Continuing with my series of posts on the story of the Lady Be Good.
Toner's Diary:
SATURDAY, April. 10, 1943
Still having prayer meetings for help. No signs of anything, a couple of birds; good wind from N. Really weak now, can't walk, pains all over, still all want to die. Nites very cold, no sleep.
Ripslinger's Diary:
SATURDAY, April. 10, 1943
Walked all day and night. Suggested Guy, Moore and I make out alone.
No one knows why Toner wrote that Ripslinger, Moore and Shelley separated on the Friday while Ripslinger wrote it on the Saturday. Perhaps Ripslinger ran out of room to write this on the Friday and then added it as an afterthought on the Saturday.
Who were they writing for? Themselves? It's interesting that no ‘last letters' were ever found. Neither used the extra pages in their diaries to write anything to family members or loved ones. Perhaps the thought of that was unbearable.
While Hatton, Toner, Hays, LaMotte and Adams could go no further, Ripslinger, Moore and Shelley set off once more. Presumably one of them took a compass though I've never read of one being found with the remains of either Risplinger or Shelley. They appear to have made a course change, moving off their heading of 325 degrees to a heading closer to 308 degrees. Based on the dunes today, this took them out of the broad valley where their five comrades remained and over the western finger of dunes and on into the sand sea.
The photo below is of me, sitting in an old Bedford RL truck we came across, abandoned in the dunes close to where the remains of the crew members were eventually found. Vauxhaull-Bedford made over 74,000 of these trucks between 1953 and the early 1970s. The one below looks to have been what we would have called a ‘D'-Tanker. I worked on crews that had later Bedford MK versions of the same vehicle. The name came from the cross section of the water tank body. The tank held about 750 imperial gallons of water. The flat top of the tank allowed cargo to be carried in addition to water, adding to the versatility of the truck particularly in the desert where we used them to support near-surface drilling operations and carry drilling mud and other supplies.
This one, however, had ground to a halt many years before and the dunes were slowly swallowing it. I suspect most usable spares were salvaged by whoever abandoned it. The door still opened and closed with ease and the glassless wing mirror was still adjustable.
Note my footsteps leading up from the to the cab from just right of center at the bottom of the frame. This is on the slip face of the dune so the sand is much softer. I'm on the eastern side of this dune so in this general area, Ripslinger, Shelley, and Moore would have had to climb up the soft face of the dunes they encountered which takes a lot more energy then descending.
The prevailing wind constantly pushes the sand up the slope of a dune to the crest. At some point, the crest becomes unstable and breaks away under its own weight and the sand avalanches down the opposite side – the slip face – until the slip face reaches the angle required for the dune to become stable once more. This is usually about 30 to 35 degrees from vertical when standing at the base – a pretty steep climb in other words. When walking, the angle of the climb can be lessened by climbing on the diagonal but that lengthens the distance of the climb in the softer sand.
Below is the same Bedford RL some four to six months earlier. Notice that there is much more of the truck showing in this earlier photo. It's possible that the varying wind over the years partially covers and uncovers this abandoned vehicle. Today it might be completely submerged in a wave of sand, only to emerge again in the future. The wooden peg is one of our seismic survey markers.
The image below gives a better sense of what Ripslinger, Shelley, and Moore were now trying to cross. At this time of day, with the sun high in the sky, the lack of contrast makes the shape of the dunes, the hills and the valleys, hard to make out. The cluster or wires in front of the Bedford RL truck is a geophone array. We used to circle the peg like this if there was too much elevation change across the normal pattern.
The photo below was taken as we were scouting a way to get our seismic crew out of the concession. We had come in across the dunes and that had been time consuming and very hard on the vehicles and equipment. I wanted to find a faster and easier way out and felt that driving North through the valleys might be more productive, and it was. In the end we saved several weeks through this approach. You can see that we didn't have the best day for this scouting trip. The marker on the right marks a pipeline laid through the sand sea to move oil from the Sarir fields to the coast. Notice from the tire tracks that on the valley floors and on the windward side of the dunes the sand is quite firm. I would say that walking on this was little different to walking on maintained grass such as a soccer pitch. This was always the reward after climbing up a slip face.
Still in the sand sea, North of where the remains of the crew were found, note how featureless this area is when the visibility shuts down. I wouldn't call this a sand storm per se, just a blustery day where the sand was kicking up and hanging in the air. Ripslinger didn't comment on the weather they encountered in the dunes – probably because in his diary the amount of space reserved for Saturday and Sunday entries was about half that available for the other week days.
Below are some more of my images of the wreckage of the Lady Be Good. Directly below is the Number 1 engine as we found it in late 1990. Note also how the leading edge of the wing has been taken apart over the years.
Below, one of my colleagues examines the Number 1 engine more closely. You can see it has been separated from the wing. This separation had occurred sometime between 1960 and 1968 as the RAF Desert Rescue Group found all the engines separated when they went to recover samples and the Number 2 engine for McDonnell-Douglas. You can see where the Number 2 engine would have been fixed to the wing and also quite clearly the hatch in the roof of the fuselage where the sea survival gear was found by Sheridan and Martin.
While I chose a 3 inch x 4 inch section of the wing skin as my souvenir, my colleague liberated this spark plug from the Number 1 engine as his souvenir. We felt quite certain from our visual inspection that if we applied the right voltage, it would still spark.
Below is a view of the star on the port side of the fuselage and the waist gun port. The flap was to deflect the airflow past the open window. I can't even begin to image what it must have been like, standing by those open windows at altitudes of 25,000 feet or more.
Below the starboard tail plane was perhaps the largest expanse of the fuselage that still had paint on it in 1990-90. You can see below some of the remaining Desert Pink but mostly the underlying Olive Drab. Over the years various visitors had scratched their names into the paint. Someone from Tripoli visited on 6/3/1964. Tam Smith of the RAF Desert Rescue based at El Adem visited on 25 March, 1963 (20 years too late). Someone with the last name of Maglin, 10th Special Forces Group (ABN) visited on 24 May 1965. Howard visited on 3/18/71 and someone else on 25/12/76 – an interesting way to spend Christmas Day. (While I learned a few Arabic phrases I never learned to read it so I can't translate the Arabic graffiti.) I wonder how the visitors in the mid sixties found the wreck and if any of them were involved in separating he engines, dragging the tail section across the desert, severing the port tailplane, etc.
Below, yet more names scratched in the paing below the starboard tailplane. Sandy Espey, W. Grant, V. Villanueva, someone who visited on 5 October 1975, M. I. Robinson, Vic Ware, 21 March 1963, c/o Union Jack Club, London, England. (The Union Jack Club still exists and is the ‘Premier Armed Force Club in London.) May they all R.I.P. I'm no handwriting expert but there's enough similarities in the letters to make me think that phrase was carved by Mr. Ware.
I'm pretty sure that, like myself, these people all took a little bit of the Lady Be Good away with them, doubtless much of it now tossed into landfills around the world.
More images to come in my next post.
I have a photo book containing several of my images of the Lady Be Good available through Blurb, below:
