The men are cold. Outside the airplane, the temperature is about 5 degrees. Inside, it’s no warmer.
Normally, the crew would be wearing heated flight suits. But this is wartime and the men are on a training mission. Soldiers flying combat missions get first shot at the heated suits and there aren’t enough for everyone in training.
To take the chill off, the crew uses an old aviation trick. They descend, dropping the plane from the standard training altitude of 8,000 feet to 4,000, which raises the temperature inside about 12 degrees. It’s a safe enough maneuver. Nothing in their flight path is above 4,000 feet.
Most of the men stay in their seats, huddled over their instruments. One, the top turret gunner, wanders into the tail section to catch a nap. It’s almost 1 in the morning.
Slowly, imperceptibly, the plane strays from its intended path.
The men are in the home stretch of a three-hour mission. As the plane cruises above the Vermont countryside, perhaps they find time to chat briefly about what they’ll do next time they get leave. Maybe they glance out the windows to check their bearings. Not much to see, though. It’s a moonless night and most of the homes in the valley below are blacked out.
There is no way they can see the mountain looming dead ahead.
‘There has got to be more to this’
Brian Lindner stumbled upon the wreckage in 1963. He was 11 years old and making his first climb up Camel’s Hump. Having grown up in the Waterbury-Stowe area, Lindner had somehow missed the local legends about the tragic bomber crash.
He’d been hiking up the 4,083-foot-tall peak when he suddenly glimpsed a silvery wing. A 30-to-40-foot-long section lay tucked among the stunted spruce trees that huddle below the mountain’s south face.
“I was just fascinated by it,” he recalls. “Even as an adult that seems like a pretty big piece of wreckage; as an 11-year old, it seemed humongous.”
Discovering the remains of an airplane on a mountainside was bizarre, but the explanations he got about what had happened were stranger still.
“Nobody I turned to at that age seemed to be able to tell me for sure,” says Lindner, now a gray-haired, recent retiree who continues to pursue his passion for local history.
Everyone had a different story.
“Oh, it was a B-52,” someone told him. “It was a Nazi spy plane,” someone else said. Another person thought it had been a cargo plane.
None of the answers made sense.
“Even at age 11, I said this can’t be true,” Lindner recalls. “There has got to be more to this.”
During 60 years since that day, he has been discovering just how much more. With the instincts and tenacity of an investigative reporter, Lindner has been piecing together the story of why this plane crashed, how it was found, and who the men on board were.
In a way, his research started that day on the mountain. When people couldn’t answer his questions, they pointed him to newspaper clippings on the crash compiled by the Boy Scout troop in his hometown of Waterbury.
There he learned the basic facts: The plane, a B-24 Liberator bomber, had taken off in October 1944 from Westover Field in Chicopee, Massachusetts, on a training mission that somehow ended with it smashing into Camel’s Hump. Nine crewmembers had been killed instantly in the crash. Miraculously, the 10th, the napping gunner, survived.
“I read that and said, boy, this is a great story,” Lindner says. But some things didn’t add up. “A lot of stories said the sole survivor had been riding in the left wing. That was the one that really caught my attention first.” The writers had gotten that wrong. The survivor must have been somewhere else, he knew even then, because the B-24’s wings were full of aviation fuel.
“What’s the story here?” Lindner remembers thinking. “What happened here?”
The questions gnawed at him. During high school, Lindner found himself regularly spending weekends hiking to the crash site with friends, looking for clues. Then, on July 4, 1976, Lindner was climbing Camel’s Hump with his first wife to watch the fireworks in the communities below as they celebrated America’s bicentennial. As he neared the summit, there in the path ahead was the co-pilot’s armor-plated seat.
“It was a shocking to see that lying there,” Lindner says. “I had spent countless hours in the woods with my buddies and never seen that. That we missed it is amazing.”
If finding the wing had made Lindner curious, seeing the co-pilot’s seat made him borderline obsessed.
“That was really a spark,” he says. If there was more wreckage still out there, there must also be more information, and Lindner was determined to find it. “I looked at that seat and said two things: If I don’t do this research, nobody else will. And the people who participated in this event are starting to die, so my time is limited.”
Calling in the cadets
The temperature drops into the low 20s as Jimmy Wilson lies unconscious, cocooned inside the tail section of the smashed plane. The rest of the airplane is shattered and scattered across the snowy flank of the mountain. The search for survivors won’t start until morning.
At first light, military and Civil Air Patrol personnel throughout the Northeast begin the hunt. They know the procedure; this is an all-too-familiar task. Westover Field alone has lost three bombers on training missions in recent months.
Search planes scour the hills and valleys around Burlington, the B-24’s last-known location. Low cloud cover prevents them from searching mountaintops. When the clouds finally lift on the second day, the crew of an Army airplane spots the crash site on the southeast corner of the mountain at 2:30 p.m.
Someone, however, makes a mistake plotting the site’s map coordinates, and the Army dispatches a search party to the mountain’s west side. Major William Mason, director of Civil Air Patrol operations in Vermont, catches the error and tries to explain it to the Army captain directing the search, but the captain dismisses the claim.
So Mason calls his son, Peter, a senior at Waterbury High School, and tells him to gather other Civil Air Patrol cadets at the school to search the mountain. They’ll find the plane, even if the Army can’t.
Seven young cadets, accompanied by a local doctor and two other men, race up a steep trail toward the summit in the fading daylight. Even if survivors have somehow endured two cold nights on the mountain, they might not survive a third.
The sun sets, but the cadets keep searching. They must be close. Finally, in the growing gloom, they smell the reek of aviation fuel and stumble upon a scene of devastation. Splintered trees and airplane parts lie strewn across the hillside.
Then they hear a noise, a voice, and frantically scurry down a steep embankment to find it. In seconds, they come upon the remains of the fuselage. And there, lying against it, is a dazed Jimmy Wilson.
‘It took 23 years’
Brian Lindner had little to work with when he began studying the crash, just a brief Army accident report and a few contradictory newspaper articles.
The research became an obsession for him. When he wasn’t working as a manager for the National Life insurance company in Montpelier, he was busy writing letters to people involved in the incident, interviewing rescuers, digging for long-lost government documents, analyzing photographs and locating the spot on Camel’s Hump’s south face where the plane first struck.
He spoke with Jimmy Wilson, and they eventually became friends. He spoke with the local doctor who first treated Wilson. He spoke with the widows and parents of the crash victims. He even spoke with the young Army dentist whose grim job it was to identify the remains.
And, off and on for more than two decades, he badgered military administrators for a photograph of the actual B-24 taken before it crashed.
“At one point, I got a letter from the Secretary of the Air Force saying, ‘Stop bothering all of our various offices. We do not have a picture of this plane,’” Lindner says while talking in a National Life conference room, which, appropriately, has a stunning view of Camel’s Hump.
“It took 23 years, but I found a photograph of this plane, and it’s sitting on the runway at Westover Field, Massachusetts,” he says, a triumphant smile spreading across his face.
Lindner took a first stab at telling the story in 1978 when he self-published his manuscript. In the four and a half decades since then, however, he has continued to uncover details about the event.
The men who died
Perhaps most absorbing to Lindner has been the information he has discovered about the men who died that night. Lindner has spent so much time with the men that it seems like he knows them personally. When he talks of them, he sounds proud of them. “It’s amazing what these guys did” in their short lives, he says.
The engineer, Luther Napoleon Hagler, 21, had invented a rice-harvesting machine and made a good living renting it to farmers in his native Arkansas. After the war, he planned to use the money to study agriculture in college.
David Potter, the pilot, was the old man of the crew at age 30. Early in the war, he’d served with the Royal Canadian Air Force because the U.S. military wasn’t then accepting pilots who wore glasses. A Canadian veteran who knew him told Lindner that Potter was “the safest pilot on planet Earth.” Lindner even saw Potter in a movie once. Potter flew a plane in a scene from the movie “Lassie,” which was filmed while he was in Canada.
Two other crewmembers had brushes with fame, but didn’t live to realize it. The navigator, Bob Geoffroy, worked at an engineering firm in Illinois where he became acquainted with a co-worker named Ronald Reagan. And ball turret gunner Bob Denton had a friend named Issur Danielovitch, who shared his passion for acting. Danielovitch would later change his name to the more American-sounding Kirk Douglas.
For all his probing, Lindner has yet to track down the name of the man who could have died with the crew that night, or perhaps prevented the accident. An instructor pilot was on the plane moments before takeoff, but superiors ordered him off, presumably because an experienced pilot like Potter didn’t need his help.
The lone survivor
Lindner was particularly taken with the only crewmember to survive the crash, Jimmy Wilson. Lindner tracked him down in Denver, where Wilson was practicing law, and the two visited together several times before Wilson died in 2000.
Through their conversations, Lindner learned that Wilson’s ordeal was only beginning when rescuers found him. As he was recovering in the hospital, a doctor told him matter-of-factly that he’d lose his hands and feet to frostbite.
The doctor said, “You’re never going to amount to anything; just get used to the idea.”
Wilson lay in his bed and cried. Then he realized what he had to do. “I decided to prove the S.O.B. wrong,” he told Lindner. “I wish I could track that guy down now, because I’d like to go see him.”
Lindner admired Wilson for his grit and humor. When they met, Wilson greeted Lindner by offering one of his metal hooks to shake. It was Wilson’s way of saying his handicap was no big deal. Even as prosthetics advanced, and natural-looking hands were developed, Wilson insisted on keeping the hooks he’d been given a half-century before. He was used to them.
Besides, having hooks wasn’t that bad, he’d joke. They meant you never had to buy potholders.
“This guy was a very quiet hero with the things he did after this crash,” Lindner says. “He graduated from college, graduated from law school, became an attorney, a very successful attorney, had kids, had a family, did the whole thing. And he never complained, never complained.”
Families left in the dark
Despite his obsession with the crash, Lindner has not forgotten that the story is even more important for another group of people, the relatives of the crewmembers. His research provided family members answers they had waited decades to hear.
“The families never knew what happened,” he says. “They got four telegrams. They got one saying your son or husband is missing. They got a second telegram saying the bomber he was on has been found; rescue operations are in progress. A third telegram saying your son or husband is dead. And another telegram saying his body is coming home.”
The Army provided no more details, but it had little else to offer. In the midst of World War II, the deaths of young men were tragically common and the Army found little time to investigate.
The Army even accidentally left one of the bodies behind on the mountain. Lindner unearthed the story of how two local men found the perfectly preserved body of the airman while hiking on Camel’s Hump in search of the wreck the following April, and how the Army tried to conceal the discovery.
The parents of Richard Wynne thought they had already buried their son. The Army, leaving out the role of the hikers, said it had found “additional remains” of their son. In fact, the Wynnes had buried the misidentified remains of another man or men, but they were never told that.
An Army official ordered the hikers to keep the incident quiet, which amazingly they did, even though one of them owned the local newspaper.
That didn’t stop the story from circulating. The officers assigned to retrieve the body had called their superiors on a party-line telephone in Duxbury. People eavesdropped on the call and the story entered the local rumor mill, where Lindner heard it years later and then tracked down the relevant declassified documents.
If not for Lindner, the crash victims might have been almost completely forgotten, like so many of the dead of past wars. “In a way, I feel I have brought these guys back,” he says.
One group that never forgot the men is their relatives. Lindner met many of them at a ceremony in 1989 marking the 45th anniversary of the crash. The event drew 15 or 20 family members, including two of the crewmen’s mothers who cried when local veterans dedicated a plaque to the men at the base of the mountain where they died.
“Many people can tell you that World War II ended in 1945,” Lindner says. “But having met these families, and particularly the mothers of these crewmen, I can now say that World War II isn’t over until the last close relative of these guys is dead.”
Maybe Lindner should include himself among the mourners. The Camel’s Hump crash happened nearly 80 years ago, but Lindner still feels the tragic weight of it — the good men lost, the freakish string of events that made it possible.
Perhaps heaviest to bear is that Lindner knows how close the accident came to not happening.
In his research, he learned that the plane nicked Camel’s Hump with the very tip of its left wing. “If they’d been 18 inches to the right, they would have gone right by it and never known,” Lindner says. “There is nothing else that high in front of them the rest of the way.”
