The Bomber Found in the Desert

April 4, 1943

When the B-24 bomber Lady Be Good failed to return to its base in Libya in April 1943, the Army assumed it had gone down in the Mediterranean. Fifteen years later, oil prospectors flying over the Libyan desert spotted a bomber sitting on the sand, hundreds of miles from the sea, remarkably well preserved.

A lost first mission

The US National Archives and the Army Quartermaster Museum both say Lady Be Good left Soluch, an airstrip near Benghazi, on 4 April 1943 with a crew of nine on its first combat mission, a raid on Naples. The Quartermaster Museum says it turned back before reaching the target. It never landed. It flew past its base into the desert.

Found in the sand

Both sources say British geologists working for the D'Arcy Oil Company (later part of British Petroleum) spotted the wreck from the air in 1958; they differ on the month (the Quartermaster Museum says May, the National Archives says November), and a ground team reached it in 1959. Smithsonian's Air & Space magazine quotes a 1959 report of water still drinkable, and guns and radios still working. No bodies were at the wreck.

The walk

The crew had bailed out as fuel ran out. In February 1960, the National Archives says, oil workers found the remains of five crewmen; co-pilot Robert Toner's diary showed they had walked north for days with almost no water. Smithsonian quotes one of his last entries: 'Still waiting for help, still praying.' The bombardier, John Woravka, whose parachute had not opened properly, was found in August 1960. The remains of the ninth man, Vernon Moore, have never been found.

Legacy

The Quartermaster Museum calls the aircraft miraculously preserved by the desert. Lady Be Good became a symbol of the war's lost crews, and its story shows how a navigation error over featureless desert could turn into a slow tragedy.

Further reading

• National Archives: Lost and found, the story of Lady Be Good
• US Army Quartermaster Museum: The Lady Be Good story

Sources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Be_Good_(aircraft)
• https://unwritten-record.blogs.archives.gov/2017/06/16/lost-and-found-the-story-of-lady-be-good-and-her-crew/
• https://qmmuseum.army.mil/research/history-heritage/mortuary-affairs/The-Lady-Be-Good-Story.html
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/world-war-iis-most-famous-ghost-plane-180967012/