A B17 Bomber ends up in Athenry
IWM, Roger freeman collection
On Jan 12th, 1943 a B17 bomber crash landed in rural Ireland.
Why would anyone care about this?
To the crew of the B17F number 41-9045 called "Stinky" it must have seemed like a fairly safe gig - instead of bombing missions they were to become an armed transport, making exciting trips around rear areas with important cargo. Unfortunately, the 'important cargo' consisted of four generals on an inspection tour, and that they were going to be the first thing that got inspected every morning.
Their flight back to the UK from Gibraltar went more than a little wrong, and they ended up in a field in Athenry, Co. Galway.
Given that Ireland was a neutral country, and that they were uniformed military officers travelling in a heavily armed bomber, they should have been interned. In practice, Ireland had, for various reasons, got into the habit of letting allied aircrew go, sometimes even taking their aircraft with them. This was part of a broader pattern, where displays of what we now call 'virtue signalling' about neutrality were a front for extensive co-operation with the allies behind the scenes.
While this incident has been extensively researched before, I am looking at it from two what I believe to be original perspectives:
1. Navigation: What went wrong with the navigation? Even by WW2 standards aiming for Cornwall and landing near Galway is unusual?
2. CRM: Did the cargo of high ranking generals help or hinder them?
The three different narratives
While the events after landing are well understood, we have three different descriptions of what went on in the airplane before hand:
- General Devers - the senior officer on board.
- Capt. Kemp McLaughlin - Pilot In Command.
- T/Sgt Laurence Dennis - Radio Operator.
As is common in such situations, all of them have somewhat different recollections, leading to ambiguity about what happened in the last hours of the flight. While the Irish Army has detailed records on the aftermath of the incident, and the Irish Aer Corps an equally detailed file on what happened to the airplane, there's no single, clear explanation about how a flight that was heading from Gibraltar for England ended up on the Atlantic coast of Ireland.
We'll start by looking at the competing narratives:
General Devers
In his report he says
- When the reached land they thought they were "100 miles north" of where they were supposed to be.
- While heading south down the coast of "Wales" they realised they had no clue where they were.
- It was only after landing they found out they were in Ireland.
Brig. Gen Kemp McLaughlin (Pilot In Command)
In his autobiography he says:
- They made landfall and recognised it as the Galway Bay area
- They circled the area and saw peat bogs
- They made a decision to head North into Northern Ireland
- They ran low on fuel and had to land
T/Sgt Laurence E. DENNIS Jr 36048962 (Radio Operator)
- From his perspective, General Devers was engaging in what we'd today call 'micromanagement':
Now my side of the story. I remember this flight very well for a couple of reasons. It was the very first time I was called upon, as a radio operator, to help a navigator determine our location or secure a course.
Most of the time he rode in the nose and bothered the navigator. But he came back to the radio room and asked if I had contacted anyone yet? I told him "no"—his answer. "What the G__ D__ hell kind of radio operator are you??!!" I offered him the headphones but he wouldn't listen—went back up front. I figured it was a bit unusual for an Air Corps radio operator to have his butt chewed out by a Tank Corp general, so I've never forgotten it. We had nothing but rain and fog for 4 or 5 hours on that trip. Static was terrible
Questions raised by the differing narratives
On the one hand you have McLaughhlin stating that he know they were in Galway bay, and were heading to Northern Ireland when they ran low on fuel. McLaughlin states that they flew an extra two hours because Hormell, Dever's aide, was concerned about accidentally overflying France.
On the other hand, you have Devers, who freely admits they were lost but - presumably in the interests of editorial efficiency - neglects to mention the side quest that brought then to Galway Bay. And he gets the date wrong, claiming it was the 12th, when they were delayed in Gibraltar and only left at 0200 on thre 15th.
And then there's T/Sgt Dennis, the radio operator, whose memories raise questions about the decision making processes on the airplane. While they might have been logical in 1943, modern students of CRM (Crew Resource Management) might raise eyebrows about the extent to which the navigator and pilot were being given 'advice' by people who weren't qualified to navigate or fly the aircraft.
This leads us to a question which as far as I can tell nobody has asked:
What do the Look Out Post records say about what they did that day? Where did they go between making landfall and actually landing?
What I found in the archives
I made several visits to to Military Archives in Rathmines, Dublin. During "The Emergency" a series of Look Out Posts ('LOPs') were set up by the Coast Watching Service. Each post consisted of a small brick hut, and was always manned by at least two people, one of whom had binoculars and the other of whom had either a telephone, or a bicycle to get to the nearest telephone with. When something was seen, it was written in a logbook and a message sent to Dublin. As a result we have reasonably detailed knowledge of what was going on on the coast, light and visibility permitting.
Below is a Google Map showing the LOPs:
I therefore went to the archives, and over a series of visits checked every LOP book on the western seaboard to see what was happening on the morning of the 15th January, 1943. I came across multiple sightings of a B17 type aircraft, and was able to plot them on a map. To my knowledge nobody has done this before. It's notable that in the pilots memoir ("The Mighty Eighth in WWII") he refers to making landfall in Galway bay, but leaves out the 'sidequest' revealed by the map.
Sightings of 41-9045 on the morning of 15th Jan, 1943
Below is a Google Map showing sightings and possible route.
- Green Airplane symbols are sightings
- Green Telescopes are observation posts that saw something, Red ones didn't see it and we have no records for the Black ones.
- Yellow circles are police stations that saw the aircraft.
- The thick black line is the assumed route from Gibraltar.
The first sighting was from the Kilronan LOP, at 1000:
"Sighted low winged monoplane 12 miles S. West of post travelling South (Nationality unknown)"
The next sighting from the Leck Head / Doon Point LOP, and is mentioned in the G2 File:
"An American Aircraft first observed at 10.08 hours on 15/1/1943, 7 miles North by LOP. Doon Point moving West"
Then it's seen from Loop Head LOP. It's reported as 1005, but I suspect the timing was a few minutes later:
"Sighted 4 engine single rudder plane 2 miles east of post. Came from the North East going South West. Height about 1000ft, nationality unknown. Visibility moderate"
Next, at 1025 the Eask Head LOP reports:
"Sighted a low winged monoplane 6 miles North of post moving SE altitude 2,000 feet nationality unknown, visibility moderate"
Around the same time the Garda (police) station in Dingle reports the aircraft.
The next sighting is mentioned in the G2 file as being made by Kerry Head (42). The G2 file doesn't mention a specific time.
Then at 1033 Kilreaden Point (44) sees it: "1033 Sighted aircraft 8 miles east of post. Came from the south east, and is moving north with an altitude of about 3,000 feet. Nationality unknown, visibility moderate."
The final LOP sighting was from Black Head (48): "Sighted one high winged, four engined, single ruddered monoplane, 3 miles south east of LOP, travelling North. Height 600 ft. Nationality American. Visability moderate.". Shortly after this the aircraft appears to have turned to the east, and followed the coastline and then keep going on inland, towards Athenry. If they'd continued north the Spidall LOP (49) would have seen them. Heading north east would have taken them over the centre of Galway, which would have been mentioned in the G2 report.
After this they circled over Athenry. By now the crew had been airborne for around 10 hours, were exhausted, low on fuel and didn't know where they were. They had nearly come in sight of both the flying boat base at Foynes and Shannon Airport, but needed to land ASAP. Their problem was that the west of Ireland coast has a lot of small, marshy fields with high stone walls, so finding a landing site was far from easy. Eventually an emergency landing was made in the grounds of an agricultural college just outside the town centre. Below is an excerpt from the OS Map sheet that shows the landing location:
Google Earth view of the location:
How sure am I of this?
We know when the aircraft landed in Athenry. The LOP books and G2 file tell us two things:
- An aircraft matching the description of a B17 showed up in Galway Bay, followed the coast south, came back up and then ended up in Athenry.
- No other relevant aircraft was seen by any of the LOPs I checked at that time of day.
So what can we conclude based on the LOP sightings?
They didn't know they were in Galway Bay when they made landfall. Had they done so, they'd have immediately headed NE into Northern Ireland. They had the fuel, as the mapped route covers 188 Nautical Miles / 350KM.
The fact that they turned South indicates that they may have assumed they were over the west coast of Wales, and that if they followed it south they'd come to the Bristol Channel, which is hard to mistake on a chart. But the view out the window looked nothing like Wales. They were seeing cliffs, coastal mountain ranges and tiny fields with stone walls. While doing this, they came within about 20 nautical miles of Shannon Airport, which at that stage of the war was used by allied transport planes to transfer passengers to and from the flying boat base at Foynes.
It's important to note: We weren't in their shoes, and weren't facing the pressures and stresses that they all faced. And to be honest, by the standards of WW2 navigational mistakes, this was run-of-the-mill.
How could they have got so lost?
Let's look more closely at the navigation involved. From a 21st century perspective ending up so far from where they started is almost incomprehensible. They had a number of navigational techniques available to them, and the navigator would normally combine them to create a picture of where they were. None of them worked well in this case. Their choices were:
Pilotage - navigation by following known landmarks. The flight was over the sea, at night, and they had limited knowledge of the UK and Ireland.
Radio Navigation - Because they were in the middle of a war, radio beacons were only turned on sporadically. In addition, AM band beacons are prone to interference from weather, something which the navigator comments on. No usable radio fixes were obtained. While other viable systems existed, the crew didn't seem to have access to them.
Astral Navigation - Using the stars. Doesn't work as well on a plane as on a ship because a plane moves about twenty times faster across the surface of the earth. It's also dependent on being able to see the stars. We know from the accounts that they were flying at a relatively low level because they had passengers on board, which meant they couldn't try to climb above the cloud deck.
GPS and Inertial Navigation - Didn't exist then.
Dead Reckoning - What they ended up having to use. Starting from a known position, and assuming you have perfect knowledge of the weather and can track you speed and course accurately, you figure out where you should be at certain times. Ideally, you will pass terrain features marked on the chart that will confirm your position, or at least tell you how far off course you are.
If everything works and you have perfect information and perfect execution, the best accuracy you are going to get is within 1-2 degrees of your planned course, or 1-2 nautical miles for every 60 nautical miles flown. The planned trip in question was around 1,000 nautical miles. This implies that if you only had dead reckoning, at the end you'd pass within 16-32 nautical miles of your destination. Sounds great, doesn't it?
But they didn't have perfect information. What they needed was the winds aloft along their course at an altitude of 10,000 feet. The winds aloft are usually much faster than the winds at ground level. And what forecast information they had was just that - a forecast. Then there's the issue of trying to keep a plane on a heading and speed to within 1 degree and 1 knot. For 10 hours. In what were functionally instrument conditions. So the fact that they appear to have been around 100 miles west and 40 miles north of their expected position at the time of their detour isn't that surprising.
What this meant was that when they were told to change the plan, they ended up flying back out into to Atlantic, heading north, and then east, which took them to Galway bay.
What happened next? We have the receipts!
The best web site for the rest of the story is ww2irishaviation.com.
After landing the Irish military took them to the Railway Hotel in Athenry. There they were given a prolonged and liquid-heavy lunch before being driven over the border in the early hours of the next day.
The military intelligence file is "G2 X 1127", which contains the army's paperwork for the crash, can be accessed here. What's interesting about it that while it covers the period after the landing, there is nothing in it that refers to decisions being requested or made about what to do about the bomber load of generals that has just shown up. Either there were phone calls that weren't in the records, or the local troops had standing instructions for this contingency.
There is also the question about what happened to the B17. The relevent Aer Corps file is "ACF/S/154", and can be accessed here. The location was awkward, as it was right next to the main Dublin-Galway railway line and was thus visible to hundreds of people every day.
A lot of the file is spent in heated discussions about lost spanners and other tools:
All in all it took a month to dismantle the aircraft and get it to RAF Langford Lodge.
Further Work
One thing that could be done would be to reconstruct an actual flight plan. We know it left Gibraltar with full tanks, and we know that the Aer Corp recovered 90 gallons of Avgas, which was a precious commodity in Ireland in 1943. Given that the B17 manual has 'book numbers' for a long flight with extra fuel like this one it ought to be possible to fill in the 'middle bit' of the flight plan. How useful this would be is, obviously, open to debate.