A WWII bomber vanished in an upstate New York blizzard. A new book tracks the mystery
They are frozen in a moment, in a frame on fireplace mantels, tucked in photo albums or stored away in dusty boxes in countless attics: the faces of the Greatest Generation in time of war. Whether lost in youth or decades later in old age, they live on in black-and-white portraits in dress uniforms, spit polish and forever young.
Men such as 21-year-old Wendell Keith Ponder of Forkville, Mississippi, Keith to his family and friends, who never saw 22 and whose death in a homefront training mission remains part of a stubborn mystery 79 years later.
This Memorial Day, a new book revives the long-lost story of Ponder's World War II bomber that vanished in an upstate New York blizzard on Feb. 18, 1944. “Vanishing Point: The Search for a B-24 Bomber Crew Lost on the World War II Home Front,” (Three Hills, $29.95) by veteran journalist Tom Wilber, is part history, part mystery, part memorial to those who died before reaching the war.
World War II saw more than 15,000 Army Air Forces flyers perish during home-front training. Writes Wilber: “It was a time when, in the service of freedom, death quite literally rained from domestic skies.”
“Vanishing Point” unspools what happened — or might have happened — to Ponder's ill-fated flight. It’s the story of the story, the people behind the story, and the keepers of the story who maintain a vigil of exploration nearly 80 years later.
Wilber grew up hearing the story of the ghost plane, believed missing in Lake Ontario near his family's summer cottage in Oswego, New York. His boyhood fascination with its discovery gave way to something else.
After years of shoe-leather reporting on the book, including dozens of interviews and poring through newspaper archives, he now considers the missing plane “the tomb of the forgotten soldier,” a worthy cousin to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery.
Missing bomber got lost early on
The B-24 Liberator bomber left Westover Air Base north of Springfield, Massachusetts, on a training run on Feb. 17, 1944. The eight-man crew of Gateway Gertie was to take off, rise above the cloud cover, join formation, break formation and return to base, the stock and trade of the bombing missions that awaited them in Europe in the weeks to come, as soon as their battle orders arrived.
“The men had earned their wings,” Wilber writes. “Now they were mastering them.”
Their instructions were not to leave local airspace. Instead, Gertie got a late start and, flying without a navigator, somehow found itself heading for Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, then Syracuse, New York, then, caught in the grips of a lake effect blizzard, over Oswego, New York.
It was never heard from again.
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Missing bomber was Keith’s plane
To the world, it was another B-24, the war’s workhorse bomber, able to, as Wilber writes: "go farther, faster with more payload than other bombers of its day." From 1941-45, 18,500 Liberators rolled off American assembly lines; half of them were built at Ford Motor Co.'s Willow Run plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
To the Army Air Forces, the lost plane was 41-29047E. To flight controllers, it was 047. To those who searched for it for generations, it was “Army 047” or, simply, “The 24."
The pin-up painting on the side of the four-engine bomber christened her Gateway Gertie, a name that was jumbled after its disappearance (by virtue of a typo or a waggish reporter) into Getaway Gertie, the name that stuck.
To Lucy Ponder of Jackson, Mississippi, it was simply the plane her pilot son died in.
Keith's plane.
Bomber's crew was from across U.S.
Ponder spent his Forkville, Mississippi, childhood in the thrall of the national obsession with flight. Charles Lindbergh and "aeroplane circuses" at the county fair cemented his love: His Christmas wish at age 10 was for an aviator suit.
Writes Ponder: “Flight had arrived in Forkville even before electricity and indoor plumbing.”
The Gertie crew included co-pilot Ray Bickel, 28, of Chicago, who had wed Marion Hardeis three months before the crash, and was the only married member of the crew.
There was also: flight engineer Sgt. Thomas C. Roberts from South Boston, Massachusetts; radio operator Sgt. Joseph Michael Zebo of Providence, Rhode Island; assistant engineer Sgt. Aubrey H. Alexander of Muscle Shoals, Alabama; assistant radio operator PFC Phillip R. Walton, from the San Francisco Bay area; Cpl. James O. Cozier, a gunner from Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Sgt. Kenneth N. Jonen, a gunner from Milwaukee.
Residents said they heard missing bomber
For years, folks in Oswego talked about the missing plane, which had dominated no fewer than five local papers in the weeks after it had gone missing, each tantalizing clue getting ink.
There was the woman who'd phoned Oswego police to report a low-flying plane rumbling over her home in Scriba, the beat cops who had heard it circling overhead in the blizzard, the father-and-son lighthouse keepers at Port Ontario who argued about whether or not to turn on their beacon, the justice of the peace in Denmark who heard a boom in the night and was convinced it was the B-24.
Every lead was tracked down in real time, and recalled in "Vanishing Point."
Wherever the plane was lost, over land or water, it was nearby and it belonged, in a way, to Oswego. It was their crash and, by extension, the crew members were their boys. Letters were sent to the families of the eight, who accepted the prayers of Oswego families and sent photos of their boys for display at community and church gatherings.
A watery discovery
A discovery placed the Gertie in the watery depths of Lake Ontario just off shore from the Wilbers' summer place.
Recalls Wilber: “You look out over the water and think, 'There's a plane down there.' And you're skin diving as a kid and it was like, 'Wouldn't that be cool to see?'”
But years of research, dozens of interviews and countless hours poring through newspaper archives, training manuals and documents has changed Wilber’s perspective.
“It kind of turned to: 'These were real airmen with a real story representing a much broader thing.’”
The “broader thing” was the idea that the lost plane — the focus of an exhaustive search across the Adirondacks, parts of Canada and a swath of Western New York for just three weeks before the pull of the war beckoned again — was a grave.
And it got him to thinking: "Would you want to dig up the grave to look at it?"
Steep learning curve for author
Wilber's first book, “Under the Surface: Fracking, Fortunes and the Fate of Marcellus Shale,” (Cornell University Press, 2012) arose from his nearly 30-year career as a reporter at the Binghamton Sun-Press & Bulletin. It looked at the rise and impact of fracking on communities in Pennsylvania and central New York.
"Vanishing Point" meant starting from scratch, without a reporting frame of reference, the dribs and drabs of remembered summer stories.
"I'm not a World War II guy or a history guy," he says — but the shoe-leather part was in his wheelhouse.
"I was a little bit out of my element with the technicalities of flying a B-24, and the learning curve was very steep on that. But telling a story, tracing rumors to their sources, going through all the newspaper archives, understanding the dynamics of a newsroom or a beat reporter. I've made those calls from telephone booths."
It meant talking to old-timers whose late-in-life pursuits included the whereabouts of Getaway Gertie, including Jim Coffed of Lancaster, New York, south of Buffalo, who searched for “Army 047” for decades. Coffed's roll-top desk, filing cabinets and home office nook brimmed with reports, photos, mementos and clippings he eventually opened to Wilber.
The writer recalls that in their final conversation, before his 2020 death days before his 91st birthday, Coffed spoke with a sense of frustration and disappointment at the lack of a resolution, in part for the boys in the plane with whom he had created an attachment, in part for his life's work failing to bear the expected fruit.
“It was a big deal when it disappeared. But (here we are) years down the road and nobody cares," Coffed said. "On Jeopardy, nobody knows the answers on World War II."
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A grave is a grave is a grave
Wilber writes that the story of Getaway Gertie "waits to be made whole," an effort his book has done much to advance. In the meantime, he has arrived at a conclusion by way of a question, one that bears consideration as the nation prepares to lay wreaths at memorials and place flags at the graves of the soldier dead.
If the B-24 Liberator rests at the bottom of Lake Ontario, in waters that could be hundreds of feet deep, he wonders: "Is a grave 60 or 600 feet deep inherently less honorable than one six feet deep?"
Reach Peter D. Kramer at pkramer@gannett.com.