“In those days, someone else always had a horror story worse than yours.”īut after the reunion, he got his hands on some navigation charts and plotted Hadley’s course. “I never thought of it as such a big deal,” he said. Using a small oxygen bottle as a buoy, he drifted in the ocean for four hours before reaching the shore, where he was rescued by a Turk who carried him two miles to a village.įor 50 years, Newton put his brush with death out of his mind. Among them was Newton, who suffered a broken leg. Suddenly, the two remaining engines froze and the ship plunged 150 feet, hitting the water nose first and breaking into three pieces.Īlthough Hadley and Lindsey never emerged from the sinking wreckage and presumably drowned, seven crewmen survived the crash. Newton remembers Hadley asking his fellow crew members, “You wanna try the beach? Or the water?” “Hadley turned left toward land, it was about 8 o’clock at night and we were losing oil pressure and altitude.” “We got 25 miles off the coast of Turkey and were flying barely above stall speed,” Newton recalled. They jettisoned their bombs, then ordered the crew to get rid of everything else, fire extinguishers, Mae West life preservers, parachutes, anything to lighten the airship, which was now struggling on two engines. Hadley and the co-pilot, James “Rex” Lindsey of Texarkana, Texas, pointed the damaged bird toward Cyprus, then veered toward Turkey. “We couldn’t turn because we were in a tight formation with other planes, so we kept flying, powering up to clear smokestacks 200 feet tall.” “We were two to three miles from our target, flying about 50 feet off the ground when we got hit,” Newton remembers. The bombardier had been killed by antiaircraft fire that blew out the plane’s nose and crippled two of the ship’s four engines. 1, 1943, raid that was supposed to destroy the vital Nazi-held oil fields at Ploesti, Romania.Īt the reunion, he encountered two of the seven survivors of the crash who were still living. His quest actually began in Arizona at a reunion of his 98th Bomber Group, one of five that took part in the Aug.
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