It’s 67 years this week since Australia’s worst air crash yet the tragedy remains shrouded in mystery
IT was a tragedy that was immediately declared to be, in the words of a US army officer, a “hush-hush” military secret. In pre-dawn darkness, a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber had ploughed into mangroves near Mackay in Queensland shortly after take-off, killing 40 soldiers and airmen.
The crash at Bakers Creek on June 14, 1943, was — and still is — Australia’s worst air disaster. But even today it remains shrouded in mystery and half-truths.
The story is barely known outside Queensland, not least because of a concerted effort by wartime authorities to censor the facts to such an extent that the families of those who died — all American servicemen — did not know for decades that their loved ones had perished in Australia.
“There was a bureaucratic fear of accountability for blame and shame,” Robert Cutler tells Inquirer from his home in the US state of Pennsylvania.
Cutler has a personal interest in finding out what happened on that fateful day. His father, US army captain Samuel Cutler, was the last man to see the passengers alive, having closed the door of the B-17 and watched it take off.
Although it was not his fault, the crash weighed heavily on Cutler’s conscience for the rest of his life. “I put the men on the ship and so had a direct part in sealing their fate,” he confided in his diary at the time.
The anniversary of the crash this week coincides with new research by military historian David Mitchelhill-Green that sheds more light on the disaster. “It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle because there is so little official data on it,” says Mitchelhill-Green. So what actually happened on that day in Mackay and why was it so comprehensively covered up for so long? The American troops in Mackay were returning to Papua New Guinea after a 10-day rest and recreation break, a welcome relief from the horrors of the Pacific campaign.
But the B-17 bomber that was to fly them to Port Moresby had already endured a tough war. Six months earlier, during an attack on an enemy-held airfield at Luzon in the Philippines, the B-17 was peppered by cannon, bullets and anti-aircraft shells. The bomber limped back to safety over 2000km of open water. Riddled with about 1400 bullet holes, the battered aircraft was retired from combat duty and assigned to Australia as an air transport.
It was offered to the Brisbane headquarters of the allied commander in the Pacific, general Douglas MacArthur, but an inspection of the plane by one of MacArthur’s men, lieutenant Henry Godman, rejected the damaged aircraft, Godman declaring in his report “the ship is considered a ‘lemon’ by all pilots”. Even so, planes were in short supply and the old B-17 was used to make daily round trips from Queensland to Port Moresby to transport soldiers and supplies.
As Cutler noted in his diary, the aircraft was dubbed “Miss EMF, short for ‘every morning fix-it’ ” because of the effort required to keep it airworthy. A month before the crash, the plane had two of its four engines replaced and was cleared for service only on June 13. On that fateful morning, Cutler woke early to find a heavy fog had blanketed the airfield ahead of the plane’s scheduled 5.30am departure. The fog caused the airport engineering officer, US lieutenant Eugene Neighbours, to delay take-off, but when the fog had failed to lift by 6am, Neighbours decided to approve take-off anyway.
The 34 soldiers were squeezed into the plane, sitting on the floor without seatbelts and bunched towards the front so the aircraft wasn’t tail heavy on take-off. The seven-member crew included flight mechanic Dale Curtis, who had won a toss with another mechanic about which one of them would take the flight. Mitchelhill-Green records what happened next as the plane thundered down the runway through the fog and lifted into a dark pre-dawn sky. “Lieutenant Neighbours watched as the aircraft’s lights climbed above the adjoining fields but something was wrong,” he writes.
Instead of banking right and heading north, the plane flew west at a height of only 76 metres before banking 90 degrees left to the south and then 90 degrees left again to the east, taking it back towards the airfield. “Several witnesses on the ground familiar with the growl of the B-17’s engines later claimed to have heard loud popping sounds and the unusual noise made by a propeller running in full low pitch. A long flame was also observed trailing from one of the engines.
“Landing lights pierced the fog as the pilot skimmed just above the tree line at Bakers Creek, possibly trying to nurse his injured craft back to the airport. Dangerously low, one of the wings struck a tree branch, sending the aircraft careering earthward.” A Mackay police report, which did not surface until many years later, records how a local farm labourer, Arnold Bragg, saw the crash and raced to the scene.
“He searched amongst the patches of blazing debris for possible survivors; the bodies on the western side of the depression were obviously past aid, but on crossing the muddy depression through the crushed mangroves to where the tail portion was lying, he found two men still living, one with an evidently badly fractured skull and the other showing no indication of injury beyond a slight trickle of blood from the mouth.”
Bragg attended to the more seriously injured man only to find that the other man “had risen to his feet and was staggering about groaning”. The badly injured man died shortly afterwards, leaving the groaning man — corporal Foye Roberts — as the only survivor. The police report states Roberts was “cushioned by the bodies of the other men in the rear portion of the aircraft, all of whom were killed”. He suffered only two broken ribs in the crash.
The report describes the carnage at the crash scene: “Those dead were, generally speaking, mutilated and in many cases shattered and dismembered, limbs, entrails and strips of flesh being strewn over the area affected.” Journalist and historian Gavin Souter, who was a child living in Mackay at the time, witnessed the crash.
“The Fortress had caught fire in the air, and as it dived into the trees one of its wings came away, leaving a great opening in the fuselage through which most of the passengers were emptied into the bush before the final impact,” he once recalled. A distraught Cutler scribbled in his diary that evening: “What a day and a tragic one.” The wreckage was still smoking when word came that news of the crash was to be suppressed because of wartime censorship.
“Radio and newspapers were prevented from reporting the crash,” says Mitchelhill-Green. “An editorial in the local newspaper hinted at the loss but could only acknowledge the injuries sustained by the survivor Foye Roberts. Relatives of the deceased received a telegram from the US war department that stated little more than that the men had been killed somewhere in the southwest Pacific.”
Both the US officers who witnessed the crash, Cutler and Neighbours, blamed pilot error and the poor conditions for the accident, believing the crew misjudged the altitude in the fog. The pilots were relatively inexperienced and would have had only limited knowledge of instrument flying in darkness. An air force investigation came to similar conclusions, reporting that “the ship was performing in a satisfactory manner when, for some reason, it dove into the ground and exploded”.
But this is contradicted by witness reports that they heard sounds consistent with a loss of engine power, while others reported seeing flames. Another theory is that the aircraft was overloaded. Investigators found several cases of bully beef in the wreckage that had not been calculated in the plane’s take-off weight. “The exact cause of the crash remains unknown,” says Mitchelhill-Green. He says it was most likely caused by a combination of mechanical and human errors.
“Once power was lost from an engine shortly after take-off, the two young pilots courageously attempted to steer their crippled aircraft back to the airfield but the heavy, war-weary B-17 lost height in a series of turns before ploughing into the ground and exploding.” Cutler agrees: “I believe some in-flight malfunction of at least one of the four engines was the probable cause of the crash. The heavy gross weight of the airplane, poor local weather conditions and the inexperience of the pilots and maintenance crews were also contributing factors.”
Despite the heavy loss of life, the accident remains virtually unknown outside Mackay and stayed an official secret for 15 years after the war. It fell through the cracks of history because of the secrecy and the fact it involved Americans on Australian soil, meaning there was no natural archival home for the story. It was only in the 1990s that a handful of individuals searched out the full story of the nation’s worst air crash. One of these was Col Benson, historian for the Mackay RSL, who says he went to the unveiling in 1992 of a small memorial for the crash but was surprised to see it did not even list the names of all of the victims.
“I thought this needs a bit more work, so I tried to find out more information but I bit off more than I could chew because there was nothing in the archives about it.” Several years later, in the US, Cutler was transcribing his father’s wartime diary when he stumbled across his account of the event. Intrigued, he tried to find out more but found “only scant confirming information”. “US air force historians knew nothing about the deadly crash — the deadliest single plane crash in the southwest Pacific area during World War II — and [I discovered that] that military officials did not tell the victim’s families the true facts of the matter.”
Cutler visited the crash site in 1999 and met up with Benson and swapped notes. The two joined forces with a retired US air force officer, Teddy Hanks, who lost four friends in the crash. They slowly pieced the story together. In 2000 Cutler helped form the Bakers Creek Memorial Association, which made contact with families of the victims to explain — half a century after the event — how their loved ones had died. A year ago, on June 11, 2009, a memorial to the Bakers Creek crash was finally unveiled at Fort Myer, near the entrance to Washington’s Arlington Cemetery.
Roberts, the only survivor, died in Witchita Falls in 2004, having never been able to remember anything about the accident. “The only thing he ever remembered was saying a prayer on take-off,” says Benson. “The good Lord saved him from the painful memory of the crash.”
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