to whenever we can know and make note of where they perished. Armed with the exact date and approximate location of the crash, I was able to find some other sources. As it turns out, there is an Army Air Force archaeology group in Arizona that keeps records of AAF crashes. I was able to contact them and get specific facts about the accident. Facts such as aircraft model number, date of the accident, home base of the aircraft, and other important locators. With all this, still no exact location of the site, but I was getting closer. I knew there would be an accident report of the crash. Armed with the new facts, I once again went to the archaeology group in search of the report. This time success. A copy of the actual accident report in its entirety was sent to me. Now I had date, time, and possible reason for the crash. Still, no exact location. At the time of the crash, the investigators that were sent to the crash site were not familiar with McDowell County, or even North Carolina for that matter. They just wanted to find and interview a few witnesses and move on to the next investigation. One account identified a witness as a resident of Brook Creek instead of Buck Creek. Each item I read contained a lot of general information that was useless, but almost every time I found some scrap of unique information that became a piece of the puzzle. I was able to compare these notes and decide that I was on the right track and that the plane did in fact crash very close to where I'd been told so many years ago. The next step was to do an on site search for clues. I called a group of my hiking buddies, we picked a date and time, and headed into the woods. The first hike. Nobody to sugarcoat it, it was cold. The COVID nineteen cases were on the rise. We had our faces covered, but it was more as protection from the cold than from the fear of infection. We bundled up, put on our backpacks, and started out. We hoped we would see something that would tell us we were on the right track. At this point my friends were hiking with me because I told them I felt there could be a possibility of finding something, although never recorded, never mentioned, and probably just folklore fueled by a few scattered facts, and that I may have misunderstood in the first place. In other words, they were hiking these steep and cold hills because they were my friends. Thinking I had the sight pinpointed, we headed to the most distant and of course the highest peak along the ridgeline. To get there we hiked from one mountain top to another, following the ridges so we could stay oriented in the woods. We had to climb several peaks, then descend, then climb again. There was no trail to follow, just straight up, then straight down to the base of the next hill. After about three hours of searching without the slightest clue, we decided to call it a day. Even at this point my buddies were still positive about the outcome. I was not. It was beginning to look very much like a wild goose chase to me. As we headed out of the woods I did what all boys who are fortunate to be able to should do with the problem. I call my dad. My dad, also Jim Williams, hunted in these woods in nineteen forty six. He was recovering from a wound he received on Iwo Jima when a Japanese bullet went through the back of his leg, shattering the shin bone. More than seventy years later he could still remember the then fresh scar that the bomber had left on the countryside. He was on the speakerphone. I told him where I thought we were. With no hesitation he directed us to a spot he remembered even though he had not seen it in over fifty years. I'm not sure anyone believed his directions were correct, but he told us with such confidence that we once again packed up our gear and started to another location. When we arrived we knew almost immediately that we were in the site. I can't quite describe it, but everyone seemed to feel the difference. The landscape matched the old photos from the accident report, and the tree growth was a little different. Whether that was real or imagined, I'm not sure, but it was enough to make us drop our backpacks and start to look around. Fate steps in. Hunting in the forest for any clue of an event that took place more than seventy years ago might be called by some as foolhardy at best. But there were six grown men in a little group, like wild turkeys kicking and scratching on the ground. My guess is anytime you have a group of veteran hikers together, at least one of them will have a plastic bag to collect the trash. It's what all of us tend to do as stewardship for the land that we share. As our efforts to find the airplane look fruitless, unfortunately the trash collecting was going quite well. Plastic bottles and a few aluminum cans were filling the trash bag with little effort on our part. Then one of the collectors found another piece of trash that looked a little different. We took some notice, but not much. I made a mental note to examine it before sending it off to the trash tub. It wasn't as though we were Howard Carter entering the tomb of King Tut. We finally left the site confident that we were at the right place, but with no real proof that we were at the final resting place of the B twenty four E, or so we thought. As I had planned, I forged the usual piece of trash from the collection of bottles and cans. It was just a rusty old piece of metal that could have been easily overlooked. The overall shape, although badly distorted, reminded me of one of those hose clamps that helped attach the hose to a radiator of your car. It was bigger in circumference, but the shape was similar. With a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol, I started to remove the years of dirt and rust. Ever so slight, a stamped part number began to appear. No doubt it was military in composition and had some identifiers I was hoping to find. I sent the photo of the metal piece along with a part number to the archaeology group in Arizona. The reply You have a part from a B twenty four E. It is shown in the parts manual. Now it is like Carter entering the tomb of King Tut. Another call to the hiking group and we were off for what we will call our final step. This is the second hike. The group gathered once more for another hike. We needed to confirm the longitude and latitude coordinates of the area where we found the piece of wreckage. This time we knew we were hiking on top of a crash site. I was impressed, moved actually, by the somber tone of the group. I have to admit this time when I saw the crash site, I felt a little heavy somewhere inside. As we approached the site, the sky was that clear blue that only high mountain air can reveal. The leafless trees were pristine in the sunlight. The clouds were below us, causing an illusion of being on a desert island in a white ocean. Closer now to the final resting place of the war machine, the wind begins to stir, just enough to put a slight chill on our cheeks. The clouds begin to fill and climb up the hillside toward our location, and surround us with the fog moving silently through the trees. In my mind's eye, at least I thought it was in my mind's eye, I caught a fleeting image of ten young men standing just inside the veil of the fog, not solid, but wispy. They were wearing baggy olive drab flight suits. Some were in leather jackets with fur collars, some with skull caps, their chin straps opened and hanging loose at the throat. They looked with a lost gaze at where the plane must have rested almost seventy seven years ago. And then they were gone. Back to the mission at hand. Our reason to be here today was to mark the longitude and latitude of the accident site. We wanted to be able to give as much information as possible to the state and federal authorities so the site could be properly recognized and perhaps memorialized in some way. We moved to the location where we reckoned the quote unquote trash was found. One of our group used a trail lab to record the longitude and latitude coordinates of the location and we were ready to head home. As we left there was an unplanned pause. It wasn't organized, but everyone stopped for a moment. I think it was to pay tribute to those who could have gone on and had productive lives and families. There could have been sons and daughters and grandchildren who now would never exist because of the sacrifice here on the hillside. We never discussed the impromptu stop. It just happened, but I think each of us shared something and at the same time experienced something deeply personal. This mission was now complete. Where we are, as of this writing, we have recently completed our third hike to the area of the accident. This time we worked under the very capable direction of Scott Ashcraft, who is the archaeologist for Pisgah National Forest. We used metal detectors to find and mark the locations of debris at the site. No artifacts were removed. Once the pieces were detected and flagged, we were able to stand back and along with Scott determine the impact area and the flow of the wreckage as the plane disintegrated. Even that scientific task proved to be somewhat daunting to those of us who were a little more emotionally invested than we might have thought. Standing on top of the steep hill, looking out on the many flags, each representing a part of the plane that carried ten Americans to their death was a sobering sight. Scott will move forward with classifying the site so it will be identified and properly recorded. We are currently working with Jeff Fuch, Regional Supervisor of the Western Office of North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Jeff will lead us into the final chapter. With his guidance we'll be placing a memorial marker, probably along a well traveled trail to identify the approximate location of the crash. We are currently looking into the placement of another remembrance marker at a public location. I hope to follow up with you in the near future with good news. My final thoughts It was indeed a privilege to be able to hike and share this experience with that group of explorers who encouraged me and who had faith for some unknown reason in the outcome of our journey together. You know who you are, and thank you. A special thanks to my friend and aviation advisor on this article, Lieutenant Colonel USAF retired Kentner Kit Alverson, veteran of six hundred combat missions in Vietnam and recipient of five. Three distinguished flying crosses. It took several cups of coffee and many conversations on my front porch to decide we had something worth pursuing and not just mountain folklore. With this passing I lost a friend and the country lost a true patriot. As I write this article, I try to think of what must have been in the thoughts of my dad as he, fresh from the war and an old man at nineteen, walked these hills. Now I can't help but think of another nineteen year old kid who was in the belly of that plane and who, for whatever reason, decided to stand with his country in the face of a world war, and in so doing sacrificed his life on an isolated hillside in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. What a generation. Those were the articles that Scott and I wrote back in 2021. You may notice in my article there are some facts that are a little bit different than the facts that were relayed during our discussion here with our six explorers. I have to admit that, as my friend Scott Hollifield would say, I took some literary license with the article. I tried to put it in a narrative that spread out over the three hikes so we'd understand basically what we went through and what we saw and what we did. When we all got together a few days ago to retell the story, I think that was a little more emotional, but certainly no less true than the article that I wrote. So forgive the discrepancies. Basically all facts are true. Here's the update since 2021. Of course, I mentioned when we were all together that my dad has since passed away. And we're trying still to memorialize the location of the plane crash. Honestly, we haven't received as much help from state and federal government as I had hoped, but that's okay. There's a lot of stuff going on, and we understand that. We're still gonna work and try to get an interactive plaque up there somewhere on an isolated trail that will talk about the plane crash. I hope you enjoyed the original podcast, and I hope you enjoyed the addenda. I look forward to our next get together here on the porch.