Lady Be Good

On 4 April 1943, a B-24D Liberator nicknamed Lady Be Good took off from Soluch in Libya with the 376th Bombardment Group to attack Naples in Italy. It was the crew’s first combat mission. The nine men aboard were led by pilot First Lieutenant William Hatton. Accounts indicate that the formation became scattered in poor visibility and that Lady Be Good ended up flying back towards Libya alone after dark.

On the way back, the crew requested a radio direction-finding bearing to their base. They were given a bearing, but they appear not to have realised that they had already passed over the coast and their base. A strong tailwind had carried them faster than expected. Believing they were still over the Mediterranean, they continued southward into the Libyan desert.

When fuel ran low, the crew bailed out, apparently believing they were over the sea near the coast. The aircraft flew on without them and came down far into the desert. When Lady Be Good failed to return, it was presumed to have crashed in the Mediterranean, and a search found nothing. The crew were listed as missing.

In 1958 an oil exploration team flying over the Libyan desert spotted the wreck of a large aircraft, and ground teams reached it the following year. The B-24 was broken but remarkably intact, lying hundreds of kilometres inland from its base. Accounts of the site describe equipment, supplies and personal effects preserved by the dry climate, but no sign of the crew. That absence showed that the men had left the aircraft before it came down.

Searches in 1960 found the remains of five crew members together, many kilometres north of the aircraft. Nearby were the diary of co-pilot Robert Toner and other items. The diary records that the men had bailed out, gathered in the dark, and walked north with very little water in the hope of reaching the coast. Two more men had pushed on further, and their remains were found at a considerable distance. Another crew member was found separately, apparently having died when his parachute failed.

One member of the crew, Staff Sergeant Vernon Moore, was never found. The pattern of the remains and the diary allowed investigators to reconstruct the men’s walk in considerable detail. They had covered a remarkable distance in extreme conditions before dying of thirst and exhaustion.

US military investigators concluded that Lady Be Good was lost through a navigation error. Flying at night on its return, the crew overflew their base, most likely because an unexpected tailwind took them there sooner than their calculations predicted. The radio direction-finding bearing they received could not by itself tell them whether the station was ahead of or behind them, and they appear to have assumed it was ahead.

Having continued south for some time, the crew abandoned the aircraft when fuel was running out. The aircraft then glided or flew on for a distance before making a belly landing in the desert. The men’s decision to walk north was reasonable given what they believed, but their base and the coast were far beyond reach on foot without water.

There is little serious dispute about the basic explanation. Discussion has focused on details: exactly why the crew misinterpreted their position, whether they were given information that could have prompted them to question their bearing, and how far the aircraft travelled after the crew bailed out. These questions concern responsibility and training rather than any alternative account of the loss.

A persistent piece of folklore surrounds the aircraft itself. Parts salvaged from the wreck were reportedly fitted to other aircraft, and stories circulated that those aircraft were later involved in accidents, leading to claims of a curse. These stories are not supported by the documentary record in any convincing way, and a curse offers no explanation beyond coincidence and hindsight.