|
Introduction
There is an incident in the annals of aviation that has defied explanation since December 5, 1945. On this day an entire squadron of US Navy torpedo bombers utterly vanished from the face of the earth. Wreckage implies an accident, the mistakes of man and machinery or the vicissitudes of nature; but to disappear implies destruction on a scale with which we are not familiar...or a fate of which we cannot conceive.
The disappearance of the “Lost Patrol,” “Lost Squadron,” or “Flight 19,” as it is interchangeably called, was by all acceptable standards an “impossible” disappearance. It is, in fact, one of the most mysterious, if not the most mysterious, disappearance in the history of aviation. This was not just the disappearance of one aircraft, like Amelia Earhart disappearing over the Pacific in her Lockheed Electra in 1938, or like Glenn Miller disappearing over the English Channel in a light reconnaissance aircraft in 1944. This was the disappearance of 5 large torpedo bombers while flying in formation, during peacetime, while on a routine training exercise. They were not flying in a war zone like Glenn Miller. Nor were they flying between far-flung ports and distant islands like Amelia Earhart.
They were flying in fair weather off the busy Florida east coast over an island crowded area like the Bahamas. This area provided innumerable landmarks. Yet somehow they flew out of the Bahamas into the Atlantic without seeing any familiar landmark. Following standard procedure the flight eventually flew west, having more than enough fuel and time to reach a Florida base. Yet they never returned.
They also did not disappear suddenly. Nor did they disappear silently. Radio receiving stations along the shoreline continued to pick them up for hours. What they said has been greatly distorted until this book. And one of the major purposes of this work is to finally put in order what was said and the manner in which it was said.
Flight 19 broke every failsafe. Instead of making land, the broken and strained dialogue faded with the flight leader unsure of what course they were flying anymore. The flight then receded into mystery. There were no witnesses to Flight 19 after this moment until I was able to establish that they were spotted three times over land long after their radios fell silent. Yet still they vanished. Why?
One spouse would jolt awake that night with a premonition about her husband; another family would receive a telegram 21 days after the incident claiming to be from their lost loved-one and signed with his family nickname only they knew. They would finally approach Congress about this in 1992.
To compound the mystery of Flight 19, one of the rescue aircraft, a huge amphibian PBM Martin Mariner, with 13 crewmen aboard, utterly vanished as well. Adding these men to the 14 crewmen of Flight 19, no less than 27 Naval personnel and six aircraft mysteriously vanished in one night.
To further compound the mystery, Flight 19 eventually became cloaked by an even more popular modern phenomenon. Its disappearance was key in the development of the concept and enigma of the “Bermuda Triangle.” In more than one way this obscured Flight 19 from the careful eye of any serious investigator. Rather than being regarded as a unique individual incident, it was buried into a deep vault with other disappearances. Any account of it was merely a vignette placed along with the many dozens of others that have vanished in the Bermuda Triangle afterward.
Possibly the worst disservice to the real drama and mystery of Flight 19 was done by the knee-jerk reaction of those who then sought merely to denigrate the Bermuda Triangle, and with this to minimize any mystery in the disappearance of Flight 19. This sponsored the publication of the only book on Flight 19 until this one: The Disappearance of Flight 19 by Larry Kusche, the Arizona State University at Tempe librarian who was the beneficiary of a publicity stunt by Harper & Row when they entitled his anemic book on the Bermuda Triangle as having “solved” it. It was his The Bermuda Triangle Mystery—Solved (1975) that first introduced much of the Board of Inquiry’s record of the actual dialogue spoken by Charles Taylor, the flight leader. But it was introduced without much analysis of any kind, evident by the fact he copied the log entries into his book just as they appear in the clumsy transcription. On occasion, this jumble made it look as though Taylor was asking and answering his own questions.
This same superficial approach led to a disastrous result in The Disappearance of Flight 19 in 1980 (Harper & Row). More than 35 years after the flight disappeared, Kusche now saw fit to “solve” it by characterizing Charles Taylor according to second- and third-hand rumors. Without any firsthand evidence, he was alternately implied to be a drunken pilot, a wild-liver and a sloppy, careless navigator; and all this together amounted to a careless, incompetent flight leader who led rookies to destruction. There is no mystery therefore in the disappearance of Flight 19. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Even more than time, the publication of his book initially hindered me in my research. Family members and friends of those who disappeared with Flight 19 saw the mischaracterizations in his book, which even included bald face inaccuracies about Naval training, and remained skittish to talk with another author. One naval instructor at Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, David White, summed it up politely when he said: “Kusche guessed a little.”
In the 1970s, the stories of Flight 19 were the product of perhaps 25 years of popular hearsay based on erroneous misinformation, including some tidbits that were outright fables. Likewise everything written about Flight 19 today bears the fabulous influence of this 25-year old debunking book. This is the Flight 19 of popular hearsay today— a formally sensational incident now berated for having its mask of mystery removed and replaced with a simple, ironic solution.
In 1991 there was an enormous renaissance of interest in Flight 19’s drama. In May of that year salvor Graham Hawkes believed he found the final resting place of the flight only 10 miles out to sea off Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when his undersea cameras ghosted upon 5 Avengers sitting on the bottom. As a result of his announcement, he became the victim of an incredible amount of publicity. For about a month the press kept the story alive until finally there was no more market in it, and what had been known to be 5 different aircraft were finally exposed as such. Flight 19 was laid to rest yet again.
But a wave of new experts had emerged, and new stories were told. At least 3 claimants were supposed to be Naval veterans who had been based at Fort Lauderdale at the time. They rode this obscure fact as far as it was possible as proof they had the final answer. One went far beyond this and concocted himself to be a pilot who should have gone on the flight. He did not hesitate to tell people he was the “expert on Flight 19.” The hoopla over Flight 19’s supposed discovery put him in many papers and he was even able to tell his pathetically self-serving account to the last living parent of one of the men. His account of what really happened was complete with coordinates where they ditched, how far apart they ditched, and even how her son mutinied and became the leader of the flight. She was thrilled to finally know “all that went on that day.” One historical society even passes out his scatology as “fact” about Flight 19.
Even now as this manuscript makes the rounds of publishers (November 2005), the infamous flight has been subject to world news again, and with this numerous more inaccuracies which even I could barely temper, even though this MS was the instigating spark for much of the publicity inasmuch as it was as the motive for both the largest modern search for the flight, a two-hour documentary detailing this search by NBC News Productions, and from there to lobbyists in Washington DC and at last to the United States Congress itself. Here the culmination of it all was the Congressional Resolution honoring the men on November 17, 2005.
From the very beginning Flight 19’s real drama has been clouded by “facts” which were little more than popular hearsay. Even the original Board of Inquiry did little more than establish circumstances loosely. No Naval officer who testified before the Board ever knew what the other officers had testified to. It was a completely closed-door affair. All had been warned not to speak of what they said and had heard before they were dismissed. The result of the Inquiry is over 500 pages of documents, testimony, maps, weather reports, and radio and communication logs loosely compiled with little analysis or insight. More than anything the Board of Inquiry Proceedings served to confuse rather than illuminate what happened. The testimony recorded in its pages is a web a contradictions, oversights and cover-ups that place in order a false set of circumstances that serve mostly to prove the Navy’s own ignorance of what happened.
It is not surprising that a review of it by the Board of Corrections of Naval Records in 1947 exonerated Charles Taylor of the blame for the loss of the flight, and then blamed it on “causes unknown.” But this was ultimately a bureaucratic means of covering startling blame that lay elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the evidence to track and even perhaps find Flight 19 was always contained therein. But this evidence was as veiled to those who compiled it as it was to the obtuse officers on duty that night who dismissed it.
The phenomenal nature of the disappearance was really never officially approached. Nor has it been characterized accurately in any popular medium. Five aircraft with five separate pilots did utterly vanish in peacetime without trace, without foul weather. The circumstances are bizarre. Something truly unusual did happen to Flight 19— not UFOs and Time-Warps...but the facts finally deserve to be brought forward.
What follows therefore in this book will be the first time any person will really come close to Flight 19: to its crew, to its mystery, to its improbable facts, to a possible solution, and to the very reason why it was declared lost “cause unknown” after the case had been carefully re-examined. We are, in essence, re-examining the case ourselves in this volume. And even though we may find the fate of Flight 19, it may remain the greatest mystery of aviation. To find Flight 19 is not necessarily to solve it, for why it got lost and why it disappeared are altogether two entirely different things, as the reader of this book will soon find out.
I prompt you with these clues: they never saw any positive landmark in the Bahamas; after they headed west they never turned around to go east again; they had more than enough fuel to get back. With this information, it becomes possible to find Flight 19.
Gian Quasar
December 5, 2003 and 2005
|
