DUANE
Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Six-oh-five in the morning. Friday, April 20th, 1945.
Twenty-five Army Air Corps officers and enlisted men lifted off from Midland Army Air Field, bound for Berry Army Air Field in Nashville, Tennessee. Up front, First Lieutenant James A. Bailey had the controls as pilot.
Captain John R. Rawls rode beside him as co-pilot. And keeping that C-47 transport running was the flight engineer, Sergeant William H.
Edwards. Now — here's a detail that'll sit with you — that morning was Sergeant Edwards' 36th birthday. Behind them in the cabin: eight officers and fourteen enlisted men.
Soldiers headed somewhere. Maybe home, maybe a new posting, maybe something they'd been looking forward to for a long time. We don't know.
The marker doesn't say. What it does say is that they were up there in the Texas sky, and they were in trouble. Two Sweetwater cab drivers spotted it first.
A plane on fire. In mid-air. They flagged down their dispatcher, who got word to authorities at nearby Avenger Field.
Then, at 6:30 a.m., a crash landing message came from the plane itself. The crew knew. They were fighting it.
Now here's the thing that makes you go quiet for a second — another C-47, flying just a few minutes behind that doomed aircraft, never encountered a problem. A few minutes. The same sky, the same route, and nothing.
The difference between those two flights is the kind of thing you can't explain away easy. The crash came down in Nolan County, about six-tenths of a mile from where this marker stands. Afterward, parts of the plane were found on a straight line almost two miles from the crash site.
Two miles. That tells you something about the violence of what happened up there. By ten o'clock that same morning, most of the bodies of the victims had been recovered from the smoldering wreckage and taken to funeral homes in Abilene and Sweetwater.
The soldiers' ages ranged from 20 to 37. When it was all over, they went home — to Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Twenty-five men.
Fourteen states and a district. Every one of them somebody's son, somebody's brother, somebody's reason to watch the mailbox. Ten days after the crash, the Army Air Corps Aircraft Accident Classification Board convened to determine the cause.
The regional safety officer's opinion: the craft had encountered a thunderstorm with only one of its two engines running, putting the plane into a roll. And there was more to it than that. The C-47 had logged 4,000 hours of flight time — most of it towing gliders — and the board concluded that kind of wear had probably caused a weakness in the tail, contributing to the plane's disintegration in severe turbulence.
Four thousand hours in the air. A storm. One engine.
A birthday morning that became something else entirely. Twenty-five men flew out of Midland that Friday. The marker is 0.6 miles east of where they came down.
Go slow when you pass it.
What the marker says
(0.6 miles east) At 6:05 a.m. on Friday, April 20, 1945, twenty-five Army Air Corps officers and enlisted men left Midland Army Air Field in a C-47 transport plane en route to Berry Army Air Field in Nashville, Tennessee. The flight crew consisted of the pilot, First Lieutenant James A. Bailey; the co-pilot, Captain John R. Rawls; and the flight engineer, Sergeant William H. Edwards. It was Sergeant Edwards' 36th birthday. Included among the passengers were eight officers and fourteen enlisted men. Two Sweetwater cab drivers spotted the plane on fire in mid-air. They notified their dispatcher, who alerted authorities at nearby Avenger Field. A crash landing message came from the plane itself at 6:30 a.m. Another C-47 flying just a few minutes behind the doomed aircraft never encountered a problem. After the crash, parts of the plane were found on a straight line almost two miles from the crash site. By 10:00 a.m. most of the bodies of the victims had been recovered from the smoldering wreckage and taken to funeral homes in Abilene and Sweetwater. The soldiers, whose ages ranged from 20 to 37, were buried in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington, D. C. Ten days after the crash, the Army Air Corps Aircraft Accident Classification Board met to determine its cause. It was the opinion of the regional safety officer that the craft had encountered a thunderstorm with only one of its two engines running, putting the plane into a roll. The plane's 4,000 hours of flight time, mainly spent towing gliders, probably caused a weakness in the tail and contributed to its disintegration in severe turbulence. (2000)