Lady Lex

Handwritten on the back is "USS Lexington in Norfolk Navy Yard drydock".

Since I just had the privilege of sailing onboard the Navy's newest aircraft carrier, the USS George H. W. Bush (CVN-77) from Norfolk, I thought it appropriate to post this photo (one of the only ones on the blog that doesn't show an airplane!) of a previous generation's floating sovereign U.S. terrirtory, the legendary USS Lexington (CV-2).

Lady Lex was originally intended to be a battle cruiser, but after her keel was laid, plans changed and she was built as one of America's first aircraft carriers. She was commissioned on 14 December, 1927.

Minor Lexington trivia: One of her young ensigns that served on board in 1929 was none other than Robert Heinlein.

Crashed Caudron

These two real-photo postcards (photographs printed on paper that had postcard markings pre-printed on the back) document the crash of a French twin-engine Caudron G.4 bomber sometime during WWI. The G.4 initially flew in 1915 and was one of the first bombers produced in large quantities, with over 1400 built. The aircraft was quite primative in design, and used wing-warping for roll control.

Initially, the G.4 was used as a day reconnaisance bomber, but as soon as Germany started lofting fighter aircraft, the slow bomber was relegated to night missions. Whether our photos show a victim of enemy fire or merely an accident is unknown.

Only one G.4 survives, and is on display at the Air & Space's Hazy Center.

Accompanying the two G.4 photos when the Archive acquired them was this photo of a landing field. The fact that it is printed on identical paper suggests that it was a WWI aerodrome in either England or France.

Three Lost Airports: Uniontown, Rockville and Miami

Buried in a pile of movie stills in the back of an antique store in southern Maryland, I found these three 8x10 prints of diverse airports. Clearly, these were printed as a series, given the text in black on the photo's border, and the store's proprietor said he thought that there were more and they'd probably been purchased. The notations in white within the image indicate that these were produced by the Army Air Corps.

Burgess Field, Uniontown, Pennsylvania - January 25, 1927 

My first stop on the research journey was Paul Freeman's invaluable website Abandoned and Little Known Airfields. For Burgess Field, though, I came up empty. A check of Google Earth shows a Burgess Field Road, which, along with the surrounding roads and features, match the old photo. Unfortunately, I could find no other information or history of this field, when it was established nor when it disappeared.

The farmland as it looks today, with Burgess Field Lane running
diagonally in the foreground.

Congressional Airport, Rockville, Maryland - August 21, 1934

Unlike Burgess Field, Freeman's website has a wealth of information on Congressional Airport. The Army notations list it as in Washington DC, although in reality it was in Rockville. The airport was established in 1928 by the Congressional School of Aeronautics, which later participated in the US' Civilian Pilot Training Program.

Google Earth's view rotated to approximate the view of the original
photo.

A couple of references state that the man responsible for founding the airport was "noted aviator" Major Harry Horton, but I've yet to find any good information as to what made him notable (he does not, for instance, appear on any of the Ace lists that I could find).

Aviatrix Helen Richey, who would go on to become the first female commercial airline pilot in the US, set an international class altitude record of 18,448 feet in May, 1936, during a flight from Congress Airport to New Market, Virginia.

The airport closed in 1957, as nearby residential development began to encroach of the airports operational area, and land values were steadily climing. It was replaced partially by a residential development which contains a street still named Congressional Lane, and a shopping and business complex (big surprise there) named Congressional Plaza. The last vestige of the airport was one of its hangars, which continued to be used as a roller skating rink until it was torn down in 1984. The location of the hangar in our photo appears to be now occupied by a US Post Office branch.

All American Airport, Miami, Florida - April 26, 1931

The photo of All American Airport, Miami, is perhaps the hardest one to reconcile with later photographs. Freeman's web entry for this airport has several early images, but it's hard to see a correlation between our photo and the later ones on Freeman's site of the airport, which became known as Master Field when the City of Miami bought the land to build the first Miami International Airport.

All American/Master Field was build right next door to the Miami Executive Airport, where Amelia Earhart set out on her ill-fated around-the-world flight. During the 1930s, the airport was the site of the All-American Air Races. In 1942, the Navy acquired both airports and folded them into NAS Miami, which then became MCAS Miami in about 1955.

Two biplanes and a dirt parking lot - humble beginnings

A Google Earth view of the region from about the same angle as our photo. A few
traces of the runways from Master Field can still be seen on the campus of Miami-
Dade Community College-North Campus.

By 1962, part of the Navy facility was turned over to Dade County and became Opa Locka Airport. Other parts of the land, including the acreage that formerly held All American, was developed into the North Campus of Miami-Dade Community College. Today, only a few fragments of the runways survive as parking lots.

Airshow at the Dawn of the Jet Age

These two snapshots, which came from a large bin of photos at a Long Beach CA antiques shop, catch a moment in time at an airshow (location unknown - comment if you recognize it!) from the late 1940s or early 1950s. The P-80A-1 Shooting Star shown, 44-85284, was one of the first 344 Block 1 production aircraft, and was later upgraded to a F-80C with an improved engine and an ejection seat.

Help Identify this B-17 Crew

A while back, the Archive acquired this WWII B-17 crew photo, which came with no other information other than the official caption (which, other than the date of September 30, 1943, I'm not sure how to decifer) and the handwritten name "Elliott Hofkin". So, I'm turning to my readership for any help in identifying all these crew members, as well as which B-17 they're standing in front of.

With the modern power of Google,  the name was sufficient enough of a clue to lead me to the several sources.

One was a forum post at Army Air Forces (link here) that discusses a photo (without showing it) of the Hofkin crew, and lists their names, but I'm not certain that these names also correspond to our photo. For the record the names as listed in the forum post of Hofkin's crew are:

Hofkin, Elliott F. 2nd Lt. Pilot 
Cronin, William R. 2nd Lt. Copilot
King, Leslie M. 2nd Lt. Navigator
Maurstad, Richard I. 2nd Lt. Bombardier
McDonald, Paul R. S/Sgt. AEG
Hagen, Wesley M. S/Sgt. ROG
Thompson, Eldon W. S/Sgt. AAEG
Sarver, Edward K. Sgt. AG
Riedinger, Lawerance D. Sgt. AROG
Guttadauro, Joseph A. Sgt. AAEG 

I was also able to learn that this photo was taken just after the crew arrived in England. According to the forum post, Lofkin's crew completed their 25th mission and their tour of duty in April, 1944.

Another source was the AAIR website which lists Hofkin as the pilot of B-17G 44-6641 (817th BS, 483rd BG, 15th AF) when it suffered a taxiing accident (the code lists it as due to mechanical failure) on October 6, 1945 at Lagens AAFB on the Azores.

According to other records I was able to find, Hofkin was born on March 2, 1922 and passed away at the age of 83 on September 5, 2005, and appears to have last resided in Hatfield, PA.

If you have any information that will help in ID'ing these crewmembers, please comment below!

(Tip o' the hat to Chip for his help!)

Martin To A 'T'

Glenn L. Martin and crew with an Army officer and the Model TT. Givin Martin's
presence wearing a flight coat and helmet, it's likely that this photo was taken
very early in the Model T program.

In the early 1910s, with aircraft accident and casualty rates quite high, the Army decided that one of the causes was the nature of the pusher aircraft of the time: in an otherwise survivable hard landing, the engine, mounted right behind the pilot, would break loose and kill the man. In 1914, the Army decided it needed to find a safer tractor-configuration trainer, and meanwhile grounded all the Curtiss- and Wright-built pushers.

Both Martin and Curtiss proposed replacement aircraft that would be safer. Martin offered their Model T (also known as the TT), while Curtiss developed two different aircraft, the Model J and Model N (the best of both would later be combined in the JN, or Jenny).

First flight of the Model T took place in 1913, and first deliveries to the Army were aircraft without engines, as the Army had a surplus handy. The Martin design was unique in that it was equipped with nose landing gear, in an era when virtially all the other aircraft were taildraggers. Subsequent aircraft were delivered to the Army with engines, and these were known as the TT. Seventeen, in all were built. In 1915, Oscar Brindley won the Curtiss Marine Trophy competition for distance flown over a span of ten hours with a Model TT, covering 444 miles.

Martin was a Ford automobile dealer who, like so many others, became enamoured with aviation. In 1909 he set up shop in an old church and, assisted by his mother, built his first powered aircraft. He used the aircraft in publicity-garnering stunts, including delivering newspapers, shooting some of the first aerial motion picture footage, and supposedly claiming to be the first aviator to take his mother flying. He sold his company to Wright in 1916, and then started a second company with the same Martin name.

A PBJ and the Curse of Palmyra Island

When I first saw this photo, an official 8x10 glossy, something struck me as just slightly odd about it. The plane carries an AAF serial number (42-87197, visible on the side of the fuselage at the far left of the photo) and yet one of the mechs working on the #1 image has Marine Corps insignia on his cap. The men are doing what appears to be routine maintenance on the Wright R-2600-13, with new spark plugs lined up on the stand to the left.

A check of the serial number showed that this was a Kansas City-built B-25D, and that this was one of a block of 24 Mitchells that, after being ordered for the AAF, was diverted to the Navy and designated as PBJ-1D. Thus, 42-87197 became Navy BuNo 35114, though the AAF number apparently wasn't painted over. This photo was acquired with a group of other USMC images that were centered on MCAS El Toro, so I'm presuming that this is where the photo was taken.

Like so many bombers of the war, tragedy struck 35114, and it crashed at sea on 4 August 1943, with the loss of all nine Marines onboard (their names are listed at the bottom of this post). The plane had taken off from Palmyra Island and disappeard, and that's where this story really took a twist. I have to confess that when I started researching this photo, I didn't even know where Palmyra Island was, but I quickly found that the place has a long tradition of being a Pacific version of the Bermuda Triangle - there's even a book that's been published by the name of The Curse of Palmyra Island. While I don't put a whole lot of stock in tales of the paranormal, I'm always up for a good sea story, and this one turns out to be a doozie.

If you were to think of the Pacific as a giant circle bounded by the Americas, Asia, Australia and Antarctica, then Palmyra Island would pretty much mark the circle's very center. Lying about a thousand miles south-southwest of Hawai'i, the "island" is really an atoll comprising of about 50 small islets surrounding a couple of blue lagoons; the entire complex is only 1 1/2 miles long by a half mile wide, and is one of the most remote locations, and thus hosts one of the most pristine coral reefs left on earth. It also has a very long history of very strange happenings.

The stories begin with the island's discovery in June 1798 by Capt. Edmond Fanning of the Betsy. Fanning's story has been passed down through the years, but it's difficult to know how much is real and how much is embellished legend (not that that should stop a good sea story!) While under sail one night in normal seas, Fanning hit the sack, but awoke to find himself standing at the top of the companionway. Normally not a sleepwalker, this startled him, and he returned to his quarters. This happened twice more, which really shook the man up. He became convinced that this was, as he reportedly described it, a form of "supernatural intervention", and thus ordered the ship hove to until morning. Returning to his bunk, he slept soundly for the rest of the night. In the morning, Fanning ordered the ship to resume its course, but almost immediately the crew saw breakers - indicating the presence of a reef - dead ahead. This surprised everyone on board...had they continued the night before for another half hour at the most, they would have run aground, probably with the loss of all hands. While Fanning recorded the incident in his log, he didn't bother to report the atoll as its discoverer.

Four years later, in 1802, Captain Sawle and his ship Palmyra was blown ashore on the island, and later reported its discovery, naming the atoll after his ship. Perhaps it is for the best that Fanning failed to report the discovery, else we'd be telling the tale of the "Curse of Betsy Island"...which just doesn't have the same ring.

There is a legend of buried treasure on the island, as well. Supposedly, in 1816, the Spanish Galleon Esperanza flush from plundering Inca temples of their gold was blown way off course (some versions of the legend say that this happened after a particlarly nasty fight with another ship) and ran aground on the atoll. The crew made it to shore with the loot, and reportedly buried it there before setting off on three makeshift rafts. Two of those never were seen again, and only one sailor was still alive on the third one when it was found by an American whaler. After telling his tale, along with mentioning the burial of the treasure, that sailor, too, died.

There were others, too. By the late 1930s, with war clouds looming over the Pacific horizon, the Navy eyed Palmyra. Its location smack in the middle of the Pacific made it a natural refueling stop for the Allied aircraft. The Navy's Seabees bulldozed a landing strip into the longest of the islands, and dredged a channel into the largest of the lagoons. The "curse" seems to have lived on. Hal Horton, a Navy officer who spent time on the island, is quoted in the book And the Sea Will Tell (more on this book in a bit) as saying:

Once one of our patrol planes went down near the island. We searched and searched but didn't find so much as a bolt or piece of metal. It was weird. Like they'd dropped off the edge of the earth. Another time, a plane took of from the runway, climbed to a couple hundred feet, and turned in the wrong direction. They were supposed to go north and they went south instead. It was broad daylight. We never could figure it out. There were two men aboard that plane. We never saw them again. We had some very bad luck on that island. Old salts in the Pacific called it the Palmyra Curse. [The island]...is very small. You [could] fly over it at ten thousand feet and not see it if there [were] a few clouds in the sky. Once we heard a plane over head trying to find us, be he crashed in the drink before he could find the runway. We didn't get to the poor guy fast enough. Sharks found him first.

Horton isn't specific, but it's entirely possible that the first plane he refers to is our PBJ. What is clear, though is that 35114 disappeard and her crew was listed as MIA. Two years later, on 6 August 1945, the status of the entire crew was changed from Missing in Action to Killed in Action. Lost onboard PBJ-D1 35114 were:

1st Lt. Charles W. Sieben, Pilot
2nd Lt. John James Zelmer, Co-pilot
SSgt Arthur C. Thielen, crew
Cpl Bernard F. Banker, crew
Sgt Frederick J. Seitz, crew
TSgt Paul Junior Rogers, crew
TSgt Clarence H. Post, crew
TSgt James Henry Mons, crew

But the strangities didn't stop after the war...more craft were wrecked, and more people stranded. The notoriety magnified in 1974 when a couple who were living on the island, Buck Walker and his girlfriend Stephanie Stearns, attacked and murdered a couple, Mac and Muff Graham, who were visiting in order to steal their sailboat. Because no bodies could be found, the offenders were initially just charged with theft, but then another yacht crew, who were visiting the island six years later, just happened to be walking down one of the most remote beaches on earth, on the only day when the skeletal remains of Muff Graham were visible on shore...one more day and the tide would have washed them away. This provided the evidence to convict the Walker of the murdering couple (Stearns was acquitted) and send him back to prison. The sordid tale made national news, and was later documented in the 1991 book And the Sea Will Tell by Vincent Bugliosi (author of Helter Skelter), and the TV movie of the same name. And there have been more incidents since then, so the curse lives on.

Some details about the island, along with some gorgeous photos of it today can be found at this post on the TravelVivi blog. Today, it is owned primarily by the Nature Conservancy, which has a number of excellent online articles about the island.

A tip o' my sailor's hat to my brother Eric for giving me the photo...and Lisa, this is why he's always looking for photos for me!