North Atlantic Skyline - - Photographs from the west of Ireland (Galway, Mayo, Clare, Limerick, Roscommon and even Leitrim)

Fortress Down

Some gave all - a plaque commemorating a WWII plane crash off the Galway coast.

On a gloomy morning exactly 62 years ago, Lt. C. B. Collins was lost in the countryside. No matter how often he nervously checked his charts, he couldn’t be sure where he was. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t alone. He was the navigator of a B-17 bomber of the US Air Force, nicknamed "Stinky", that was carrying a special cargo. And everyone else on the plane, including the cargo, was getting anxious not only about where the plane would land, but how they would land too.

"Stinky" was about to come to the premature end of a journey that had taken the plane, and its cargo, over 16,000 miles. The plane had travelled from the US to the Caribbean, down to Brazil before crossing the South Atlantic to Ascension Island. From there, it crossed to the west coast of Africa at Accra, crossing the continent to Khartoum. From there to Cairo and later to Gibraltar, and it was from the Rock that "Stinky" had set off that January morning for an airbase in England.

Navigation was, quite literally, a fairly hit and miss affair for bombers in World War II. It’s often forgotten that the RAF’s original intention for bombing missions during the war was to attack targets such as rail yards, factories and ports using precision bombing missions only. Unfortunately, they soon found that they couldn’t hit much, even on a clear day. In cloudy conditions, or at night, and flying high enough to avoid at least some anti-aircraft fire, the bombs could land anywhere, and often did. So they switched to what became known as carpet bombing. One of the problems was that it was hard for a pilot or navigator to tell exactly where the plane was. There was no radar to speak of on board, and it would be decades before GPS and satellite technology would be available (both made possible, ironically, by the Nazis’ attempt to design a weapon even more fearsome than carpet bombing – the V2). A navigator on a plane plotted his journey much like a navigator on a ship – using a compass, charts and carefully measuring speed. Both the Allies and the Germans erected radio beacons that transmitted signals that navigators could use to find out where they were – they weren’t precise but they did help navigators tell one country from another.

On January 15, 1943, Collins couldn’t pick up any radio signal that would tell him where he was. Instead, he could see farmland below – green fields that could be anywhere in northwestern Europe. Gloomily, the pilot and captain decided, since they were hopelessly lost, they would use up fuel until they they were ready to crash land and take their chances. The important part of crashlanding is not the land part but the crash part. The first step was to get rid of anything that would burn on impact; i.e. the fuel. This involved flying round and round in circles until the tanks were nearly dry. Usually, any remaining bombs would be dropped too, but Stinky wasn’t carrying any. The plane would be travelling at seventy miles an hour as it touched down – not a problem if it was landing on tarmac or a flat grassy strip, but potentially fatal in rough terrain or at sea. By the time the captain, Thomas Hulings, had burned enough fuel to attempt a landing, the crew had figured out that they were near Galway Bay. So he just needed to find a field…

Now, there were no shortage of fields in east Galway, but most of them had been planted with giant wooden stakes to prevent exactly what the Stinky crew were planning – landing a plane (well, the stakes were to prevent a lot of planes landing, such as a battalion of glider-borne SS paratroopers, for example). Hulings did identify a field that hadn’t been staked and picked that as his landing strip. Technically, it was two fields since there was a rather solid stone wall running across it; a feature that would liven up the landing a bit. As the plane came in to land, it clattered into the wall, instantly resolving the question of whether the undercarriage would sink into the field. The plane landed on its belly and ploughed its way across the field, remaining intact until it stopped.

Inside, the crew and their passengers were unhurt, though probably well shaken. Ten hours after they had boarded in Gibralter, they pushed open a hatch and stepped out into one of the fields of Athenry. The B-17 had a full crew of 10 as well as a very special cargo – a number of top-ranking US Generals that had spent the previous month (and sixteen thousand miles) auditing the progress and status of the Allied military campaign in North Africa. Oh, and one more thing. They were stopping in the UK to check on the progress of a military operation that had been planned for a year. It was called Operation round-up and it would be another 18 months before it would be executed. By then, it had been renamed, to Overlord.

One can only imagine the misery of the senior crew. They had only been assigned to Stinky in Gibraltar. I’d say Collins was particularly gloomy – earlier in the journey, one of the Generals had advised him, against his own judgement to veer west of Brest in France – a path that took them away from England. When the backseat driver was a general, there wasn’t much he could do. The name of the general was Jacob Devers, the most senior of the passengers on the plane.

Devers had graduated from West Point in the same year as George Patton and had excelled in a number of administrative positions earlier in the war. After he got back to the US following the Athenry crash, he was put in charge of training the one million troops required for the invasion of northern Europe - Overlord. Ironically, his former classmate Patton was ‘put in charge’ of a phantom army in southern England in order to deflect German attention from the real invasion force. Devers didn’t get a chance to lead those men into battle – Eisenhower was given the command of the invasion, and Devers took Ike’s old job commanding the forces in the Mediterranean. This command took him through the battles in Italy, France and Germany, and he accepted Kesselring’s surrender in 1945.

In all, there were four generals on the plane. Apart from Devers, there was Edward Hale Brook, a veteran of WWI. His 2nd Armoured Division landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day and fought their way through northern France – later he commanded an Army Corp during the ‘Battle of the Bulge’. There was also the splendidly named Williston Birkhimer Palmer – he commanded troops during the post D-Day battles in France in WWII and also in the Korea War. He shares a headstone in Arlington National Cemetery with his brother – they were both 4-star generals. There was also William Sexton who also was involved in the battle for Germany after D-Day.. Finally, there was Gladeon Marcus Barnes who later led the ENIAC project – one of the first modern computers.

When the Americans emerged from the crashed plane, they were met by a contingent of the Local Defence Forces (the auxiliary force of the Irish Army). The crew surrendered their weapons (they had, after all, crashed in a neutral country) and brought to a local hotel until regulars from the Irish Army arrived. By the end of the day, they had been transported over the border to Beleek, and the next day, they resumed their work in England. Moving the plane was another matter.

All news of the plane crash was censored, and a unit of the army from Galway were despatched to hack the plane apart. However, the plane had crashed in the grounds of the Agricultural college through which the main rail line to Dublin ran, as it still does today. It is said that the drivers of the Dublin-Galway trains would slow down to give all the passengers a good look (I suspect this is just a yarn – the landing site is close to the station so the trains would have been trundling along slowly in any case). The local tinkers were delighted and apparently did a roaring trade in aluminium buckets as did the cook from the field kitchen set up to feed the troops scrapping the plane. Plenty of locals turned up at the kitchen too, and when he got through all the rations a little too quickly, he was sent back to barracks.

The story of how Stinky ended up in an Athenry pasture is told in a book called “Eagles over Ireland”* which was written by local man, Paul Browne. He has given a couple of public lectures on both the story and how it was researched and it was at one of them that I learned the story (and bought a copy of the book). The book was written in advance of the 60th anniversary of the crash, and was intended to do two things; research the tale and record the memories of the locals who witnessed it, and also to use the story to boost local tourism. Apart from the local input, the families of the Generals were very generous – sending over irreplaceable souvenirs such as medals, flags and other paraphernalia. I forgot to ask the obvious question during the lecture – did the entire crew survive the war? The book only mentions the pilots. The pilot, Hulings, lived to a ripe old age. The co-pilot, James McLaughlin, is still alive – he survived 40 missions before returning home to set up and command the West Virginia Air National Guard. Now a retired politician and active businessman, he got married again four years ago. He is 86.

The book has a lot of other stories, and sets the story of the crash against the history of the war and the contribution of the men who flew in Stinky on that January journey. “Stinky” (with a different crew) had flown on one of the first bombing missions by the USAF during WWII – bombing the French in Rouen, as it happened**. Its final mission carried some of the men that would play a significant part in ending the war. The book also contains the reports that Devers had compiled on the earlier part of his survey mission. There is a display in the town museum of some of the artefacts collected during the research for the book. However, let me make a suggestion – if Athenry wants to attract more visitors, why not build a full-scale replica of the Flying Fortress near the rail line in the town?

* There’s no ISBN number but I think the book shops in Galway have copies. Only 1,000 were printed.
** Another bomber of that mission was piloted by Paul Tibbet, who would later lead a mission that helped end the war in the Pacific – the bombing of Hiroshima.

Posted by Monasette at January 15, 2005 11:57 PM