1945 Empire State Building B-25 Crash

Sponsored by Dashlane. The summer of 1945 represented hope for a war-weary nation. Germany had surrendered in May. In the Pacific General Douglas MacArthur announced that the Philippines had been liberated, and in New Mexico the United States tested the bomb that would finally put an end to the war. There was plenty of reason in July 1945 for New Yorkers to look forward to a period peace, but their peace was shattered with a spectacular accident involving a United States Army Air Force plane and the tallest building in the world. It is history that deserves to be remembered. I'm really excited about today's sponsor, Dashlane. I don't know about you, but I cringe whenever I get logged out of some app or need a password because I know I forget the password and have to go through some recovery tool. And Dashlane takes that stress away. It saves and autofills all your password information on every website, gets rid of that forget password nonsense forever. 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The morning of Saturday, July 18th 1945, a United States Army Air Force's V-25 Mitchell was flying from Bedford Army Airfield in Massachusetts to New Jersey's Newark Airport. At the controls of the plane was Lieutenant Colonel William F Smith Jr. The 27 year old Smith was an experienced pilot, a veteran of more than 30 missions, and a thousand combat hours flying B-17 bombers over Europe during the war. The B-25 was a twin-engine bomber, smaller than the B-17s that Smith had flown over Europe. This plane, using callsign 0-5-7-7 and nicknamed Old John Feather Merchant, had been converted to fly VIPs. Smith had piloted the plane from Sioux Falls Army Air Base in South Dakota, and was scheduled to pick up his commanding officer in Newark before continuing back to Sioux Falls. He was accompanied by 30 year old Army Air Force Staff Sergeant Christopher Dimitrovich, and 19 year old Navy machinist mate Albert Perna, who was hitching a ride from Massachusetts to see his family in Brooklyn. As the plane approached New York City, it ran into heavy fog. Smith requested permission to land at New York's Municipal Airport LaGuardia Field, but was advised that the visibility was too low and told to go on to Newark. LaGuardia Air Traffic Control signed off with a warning about visibility in the fog. At the present time, the controller said, I cannot see the top of the Empire State Building. The words turned out to be hauntingly cryptic. Smith responded, thank you very much. It's not exactly clear what happened next, but it seems likely that Smith mistook the East River for the Hudson. That was a fatal mistake. Had he turned left as he came by the Chrysler Building, he would have been safe, but disoriented, he turned right, taking his plane straight over the island of Manhattan. Air Traffic Control had advised that he stay above 1500 feet over the city, but apparently disoriented and thinking himself clear of the city, he had dropped to 500 feet, perhaps thinking that he was on approach to Newark, or perhaps trying to get a view of the ground to orient himself. Suddenly the fog cleared just enough for Smith to realize that he was flying in the middle of skyscrapers. Stan Lomax, a radio sports announcer, was driving to work when he heard the plane's engines. As he looked up, he recalled he yelled, climb you fool, climb, from his car window. At 200 miles per hour, the plane was on a collision course for the 850-foot RCA building at 30 Rockefeller Center. Smith veered at the last moment, avoiding disaster, but the turn took him on a collision course with the tallest building on earth, New York's iconic 102-story Empire State Building. Mort Cooper, a big league pitch who had helped the St. Louis Cardinals win two World Series, witnessed the crash from the 16th floor of the Hotel Commodore. He said, I heard the roar of a plane and I picked it up as it roared between me and the RCA building. Suddenly it flashed across my mind that it was flying very low, and that it would hit the Empire State Building. The streets of downtown Manhattan were relatively empty on a foggy Saturday, but there were some witnesses along Fifth Avenue and 34th Street who heard the roar of the engines. They described the plane climbing steeply. William Utley, vice president of a public relations firm in the Mercantile building at 10 East 40th Street, was quoted in the Scranton Pennsylvania Times-Tribune. The plane went past my window at eye level or just above it. This office is on the 38th floor. The engine was apparently going and it looked like the pilot was trying to gain altitude. Smith was apparently trying to climb out of the city, but it was too late. At 9 40 a.m. old John Feather Merchant, traveling some 200 miles an hour, struck the 34th Street facade of the Empire State Building at an altitude of 913 feet, between the 78th and 79th floors. Nanette Morrison, at the same firm as Mr. Utley, said there was a terrific explosion when the plane hit. It looked as though the flash and flame from the explosion spread over four floors. Albert Fuller, at the B. Altman department store across the street, told the New York Times that the floor moved. I looked at the clerk and I said, isn't that strange? And I thought it couldn't be an earthquake. Harry Weiskopf, on the 63rd floor of the Empire State Building, said there were two terrific explosions. The whole building shook, and looking out the windows, facing down, we could see flaming debris falling down. Charles Harmer, who had been on the 36th floor, said the whole Empire State Building seemed to jump about six inches. Daniel Norton, on the 18th floor, was thrown out of his chair amid the glass from four windows that were blown out in his office. 54 year old Louis Petley, a tour guide with a group of 35 tourists on the 86th floor observation tower, said I never heard anything like it in my life. I jumped three feet in the air. Gloria Paul, on the 56th floor, said I was at the file cabinet and all of a sudden the building felt like it was just going to topple over. It threw me across the room and I landed against the wall. People were screaming and looking at each other. We didn't know what to do. 24 year old bookkeeper, Althea Ledbridge, was on the 72nd floor. She said everything shook. We ran to the window and looked down. We saw flames below us. We looked up and saw flames above us. Ledbridge walked down 70 flights of stairs in the dark. An analysis of the force of the crash, based on where the plane came to rest, estimated it hit at a force of some 4,400 kilonewtons, or around 990,000 pounds of force over a quarter of a second. The plane ripped a hole 18 feet by 20 feet in the limestone and granite facade of the building. The Knoxville Journal of Knoxville, Tennessee reported that so tremendous was the explosion that it ripped away the fog which had hidden the top most stories of the skyscraper, and for two minutes the pinnacle of the chromium-girt Empire State stood out sharp and clear in the drizzle, while orange-red flames looked around. Many New Yorkers who had feared attack as the war went on feared it was an enemy attack. Miss Weisskopf said that the staff in the office feared it might have been a buzz bomb, the name for the German v1 rocket that had terrified England during the Blitz. Others thought it may have been a Japanese bomb balloon, like the one that had killed a Sunday school teacher and five children in Oregon in the previous May. The plane struck so hard that the wings were torn off, one engine shot through the building landing on the roof of a building on 33rd street and starting a fire that destroyed a penthouse art studio. The second engine and parts of the landing gear went down an elevator shaft were found in the basement. The body of Albert Perna, the young Navy corpsman, was also thrown down the shaft and wasn't found until two days after the accident. He had been headed to Brooklyn to console his family over the death of his brother who had been killed in combat. The plane's fuel tanks ruptured and exploded sending a sheet of flame into the building. It was lucky it was a Saturday otherwise the building would have been much more crowded. On a normal day as many as 5,500 people worked in the building but that Saturday only about 1,500 were thought to be in the building. The offices where the plane struck were occupied by the War Relief Services and the National Catholic Welfare Council, both Catholic organizations dedicated to helping European refugees of the ongoing war. Some 20 people were working in the offices that Saturday coordinating aid for war refugees throughout the world. Several of those were killed instantly by the flames, others crowded in a room hoping to escape the flames and smoke. One of those was Teresa Willig who told the New York Times, I don't think any of us had any idea what happened, who'd have thought a plane crowded in the room with other Catholic War Relief employees, she thought she was not going to make it. She took off her rings, a high school graduation ring and a friendship ring from her boyfriend and threw them out the window. She said I thought I won't be around to have them, someone else might as well have use out of them. One of the workers, a man named Paul Deering, jumped to escape the fire and was killed. 20-year-old Betty Lou Oliver was the elevator operator of elevator number six, she was on the 80th floor when the plane struck. The crash caused her to be thrown across the building and is well suffering from severe burns. Two office workers rendered first aid and placed her on an elevator to be taken to the ground floor where an ambulance was waiting. But parts of the plane had flown through the elevator shaft and had sheared off cables. When Betty was placed inside the elevator on a stretcher, the cable snapped with a sound like a shot. Betty plummeted 75 stories. 17-year-old Donald Maloney was a Coast Guard hospital apprentice, second class. He was on 34th street when he saw the plane crash. He rushed into a nearby pharmacy telling them he needed first aid supplies to go help. The pharmacy gave him bandages, burn ointment, sterile water and a dozen syringes with morphine. As he ran in, someone shouted they needed help in the building's sub-basement. Maloney was small so it could fit easier into the ruined elevator shaft where a girl was screaming. It was Betty Lou Oliver. Miraculously, after falling more than 70 stories, she was still alive. The elevator's landing was softened by the huge coils of cable that had piled up beneath it like a spring. Some experts speculate that the rapid descent might have caused air pressure to build up under the shaft under the elevator. The rest of the elevator was ruined, full of steel shards and broken concrete, all but the corner that held Oliver. Maloney gave her some morphine for the pain and put burn ointment on her face and sterile bandages on her burns. Betty had to be cut from the wreckage of the elevator. Her fall, some 1,000 feet, still according to the Guinness Book of World Records, holds a record for the longest survived elevator fall. Betty was one of more than two dozen injured in the crash and aftermath. To her own surprise, Teresa Fortier Willig survived. When firemen rescued she and her friends from the room, she said she was just happy to be alive. She didn't suspect she'd ever see her rings again, but they were discovered by rescue workers and returned to her. She ended up marrying the man who had given her the friendship ring. Betty Lou Oliver, before her 75 story plummet, had only been scheduled to work in the Empire State Building another three days. It took her eight months to recover from her injuries, but she moved to Arkansas with her husband. She had three kids, seven grandkids, passed away in 1999 at the age of 74. The accident did not compromise the building's structural integrity, but repairs cost a million dollars, the equivalent of about 14 million today. Hundreds of firemen were dispatched to fight the fire, which was extinguished in 40 minutes. It is the only significant fire at such a height to be brought under control in world history. After an investigation, the federal government offered families of the victims money. Many accepted, but some refused and initiated a lawsuit, and the lawsuit helped to spur the passage of the Federal Tort Claims Act of 1946, which had been stalled in Congress for almost two decades. For the first time, US citizens were given the right to sue the federal government. The act was specifically made retroactive to 1945 in order to allow victims of the crash to seek remedy. In all, 14 people died in the crash, the three people in the plane, nine Catholic relief workers, one janitor, and one elevator operator. Almost certainly, if the crash had occurred at any time other than a Saturday in poor weather, there would have been more casualties in a building that could have had far more workers in it. As debris rained down on streets, it could have been far more crowded. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the History Guy, short snippets of forgotten history between 10 and 15 minutes long, and if you did enjoy, please go ahead and click that thumbs up button. If you have any questions or comments or suggestions for future episodes, please write those in the comment section, I will be happy to personally respond. Be sure to follow the History Guy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and check out our merchandise on teespring.com. And if you'd like more episodes on forgotten history, all you need to do is subscribe.