Seeking a Memory

Why do 15,000 stateside military deaths during World War II remain largely forgotten?

Lake Ontario, the inland body separating upstate New York from Ontario Canada, is deep, wide, and brimming with legend. Submerged secrets include a British Revolutionary War ship that sank with its crew in 1780 and a top-secret Cold War defense project abruptly scuttled in the late 1950s. Among these intrigues, it’s said, is an American B-24 bomber and crew lost at the height of World War II and missing to this day.

Growing up in a small family cottage located on the southeast shore of the lake, I sometimes wondered about this ghost ship, purportedly somewhere offshore from where I fished, swam, and took in the view. The B-24 story made for a compelling tale around the campfire, but seemed a little farfetched to me. I grew up with the notion that World War II was fought in Europe, the Pacific and, to a lesser degree, off the Atlantic coast. But then again, my impression of home front history at the time was derived largely from a collection of Life magazines from my grandmother’s attic and grade school lessons of Rosie the Riveter, War Bonds, and Victory Gardens. No part of the curriculum dealt with domestic military plane accidents, although maybe it should have.

That was in the 1960s. Decades later, as a working journalist, I began checking into the mystery plane. Several Freedom of Information requests to various defense agencies turned up archival material that identified it, officially, as US Army aircraft 41-29047E. Newspaper clips from the day referred to the fated craft -- lost with a crew of eight somewhere over upstate New York during a whiteout on February 18 1944 -- as “Getaway Gertie.”

So it was true. And there was more: Gertie’s demise, it turned out, was hardly a singular event. During the three years and nine months that America was involved in World War II, fifteen thousand American airmen, and sometimes women, died in stateside training accidents.

But how was it that, after all these years, Getaway Gertie and crew were still missing? And why was a story that flourishes in oral accounts at bars, bait shops and diners conspicuously missing from official plaques and displays commemorating lakeshore history found so routinely at regional parks and museums? Was this due to my ignorance of home front history, or had this chapter of World War II had been essentially overlooked, or simply forgotten?

For answers, I turned first to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency – known for its high-profile missions to find and recover remains of veterans, most famously those lost overseas in the Korean War, World War II, and Vietnam. The email response I received from Public Affairs Officer Sean P. Everette, didn’t exactly clear things up:

DPAA only does search and recovery operations from the warzones of our various conflicts, and the only parts of the U.S. considered part of any warzone are Hawaii and Alaska during WWII. That said, we don't really track those who were lost in the U.S. other than those two states for that specific war.

While the US military lacks incentive to find the plane, I learned that an eclectic assortment of enthusiasts have been quietly searching for it on and off for the last 50 years with a focus sometimes bordering on obsession. These people, and the inside story about the lost crew and plane, are detailed in my latest book, Vanishing Point, now available in bookstores and online in print, e-book and audio formats.

Meantime, the story continues. Please look for periodic updates at this site.