1945-03-20 - B-25 Crashes in Lake Martin

The Flight
By March 20, 1945, Victory in Europe was still more than a month away and Adolph Hitler maintained boldly that fighting would continue. Allied troops were poised along Germany’s Rhine River, and half a world away U.S. Marines had returned to the Philippine’s to address pockets of Japanese resistance.

Here in America, drives were continuing for rubber and steel, and what would be the last Victory Gardens were being carefully prepared.

Army Capt. John Glenn Mabry, an East St. Louis, Ill., native, was flying a B-25 across the Southeast United States, without fear of assault from the enemy.

The twin-engine bomber, built in 1943, had left Washington, D.C., about 8 a.m. and was headed for Texas on a training mission. Passengers included Army Staff Sgt. James N. Green, an aerial engineer from Washington, D.C., and Army Capt. Charles P. Oliver, a passenger who lived in Penacook, N.H.

Capt. Mabry performed a routine check-in at an Atlanta airport as he passed over around 10:13 a.m. on that fateful Tuesday morning. The pilot, the only passenger certified to fly, had accumulated 600 flight hours with 400 of those in a B-25. He was bound for Maxwell Air Field in Montgomery, where they were scheduled to refuel before heading on to Texas. But they never made it that far.

The plane was a B-25 bomber enroute from Washington, D.C. to its homebase in New Orleans.


The Crash
Thirty minutes west of Atlanta, the crew encountered a fierce thunderstorm. One of many that day that swept across east-central Alabama, spawning at least two tornadoes in the state and apparently playing a part in the downing of the 22,000-pound plane. The official Army Air Corps report never cited a cause for the crash, but the report, which mainly includes photographs of the crash site and Bolling Field, where the plane took off, did note the weather.

Through the piles of retrieved debris and military records, Mr. Norwood, a former aircraft mechanic and inspector, has pieced together a theory on what happened to the airplane and the crew. It’s only guesswork, he said, but “it’s a lot better guesswork than what they originally had”.

The right engine was out and on fire, the alcohol tank had exploded, the crew had it “as dirty as they could get it to slow it down,” with flaps down, the working engine feathered, and landing gear down. The fire was on the inside as well as the outside due to the lack of insulation.

“It got all smoke in the cockpit… and I believe they got completely disoriented and went straight in,” Mr. Norwood said. “With all that happening fairly quickly, I don’t think they ever had a chance.”

According to newspaper accounts in The Montgomery Advertiser and the Dadeville Record, more than two dozen planes from Gunter and Maxwell air fields combed a 50-mile –wide path from Montgomery to Atlanta in a three-day search before forestry

Officials at Smith Mountain near the crash site reported seeing debris along the lake shoreline.

They managed to retrieve the body of Sgt. Green and several pieces of debris, including charred “Mae West” life preservers that had floated to shore. Attempts by the Air Force to raise the B-25 bomber were eventually abandoned due to the extremely muddy difficult conditions in that part of the lake. The bodies of the other two men were never recovered during the search by the Air Force in 1945.


Childhood Dreams
Bobby Norwood has heard the stories about the crash of the bomber all his life. As a member of a Montgomery-based underwater diving club at the young age of 14, he dove in Lake Martin for the first time. Since that time, the amateur diver has envisioned himself finding the twin-engine plane.

A later interest in World War II aircraft and the idea that if the plane was salvageable it could be used as a display or perhaps become airborne again spurred his interest on. On the lake, Bobby began using magnetic detectors and depth finders. “I used to go riding in my boat up there thinking I was going to find a picture of an airplane under water on my depth finder, but it didn’t work like that”. It wasn’t until he began questioning local residents that the search took a fruitful turn.

There were no witnesses to the crash, but some longtime locals did remember the military’s attempt to retrieve the bodies and were able to provide him with the general vicinity of the recovery activity.

Bobby was still curious about the cause of the accident. After much research, he finally found a small article on the crash on the front page of a 1945 Dadeville Record. That article helped him pinpoint more specifically the area of the accident – which was the Sandy Creek area – and then he started diving. This valuable piece of information allowed him to focus on a 1,000-yard area of the lake floor, where the discovery ultimately was made.

“When I found that article, I knew definitely the airplane was there, I knew it was near Sandy Creek,” said Norwood, who lives and works in Montgomery and has a lake home hear Kowaliga.

“Before that I didn’t really know it was there because nobody could ever tell me they had seen it or seen part of it. That’s when I really started looking hard and requested the crash report. It took me I don’t know how many times before
I finally got the right one. It had a picture of the crash site on it, which was hand drawn, but that didn’t really help much. The problem with the crash report drawing was the shoreline was drawn while the water was 45 feet below full pool. Since the shoreline looked totally different, it didn’t match any known shoreline of the Sandy Creek area. During World War II, Alabama Power Co. generated power at Martin Dam close to full capacity to supply power to industries supporting the war effort, resulting in a lower lake level than today’s operating guidelines.


Rivet Holes
Three years ago Norwood, suited in his scuba gear, slipped beneath the surface of Lake Martin. He and a friend, Jeff Norris of Atlanta, were finally able to actually dive for the plane. Bobby would be reported to authorities many times over for his activities. Although, after painfully extensive research and effort, he had gained all legal and salvage rights to the aircraft through the United States government, Alabama Power, and the Alabama Historical Commission.

At about 50 feet below the surface of beautiful Lake Martin, Mr. Norwood was unable most of the time to see even his hand in front of his face. He swept the cold, murky bottom with arms and legs, and occasionally probed the bottom with a long poker, which sunk into the surface “like butter”.

Plunging down into the depths, he acted out his childhood fantasy of finding the submerged airplane. But still there was nothing. “We had been searching for two years, every weekend, even through the winter,” Norwood said. “It was 35 degrees and we were out there diving. That’s how this whole project has been. Since we started diving I haven’t done anything on the weekends but come up here and work on it.”

Then one day a fellow diver returned to the surface with what he thought was a piece of a discarded barrel. After a thorough cleaning, Mr. Norwood realized that he was looking at something much more than litter - metal drums don’t have rivet holes.

Almost 47 years after the crash, Norris and his team had brought up the first piece of the aircraft, an unspectacular, mud-covered piece of metal with a rivet hole in it. But to them it looked like gold.

“It didn’t look like anything really, but I used to be an aircraft mechanic years ago, and when I saw that rivet hole, I knew what it was,” he said. “I wiped it off and boy, I went crazy. I said, ‘Go back down, go back down!’” And ever since then it