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About B-17s
Discovered 55 years after the crash
Tribute to a World War II tail gunner and his recently discovered B-17 crew members
By Peter V. Owens, surviving nephew
On the morning of September 15, 1943, eleven young American crewmen on a B-17F were returning with their 65th Bomb Squadron of the 43rd Bomb Group formation after dropping their bombs on Japanese troops trying to hold Lae, Papua New Guinea. They must have felt some degree of relief having survived the mission, but as they cruised back toward their base at an altitude of 11,500 feet, they flew into an enormous thunderhead. In an attempt to avert the storm cloud, Pilot Lt. Howard G. Eberly "peeled up and out to the left" and was never seen again. A half century later the plane was discovered strewn over a mountainside in the rugged, almost impenetrable Owens Stanley range in Papua New Guinea--one of the wildest, most remote jungle regions in the world.
The saddest piece of information I've discovered is that my Uncle Peter's plane was the last B-17 lost in combat in the Pacific War**, and in all probability, had he survived his final bomb run, he would have been sent home. At the time, the B-17 Flying Fortress was being replaced by B-24 bombers, and the B-17 crews were being sent back to the U.S. after two years of harrowing combat.
Peter's 43rd Bomb Group was shipped out of Boston Harbor in March 1942 aboard the Queen Mary. The elegant liner, converted to a troop ship, sailed to South America and across the south Atlantic, south of Cape Horn in Africa, and ultimately ended up in Sydney, Australia. There were five separate reports that the ship was sunk by German U-boats, none true. When they arrived, they had no planes. B-17s were too big to ship by boat and had to be flown over, their bomb bays loaded with huge portable gas tanks for the very long flight. The crews hung around Sydney, apparently enjoying themselves for some weeks while working to repair planes that had been badly shot up.
But eventually they were shipped north to a tiny little town called Mareeba in northern Australia. They lived in tents at a makeshift air strip, hampered by ferocious biting insects, poisonous snakes, malaria, dengue fever, extremely hot, humid weather and monsoon rains that lasted from November to March. They alternated between Mareeba and Port Moseby on the island of New Guinea several hundred miles to the north. Northern Australia was in great danger at the time. The city of Darwin had been bombed. The Phillipines had been over-run, and the great fear was that Japan would invade Australia. During this time in the war, the Japanese had moved very rapidly throughout the South Pacific, capturing one island after another.
The 43rd Bomb group was quite small, and the missions often involved a half dozen planes or fewer. Their first job was to harass and try to sink Japanese shipping and to prevent the fall of New Guinea. The Japanese did control the City of Lae and entire west coast of the large island. They had air bases loaded with Japanese fighters which regularly attacked the American bombers. Port Moseby was insufferably hot and humid, situated across the Owen Stanley Mountain Range from Lae. It was a bomb run to Lae, probably to hit Japanese shipping, that led to the fatal crash into the mountains during a torrential thunderstorm. Nobody knows why Pete's Captain pulled out of his formation. It could be that his plane was damaged or malfunctioning--a very common, daily occurrence. Possibly they were damaged by lightening. But if a pilot could help it, he did not break out of the formation because there was great safety in numbers.
A small group of closely packed B-17s were very dangerous to attack by Japanese fighter planes because B-17 gunners could cover any angle of attack, and their .50 caliber machine guns could unleash a terribly fearsome wall of death that Japanese pilots frequently acknowledged to be almost impenetrable. So it was both firm tactical strategy and simple self-preservation that kept the B-17s glued into formation. Yet every day damaged and malfunctioning planes drifted or fell out of formation. Cloud formations and severe weather did, sometimes, cause formations to lose cohesion, but the planes were equipped with radar and auto-pilots, so usually they could hold together pretty well in dense clouds.
Flight conditions
The flyers typically were drenched in sweat on the ground, but once they took off, temperatures in their planes dropped to well below zero, as low as forty-degrees below. Although the B-17 was extremely difficult to shoot down and was considered one of the best planes ever built, they were regularly riddled by machine gun and antiaircraft fire, many of the men killed or injured inside the planes. The storms were horrendous, the damaged planes often subject to failure, crash landings, and ditchings. The hardships and dangers were extraordinary, and for the first year of Pete's duty there, they were fighting constantly losing battles.
Interestingly, the tail gunner on B-17s was often the best shooter on the plane. In gunnery school the men practiced by shooting skeet, and I suspect Pete was exceptional, given his experience hunting. The gunners on B-17s were remarkably successful at shooting down enemy fighters, but they often did so with frozen hands, severe wounds, and faulty oxygen equipment that caused them to pass out and sometimes die at high altitude.
During Pete's first year there, most of the bombing was from high altitude--as high as 30,000 feet where the B-17 could out-perform fighter planes and avoid antiaircraft fire, but hitting moving war ships was extremely difficult at that altitude. But later in 1942 they learned a new technique called "skip bombing." When they located enemy shipping, they would fly low, coming in at 150 feet or even less above the waves. As they approached the ships, they dropped their bombs, which skipped like stones on the water into the sides of the ships. Then they would fly directly over the ships, usually toward the sun, hoping to blind the enemy anti-aircraft gunners as the planes climbed to safety. This was extremely dangerous stuff, but it worked, and suddenly the bomber squadrons were sinking many Japanese ships.
In September, 1943, the tide in the Pacific War was swinging toward the allied forces. New B-24s and crews were arriving daily, and veteran B-17 crews were being flown to Hawaii and eventually home. For most of B-17 combat crews, the war was essentially over.
That is, of course, a special note of sadness. It was not uncommon for flight commanders on the ground to spare crews near the end of their hitch and not send them into battle. Pete and his crew must have known they were very nearly home free, and probably the only reason why they flew was because there just weren't enough planes available to fly. In all probability, they must have suspected this might be their very last flight before coming home.
Evidence later revealed that the plane plowed into a mountain side killing everyone aboard. Peter S. Owens, my uncle and the man for whom I was named two years after his death, was the plane's photographer and tail gunner. The next day Australian troops captured Lae, a modest step as the momentum of the Pacific War gradually shifted toward the Americans and Australians and away from the Japanese.
The plane was listed as missing in action and was presumed to have crashed, based upon reports from other planes in the group. But no one saw the crash, and although crew members were declared dead, no one really knew what happened to this plane until 1992 when Janice Olson and a friend discovered the crash site. Olson's avocation is locating and documenting the history of the B-17 Flying Fortress in the South Pacific. She describes the incredibly lucky circumstances of the discovery:
"Two native hunters, looking for cus-cus (small, furry animal eaten by Papua New Guineans) actually found the plane. They took Pilot Eberly's I.D. bracelet and sold it to dealer in WW II artifacts. The dealer was at the country club in Wau New Guinea showing off the bracelet when a coffee plantation owner saw it. The plantation owner called a friend of mine, Richard, who lives in Lae, Papua New Guinea. The plantation owner told Richard about the bracelet; Richard called me to see if I had any info on the name on the bracelet and the next thing I knew I was on my way to New Guinea where Richard and I made it in to the crash site and positively identified the plane. When I got to a fax, I sent a message to my then senator, John McCain, to let him know the plane's location and the positive identification. Then Richard and I went got the bracelet. I brought the bracelet back to the States with me. The state of Oregon threw a party for me and the wife of the pilot. I returned the bracelet to the wife at the ceremony. It was quite emotional."
The remains of crew members and wreckage were strewn over a steep mountain side, and the next year an archeological team was sent to the crash site to confirm the crash and return the remains of crew members to the U.S.
Scientists and dental experts verified that this was the missing plane and crew. They identified enough dental information to confirm a number of the crew's identities and conducted DNA analysis until all eleven crewmen were positively identified.
In December, 1998 the surviving families assembled at Arlington National Cemetary for a group memorial service and burial with full military honors, finally putting these men to rest fifty-five years after the crash.
* * Remarkablly detailed accounts of the B-17 Pacific Air War are contained in Gene Eric Salecker's Fortress Against the Sky and at the 43rd Bomb Group Association Web Site. I've relied heavily on these accounts as well as the official crash reports.