Lady be Good

Today I think I'LL fly my C46 Commando SE from Benghazi down the Libyan desert to the coordinates of the "Lady be Good" crash site. Familiar story to many, the Lady was a B24 on its first mission for plane and crew out of Boluch Libya on a raid to a port in Italy. On the way back she was separated and disoriented over the Mediterranean and in the dark the crew overflew their base thinking they were still over water they flew over 400 miles into the Libyan desert. They bailed out when three engines quite due to fuel starvation, still thinking they were over water. The plane flew pilotless bellying into the dessert, breaking in two but little else damaged. Sixteen years later she was discovered by a BP oil exploration team. When a ground research team first got to the site, they found the crew side arms, charts, machine guns and even a thermos of still drinkable coffee.

What followed was an extensive unsuccessful search by the U.S.A.F and Army for the crew remains. A couple of years later It was another BP oil crew that found five of the bodies where they had lain and died together. A journal was found on one telling of what must have been a slow hellish death over five days. He described losing eye site in the desert and going on one cap of canteen water a day. In the Libyan desert day temps can reach as high as 130F And down toward the upper thirties at night. Last entry: "Today was hell, just want to die".  They tried to mark their paths by cutting triangle pointers out of parachute cloth and holding them down with rocks on each point. 

There was also a British RAF Bristol Mk.IV  discovered in the same desert in 1959 still sitting on its landing gear with the crew exhumed from under the wing where they lay for shade. In that environment dehydration can be fatally fast.  

It has been surmised that if they had just dropped the gear the aircraft could have landed intact. The crew would have had survival gear as well as an all-important Gibson Girl radio equipped with an antenna kite which might have led to a rescue. On a ghostly note, the Gibson Girl was used on a C47 that took a crew to the site when its own radio failed. The Gibson worked fine after seventeen years in the desert. Shortly the same C47 ditched in the Mediterranean after flying into a storm while returning to Libya from Germany. A U.S. Army U1A Otter took an arm rest from the crash site and soon crashed in the Gulf of Sirte. Ten crew killed and bodies never recovered. Of the few things washed ashore was the arm rest from the "Lady be Good".

Been many books written about the Lady and has been a fascinating story to me since my youth first hearing people talk about it. Many such stories of survival and tragedy available but this one has a draw I just can't put my finger on. There was an old episode on the TV show "Twilight Zone" I think had to have been based on this story about a bomber crew in the desert. When rescuers approach the plane, they come running up to greet them and to their surprise the rescuers can't see or hear them. They then realize it's because they're really dead. 

Edited July 29, 20223 yr by Patco Lch