Posted by
Dawnsblood on Monday, January 08, 2007 7:15:23 PM
It is the
story of an aircrew lost during WW2 and the surprising find made about in many years later. Experts were able to piece their story together in the 1960's. A sad but interesting read.
In early November, 1958, a British oil exploration team was flying
over North Africa's harsh Libyan Desert when they stumbled across
something unexpected… the wreckage of a United States Army Air Forces
(USAAF) plane from World War 2. A ground crew eventually located the
site, where a quick inspection of the remains identified it as a B-24D
Liberator called the Lady Be Good, an Allied bomber that had
disappeared following a bombing run in Italy in 1943. When she failed
to return to base, the USAAF conducted a search, ultimately presuming
that the Lady and her crew perished in the Mediterranean Sea after becoming disoriented.
The
British oil surveyors found that the desert environment had preserved
the aircraft's hardware astonishingly well; the plane's 50 caliber
machine guns still operated at the pull of the trigger, the radio was
in working condition, one of the engines was still functional, and
there were still containers filled with water on board. But the remains
of the crew were nowhere to be seen.
It took the US military over a year before they took the sighting
seriously, but eventually they dispatched a search operation which
scoured the desert for the remains of the crew. The search teams found
several improvised arrow markers at varying distances to the northwest–
one made of boots, others made from parachutes weighed down with rocks–
but the markers stopped at the edge of the vast, shifting sea of sand
known as Calanscio. The group was unsuccessful in finding any further
trace of the crew.