1869, Ep. 132 with Tom Wilber, author of Vanishing Point

4:42PM May 18, 2023

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Tom Wilber

Keywords:

plane

syracuse

flying

world war

lake

war

history

lake ontario

story

years

bomber

enthusiast

book

great

homefront

big

mystery

day

flight

seekers

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. This episode we speak with Tom Wilber ,author of Vanishing Point: The Search for a B-24 Bomber Crew Lost on the World War Two Home Front. Tom Wilber's writing career spans 25 years at USA Today Network's Central New York Newspaper Group, where he won Best of Gannnett honors on multiple occasions. He also taught journalism at Binghamton University, and is the author of Under the Surface. We spoke to Tom about how he first heard about the disappearance of the B-24 Bomber and its crew, the unsolved mystery of their ultimate resting place, and the largely unreported history of the thousands of United States airmen, and in some cases, women who died on the World War Two American Home Front Hello, Tom, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Jonathan. Great to be here.

Well, it's great to see you again. We worked in the past several years ago. Time does fly, but you have a new book, Vanishing Point: The Search for a B-24 Bomber Crew Lost on the World War Two Home Front. Tell us the backstory to this book, what inspired you to write it?

So my inspiration actually came many years ago as in about 50 years ago, I spent the summers of my youth at a family cottage on Lake Ontario, north of Syracuse. My grandfather built the cottage a long time ago. And growing up I mean, beachcombing was a big part of our summer activities. Before the years of Facebook and social media. We didn't have a TV up there, campfires stories, and there's a lot of lore and legend in Lake Ontario is a big lake. It's a seaway, a lot of history a lot of things in the lake. But one thing that I grew up with was the idea that there was a lost world war two bomber somewhere in the lake with a crew of eight. And back in my pre-adolescent years, this kind of seemed far fetched to me, I always thought World War Two was bought in the Pacific or the Atlantic and the Atlantic, to a lesser degree off the Atlantic coast of the US and Europe, of course. But I never really had this idea that there was this, it was fought on the homefront. And the other thing was there was really no confirmation back then that there was a bomber in the lake with the crew. There were no plaques or memorials. And as you might know, and some of your listeners might know if they're from around here, if you grew up around Lake Ontario, in the many parks, there's always historical monuments and landmarks to talk about the various historical points, nothing at all about a loss bomber. So I was skeptical. But it always kind of stuck with me, along with the various things about a cottage cottage remained in the family. Long story short, many years later, as a working journalist, I finally got some time to really look into the story. And I did some research, newspaper archives, some archival material with military. And I found out that the story was in fact true. Even though this was a story that circulated around campfires, back in the day, it's kind of like was a ghost ship story, it was lost, there were pieces of it maybe washed up. Nobody really even knew the circumstances, at least in my circles, or even the names of the crew. But upon looking into this further, I found that the backstory of it was it was a training accident, the plane got lost in a white out in February 1944. And as I did more research, I found out that this was not uncommon at all. But what really was particular about this was that all these years, there's a plane in the lake with World War Two veterans aboard that has never been found. And I started wondering, well, how what has the search been like is anybody even look for this plane?

That's amazing things

that kind of inspired the research and then the research inspired the story. At some point when as a journalist you look into these things, and a lot of times there's a great rumor that seems like a story but it doesn't pan out. But this was a interesting rumor that did pan out. It turned into a pretty remarkable story.

Interesting, interesting. Well, your book features a whole bunch of things mystery remembrance, lost history, delving into the mystery angle. Tell us is what's known about the disappearance of the B -24. It was named the Getaway Gertie.

Yeah. So from the archival material, I found that this plane took off from a base...Westover base, this is called in Western Massachusetts. It was on a formation flying mission, a training, training flight with six other planes. And they were going to what so so back, then you got to remember that a lot of the pilots going to War and World War Two, of course, were very young, they were recruited very quickly, it was in kind of still the early age of flight. So you had a lot of the crews, up until they went into flight school had never even been on a plane, let alone flown one. They're all very young. And so there was this rush to train them, because obviously, we're ramping up for when after Pearl Harbor, we're we're ramping up very quickly with all our material and human resources to go to war. So there are accelerated schedules and a lot of pressure for these kids basically 18, 19 20 years old to learn how to fly into in a hurry. And not only fly but fly in these massive formations, wing to wing that really this style of air combat was never had never been done before. So they were pioneering all that as well. So there was a lot of training flights. This was one of them, trying to figure out how to fly in formation. And weather moved in and things came apart. All the planes in this particular mission got lost, they were flying over western Massachusetts, radio communication was nothing like it is today. It was very touch and go especially with the bad weather. So throughout the night, the controllers were trying to rein these planes in and get the crews down. And this particular plane ended up going while a lot of them went east. This went west, they got completely disoriented. They ended up in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, the weather was getting worse. And from there, they're redirected of all places to Syracuse. And as again, some of your listeners might know that when weather gets bad regionally, it gets particularly bad in Syracuse, with Lake Effect white outs that time of year. So they went from bad to worse in terms of being directed to Syracuse. And they missed their landing and Syracuse because that was by now intense Lake Effect storm up there. And throughout that night, there were reports of the plane trying to land anywhere all around the Syracuse area. It was flying very low searching for a place to land in a Oswego, and Watertown and circled around the Adirondacks. And as you can imagine, here you have the pilot with Keith ponder from from a rural town in Mississippi, until he had his training flights he flew for little in Colorado had very little experience with snow storms, let alone flying a B 24 Bomber through one where you can't see and trying to land. We're after hour after hour missing the airport. So what we know about it, it was last heard over a squiggle and points north. And the radio contact was faltering. So they didn't have good contact. We have a little bit of a transcript of what that was. But for most part, they were out of contact and then never seen again.

What happened after the crash?

There was an effort by the US military to look for it. And at that point, they weren't sure where it was. There was a replay, they thought it was in the Adirondacks. There were reports of people hearing plan and plane over the Adirondack course after the the news reports came out and morning after the morning after that. There's a lot of people tha heard something, and they were calling in and everybody was sure they heard heard the plane. So there's a lot of red herrings. There. We're looking in the Adirondacks in the in the Utica area in the greater Syracuse area. And they did fly over as the lead. They did fly over the lake, and they didn't really see much. And they were maybe hoping maybe it was wishful thinking that it went down on land and the crew would where the crew would have a chance. So for the next week, they found absolutely nothing and then a wing panel showed up on the Lake Ontario around the Oswego area. And they thought well this is it. Here it comes there's going to be debris and float some debris field is going to be coming in and they totally expected the bodies and other pieces of the plane to come I mean after that, so they were searching now, Lake Ontario in February has ice banks is treacherous. The shorelines very inaccessible is not very developed on the east end of the lake today. So there's very little infrastructure that was plowed. So it was a job just getting out there to try to do any type of search plus, you have to remember that all the all the wherewithal with personnel was going over to fight the war overseas. So just as fast as the men and women could get trained mostly men back then, of course, in some cases, women, they were being shipped out. So he didn't have a lot of wherewithal to look. But they searched around the shores of Lake Ontario. And then after the wing panel washed up and nothing else came, they kind of said, well, that's it, we got to move on. And it was pretty well, please close after that. So for the next 50, 60s 70 years, this word got out, I guess people remembered it directly back then. But scuba diving was not a thing in the 40s or in the 50s. In the 60s and 70s, it became much more of a thing in you know, fresh waters, it became a recreational thing. And it became quite a thing in the 80s and 90s. So you had a lot of people that were doing this, the rec seekers right there. They're pursuing the so people that knew about the story. And again, this was not widely publicized. But stories circulated and people who were fishing up there and people who were scuba diving, and a few people in particular, John McLaughlin, who was a body recovery diver, He's now retired. He's still up in up in that area. He worked for the it was a volunteer firefighter, they're actually a fire chief. And some other people that Jim Kennard and Tim Caza, who have the equipment, they're amateur seeker, sonar enthusiast, some of them are retired engineers, and they got interested in developing sidescan sonar to look at the lake bottom. So we have these small groups of people. Some are war enthusiasts. Some are what I call seekers. They're just people looking into shipwrecks and other things. You have John McLaughlin, who was just interested in the history of this particular thing, and body recovery diver was doing it, just to try to recover the memory in the story. You have these various people that have been looking for it on and off for many years, and then kind of ebbing and flowing. Never finding anything like Ontario is a big lake. I guess that's another part of the story. I won't go into that too much here. But theirs is over 800 feet deep in this deepest spot is over 200 miles long as part of an international Seaway. So there's a lot of things in the lake. But you had the various seekers looking for unsuccessfully, on and off up until the present day. And then this might be another part of your question. I don't want to get too far ahead of it. There's things that are changing now that make the story of the plane, the history and the likelihood of it finding. It raises the stakes across the board, because Eastern Lake Ontario is now being designated as a national marine sanctuary for the mana histories in there. So you have, you know, federal agency involved and a designation that will draw a lot of people to that area to look for a lot of history in the lake, not just the plane, but you have a revolutionary warship. You have a Cold War air defense project the Avro Arrow, which was one of the first supersonic jets, and that project was scrapped and there's parts of that that are in the lake. So there's all this history, the awareness is growing. And you have the marine sanctuary which is now going to make this more of a thing than it wasn't when I was a kid and it was just a rumor.

Once those are positive developments.

Well, they're positive for the most part, there's some that would argue that if this fuselage is found, and it becomes tourist attraction, then is that positive maybe will it you know there's a lot of people that for either because they don't know any better or because they know better but they want pieces of it. They'll lose you know, parts of specially a plane like a B 24 Bomber, which is Is there used to be many of them around? There's very few, it's very rare. There's only two that are serviceable and flying now, and there's a question of whether this will become an attraction for people with, not with ulterior motives.

So that makes sense. So there's, it's the the case can be made that just, you know, let it be and that there's there's power in the mystery. You start off the book talking about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and how the nation chooses to remember fallen and missing soldiers and honor their remains. Tell us more about what you discovered on that ankle.

Yeah, into that part about the power of the mystery, I asked myself is a tomb that's 600 feet deep or 60 feet deep, any less honorable than a tomb that's six feet deep. And of course, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the classic example of whether it can be great honor to something like that. Although there is a formal monument I call the fuselage of Gertie, as it stood, at least in my youth, is "the tomb of the forgotten soldier." Now, that might change if there is some formal recognition that it exists out there. But there's something bigger at play here. And I think, by the way, that this is emblematic of something much bigger. And that is that this was not just a rare event where this one plane got lost on a training flight. During through my research, I found that there's, this happened over 15,000 fliers between 1941 and 1945. So there's 15,000 fatalities, during that time in stateside training accidents. So these aren't people that died fighting the war in Europe or the Pacific, they died just training here that's, you know, 15, more than 15 fatalities every single day. So there's that aspect to it. And why isn't this remembered more? I think that in how do we remember fallen soldiers, there's a deep meaning associated with battle losses, right? There's a lot of feelings that go along with battle losses. And the federal government that the Department of Defense for this reason spends about $150 million a year, recovering the remains of battle veterans in Korea, or Pacific or in farmer's fields in Europe or in the jungles of Vietnam. And you probably your listeners will be familiar with those cases that a lot of them are high profile when they recover a World War Two veterans, Europe and they bring him home. And there's a lot of fanfare to that. I think with training losses, that is a different case. I mean, training in World War Two, obviously was just as perilous is almost in some cases may be more than flying in more. But the training action seemed to be much less noble. I mean, they were mistakes, after all. So I think just the way this evolved through the culture of military flight, and there's some quite a bit of I spend a fair amount of time discussing this. And this is the is I call it the culture of risk, right? So this idea of fliers take risk, but when they mess up at home is a mistake or a failure. If they die in battle, then it's something different. So I think there's this element to it that goes along with how we remember falling.

Do you think that'll change? Or no...

I think certainly is if this becomes recognized as part of the marine sanctuary. You know, I think change comes about slowly and there's cultural changes, especially in the military. So I think it is a really good question. I can tell you from my research is one thing that I was attracted destroy this journalist, it, it seemed like I was breaking some new ground. So there's a lot of World War Two stories and the war in the Pacific and in Europe are fairly well documented. The war on the homefront, aside from you know, the Victory Gardens, and the, you know, other aspects of Ken, Ken drives and Rosie the Riveter. I mean, those are all cultural touchstones. Right? But the other aspects of what did the Suiko county look like in World War Two? What was that Homefront really like? There's there is research on it, but not a lot. So I think the original aspect of this there's certainly not much reporting. I mean, there are a few books and a few references that I cite in my book, that document some of these, but nothing in the mainstream about the aspect of World War Two It was here on the home front. But yeah, it's

It's great, you're breaking new ground on this. And what were some bits of research that you came across that were eye opening or you were really surprised like, wow, I had no idea.

Yeah, I think mostly that so many people died on such a regular basis flying. So that is first and foremost. Just the the amount of risk that these fliers undertook, every time they went, took a training flight, the accelerated schedules, I thought that was remarkable. But there was some small regional things. Some are well documented. Some are you might know that the military base in Oswego, which is Fort Ontario, goes back to the colonial times. At the time of World War Two. They were repurposing that is a school. A training school for for people being drafted into the military. And then later, it was the only only American refugee refugee camp for for people being persecuted overseas. And there was a lot of push and pull with President Roosevelt back then about whether they we should have a refugee camp. And the people in Sligo embraced it. And so there's like this little side story to their. So there's a lot of little pieces, big pieces, but I guess those might be two examples that I found interesting.

Yeah, I mean, the way you had said earlier, just the amount of deaths but one of the sentences that you had in your book that I was that was really eye opening for me was the US Army Air Forces lost 4500 planes fighting Japan over the course of the war, and 7100 planes and stateside accidents. I mean, that's incredible.

Yeah, it is it really, I mean, 15,000 deaths total 15 or more a day. I mean, you could argue that they were dying just every hour or every other hour, just about. So it is pretty amazing. And again, that's the one thing that when I have discussions about this with people that everybody seems surprised with, and it's not widely known.

Yeah, yeah. Well, your book is thankfully going to change that. Is there anyone that you would want, you know, in a perfect world to have this book? Or how do you hope the book will impact people's understanding of the war? These are? These are big questions. Yeah, no,

those are very good questions. And I have a couple of expectations for the book. And as I was writing this course, one of the things you always ask yourself is, who is your audience? And what are your expectations? And what will their take home be on it? And I am sure I will find an audience. I'm confident I should say, with the war buffs, World War Two buffs, there's a lot of plane buffs that are very interested they they're insatiable for the information about, you know, war planes back in the day. There's going to be a tourism artifact in June, whereas there's World War Two in airshow in Syracuse, so you'll have all those people that are enthusiast about this sort of thing, either War history in general, or aeroplane war and airplanes in general. So there will be that then there's this different group of divers and seekers, there are people that like to look for things, especially historic things, treasures, things that might be rare, the search for that as part of the fun. So rec secrets, you always you know, I don't know you're probably not as old as I am. But you remember the days of Jacque Cousteau and you know, the underwater world and the mystique and just that looking for stuff that has not been found this great Mystique to that. But aside from those two groups, I find this is really a great mainstream story. And that is because even if you're not a war buff, or an enthusiast, a plane enthusiast, if you're not a diver, there's this element of intrigue here where you have this piece of history that's lost in the leg along with a lot of other histories. And there's a much more personal story to it and the personal story. We haven't really talked about the personal story here. We're talking about the bigger thing that it represents, but are the crew members themselves. So I talked about Keith Ponder a little bit. He's the kid from Mississippi. He grew up in rural Mississippi, before electricity before indoor plumbing. And I go back in I'm able to find in reporting this, some distant relatives. So most of these fliers, most of the people that fought World War Two from enter were young and single, many of them were. And they don't have the same legacy as people. Now, obviously, they had kids kids that they died, and they had letters from home and memorabilia. So these airmen left, you know, what they did leave or what is could be recovered are from great nieces or great nephews. And they're up in, you know, as I say, trunks and crawl spaces or, you know, whatever we, you know, like how it might be with a great ancestor somewhere, especially if there's a great uncle or is like, what is this or what were they like you don't really know. So I reconnected. And, Buddy, his nickname's, Buddy is Robert Keith Ponder. He was named after the pilot, his late father named him after the pilot, but he never really knew the legacy or great uncle Keith, we knew that he died in a plane crash in World War Two, we knew nothing about it. So I was able to reconnect his history in Mississippi, and share what I knew about the actual event. And I flew out to Mississippi and reconstructed, Keith Ponder's youth, during the rush to war, and the eagerness has many, again, he represents something bigger, to go and fight the war. And then at some point, once they got involved in it, it wasn't everything that they thought it might have been to begin with. So there's a story of him the copilot, and other crew members who I reconstruct by going back to their families and reconnecting through that. So getting back to the thing about the expectations for the book, outside of those enthusiast, this is a great personal story about reconnecting with ancestry. And also a minute by minute drama of what this looked like when these kids here they are all the maybe less than a year of flying a plane are now lost in the white out together. They're thrown together as they were back then without really having necessarily a lot of common history. And so I think is a narrative that unfolds with these different aspects coming together without giving too much way that make it very personal, and a pretty compelling story.

Oh my gosh, I was saying this before we started recording, you are an amazing writer. And you just bring the reader right into the situation and I'm really impressed and so it is a compelling it is a page turner, and there is a mystery and personal stories that you have picked so well. So I encourage any listeners here to grab Tom's new book, Vanishing Point: The Search for a B-24 Bomber Crew Lost on the World War Two Home Front. It was great talking with you, Tom.

Thank you, Jonathan. I really enjoyed it.

That was Tom Wilbur, author of Vanishing Point: The Search for a B-24 Bomber Crew Lost on the World War Two Home Front. If you'd like to read his new book, visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast.