Continuing with my series of posts on the story of the lady be good.
Toner's Diary:
FRIDAY, April 9, 1943
Shelley, Rip, Moore separate and try to go for help, rest of us all very weak, eyes bad. Not any travel, all want to die, still very little water. nites are about 35, good N. wind, no shelter, 1 parachute left.
Ripslinger's Diary:
FRIDAY, April 9, 1943
5th day out & we all thought we're gone. All wanted to die during noon it was so hot. Morn & nite okay. 2 drops of water!
Walker's book contains a reference that even at rest, the airmen would have been losing 2 quarts of water through dehydration every six hours in the 130°F heat. That's over 54°C. I only recall a couple of days where for sure it got over 50°C (120°F) and that was because the thermometer at the airstrip we were working at only went up to 50°C, after which aircraft could not operate – because they no longer knew how hot it was to calculate lift, etc. for takeoff and landing. Martinez quotes from a report filed by the RAF Desert Rescue Team mission in April of 1968, that collected samples from the wreck for technical testing, that daytime temperatures were 20-30°C (68-86°F) which is much closer to what I remember.
Popular weight loss sites often state that the average daily calorie intake for an adult male to maintain his weight is 2,500. Eat more you gain weight, eat less and you lose. A deficit of 500 calories per day will lead to a loss of about one pound per week. So, they would have been losing about 10 pounds in weight per day. By day five they would have lost around 50 pounds of body weight! The relationship probably breaks down somewhere but assuming they were around 150 pounds, by this time they would have lost about a third of their weight! That they made it this far is truly remarkable. Doubtless this dramatic weight loss would also have affected the way that they experienced temperature.
In the fall of 1990 I got to make my first visit to the wreck and in the spring of 1991 my second and last visit. Had I had a digital camera back then I would have taken lots more photos but at the time I used slide film and I had to carry that in one each trip and make my stash of film last ten weeks so I rationed myself.
Below is an image of the nose of the lady be good from 1990. In the bottom right corner where the skin is all bent up you can make out a white ‘6' from the number 64. Below the windows of the cockpit there's a scar where the word ‘good' has been cut out. See the photo in my Lady Be Good – Day 2 post. To the left of the photo are the remains of the top turret. I never took any photos of the top turret for reasons now I don't understand.
Below, one of my colleagues poses for a photo in the remains of the cockpit. Note the featureless plain. As the sun came up on April 5th, this is the landscape that the crew would have seen which explains (to me) why they stuck to the vehicle tracks that had come across. A ‘Walking “Timeline” Calculator' on the website www.ladybegood.net suggests that sometime after dawn on Day 2, the crew came across another set of vehicle tracks crossing the tracks they were following. One can only imaging what discussions they had at that point. Again, someone must have been navigating and someone must have been leading as the crew decided to strike out on a heading of 325°, away from both sets of tracks and across something very much like this:
Below is a closeup view inside the remains of the cockpit. Walker reports that when the RAF Desert Rescue Team visited in 1968, the plane had already been stripped of virtually every toggle switch by souvenir hunters in the intervening 8 years since the wreck was found. All that remained in 1990 was the airframe and parts of the wiring loom.
Below is another photo of the wiring loom in the cockpit.
On the inside wall of the starboard side of the cockpit was this fuse box. The circular item I assume to have been part of an internal communication system as a similar item can be seen on the ceiling of the tail gun turret.
Now here's a detail I find interesting. According to the 1968 RAF DRG report (Martinez), the engines were separated from the aircraft but in the correct relative positions. Except they can not have been. In the photos taken when the lady be good was discovered in 1959 (see my Lady Be Good – Day 1 post) the No.4 engine was clearly the one ripped off when the pilot-less Lady Be Good crashed. Yet in my photos and in a photo of the wreck attributed in Walker to the RAF in 1968, there is an engine in the No.4 relative position.
Martinez quotes from the RAF DRG report by Flight Lieutenant B. Sellers that, “The four engines were found lying in their correct relative positions but separated from the wings. Little was left of the starboard inner engine, but the other three were more or less complete.”
The only possible answer is that someone in the intervening years had moved them for some reason known only to themselves as the initial photos of the wreck clearly show the starboard inner engine to have been in relatively good shape in 1959, and in the right place.
Thus, the engine below is actually the beat up remains of the No.4 engine, even though it is in the relative position of the No.3 engine.
Below is a shot of the underside of the starboard wing. The looped wires on the trailing edge of the wing are the control surface wires that ran aound various pulleys and move the flaps and ailerons as the pilot moved the levers in the cockpit.
Below, one o my colleagues gets down off the fuselage. To the right are the two hatches where Sheriden and Martin found sea survival kits including four pints of water and sea survival gear, including a radio and aerial. I can't help but wonder how the story would have ran had the crew taken a chance at landing rather than baling out. They would have had everything they would have needed to call in a rescue aircraft or help those who searched for them in the days following but who turned back what appears to have been 40 miles too soon.
Below, one of my colleagues contemplates the ‘office' of tail gunner Staff Sergeant Samuel R. Adams. In the base of the gun turret are the guides for feeding ammunition to the machine guns. In the ceiling another of those circular electrical components similar to the one shown in the cockpit photo above which leads me to think it was part of the internal communication system. While it's possible the damage to the fuselage above the gun turret was caused in the crash, I think it more likely that someone tried (and failed) to separate the gun turret as a souvenir.
Inside the tail gun turret were some labels, below. The top one informs of some form of release mechanism or process for the seat while the lower one seems to be machine gun loading instructions.
The label below was on the horizontal bar partially obscuring my colleague's face in the image above.
(Unreadable) OPERA (missing) IN POWER
WITH QUICK DISTINCTIVE MOVEM
DO NOT TURN OFF SWITCHES
IMMEDIATELY AFTER TURNING
I don't know about you but I'm asking, “Why not? What if I did turn off the switches immediately after turning?” If anyone knows, please comment.
Below is one of my favorite photos of the Lady Be Good – the starboard tail. The fabric control surface was still partially intact when found in 1959 but had been stripped off by man and nature by the time of the RAF DRG team visit in 1968. This is possibly the clearest view of the different paint layers – the Olive Drab over the aluminum and the Desert Pink over the Olive Drab. The yellow serial number would have been the original painted on the Olive Drab. This is because the Desert Pink is clearly painted over the yellow numbers. Slightly above the yellow numbers you can see faint outlines of the serial number that would have been painted over the top of the Desert Pink.
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:
