1945 Empire State Building B-25 Crash (History Guy)

00:00:12
Speaker 1: And we continue with Our American Stories. Our next story comes to us from a man who’s simply known as The History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The History Guy is also heard here at Our American Stories. In July of 1945, a U.S. B-25 Mitchell got lost in heavy fog over Manhattan. Here’s The History Guy remembering the B-25 Empire State Building craft.

00:00:48
Speaker 2: 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 piece, but their piece was shattered with a spectacular accident involving a United States Army Air Forces plane and the tallest building in the world. The morning of Saturday, July 18, 1945, a United States Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchell was flying from Bedford Army Air Field 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 in 1,000 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 call sign 577 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 Forces Staff Sergeant Christopher Dimitrovich and 19-year-old Navy machinist’s 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’d stay above 1,500 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, averting 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 pitcher 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, 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 Uttley, 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. 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 Weiskoff, 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.” Daniel Norden on the 18th floor was thrown out of his chair amid the glass, with four windows that were blown out in his office. 24-year-old bookkeeper Althea Leadbridge was on the 72nd floor. She said, “Everything shook. We ran to the window and looked down with soft flames below us. We looked up and soft flames above us.” Leadbridge walked down 70 flights of stairs in the dark. 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 topless stories of the skyscraper, and for two minutes the pinnacle of the chromium Empire State stood out sharp and clear in the drizzle, while orange-red flames leaped around.” Many New Yorkers feared it was an enemy attack. Miss Weiskoff said that the staff in the office feared it might have been a buzz bomb, named for the German V-1 rocket that had terrified England during the Blitz. Others thought it may have been a Japanese bomb balloon, like the one that had killed the Sunday school teacher and 5 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 and 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 against all 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 Theresa 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 No. 6. She was on the 80th floor when the plane struck. The crash caused her to be thrown across the building while 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 Don Maloney was a Coast Guard hospital apprentice second class who 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 he could fit more easily 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, and 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. Her fall, some 1,000 feet, still, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, holds a record for the longest survived elevator fall. To her own surprise, Theresa Fortier Willig survived. When firemen rescued her 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 3 kids and 7 grandkids. She passed away in 1999 at the age of 74.

00:10:16
Speaker 1: And a special thanks to Greg Hengler on the production and storytelling. And a special thanks to The History Guy. And if you want more stories of forgotten history, subscribe to his YouTube channel, The History Guy. History deserves to be remembered, and my goodness, this story deserves to be remembered. Many feared an enemy attack when this happened and soon found out that it was an accident. The story of the Empire State Building B-25 crash here on Our American Story.