B17 BOMBER CRASH IN WEST TAMPA, MAY 19, 1944

Photo courtesy of "BeetleBailey1970" at Deviant Art.com

This location is a brisk 5 minute walk from where a C47 Cargo plane went down in 1969

The following narrative is from a Sunday, September 19, 1993 article about this crash by Leland Hawes, Tribune history writer, which is included at the bottom of this feature.

B-17 CRASHED IN WEST TAMPA, BOMBER PLOWED INTO STREET IN '44

Shortly before 7 a.m. on May 19, 1944, a four-engine B-17 bomber crashed on a street in West Tampa just east of Drew Field, the giant wartime base where today's Tampa International Airport is located.

1948 Aerial view of crash site

The pilot, losing altitude after taking off on east-west Runway 27, tried to avoid smashing into homes. Wings of the Flying Fortress chopped the tops of oak trees as the aircraft descended onto then-unpaved Abdella Street.

In the tangle of power lines, tree limbs and street-side dwellings, crew members tumbled out, some of them with their clothing ablaze.

Several aboard were trapped as the wings broke loose and the fuselage crumpled in the downward plunge. Gasoline bladders in the wings burst into flames, and practice bombs charged with black powder exploded.

 

Pfc. Edward W. Westlake, who lived two blocks away, was credited with extricating the injured pilot and aiding other injured crewmen.

A story in The Tampa Morning Tribune told how Elaine L. Cuddeback and her mother, Katherine L. Drew, found an airman lying in their yard with flames licking at his uniform.

"Another soldier was trying to beat out the flames with a life raft," she said, "so my mother and I ran upstairs and got blankets and quilts. We finally got the flames smothered on the boy's clothing."

Nine of the crew members were injured, three critically. Tech Sgt. Herbert Sprague of Hudson, Mass., died in the aftermath.

CLOUDS OF SMOKE
The home at 3505 Abdella St., occupied by Frank and Willie Kacsik and their two daughters, Elizabeth, 5, and Frances, 4, was destroyed by fire spreading from the plane. A plume of smoke funneled skyward.

"It sounded as though the heavens had dropped down upon us," Willie Kacsik told a Tampa Daily Times reporter. "The house was filled with a cloud of smoke, but cleared for an instant and gave me time to find my babies were safe — and we carried them from the house."

The Kacsik family escaped injury, but all its belongings burned, the news story reported.

A nearby two-story home, providentially vacant, was badly damaged.

The crash occurred between and Glen Avenue and Lincoln Avenue on Abdella which today would be the 3400 block.

According to the Tribune article the next day, ammunition and gasoline explosions hindered rescuers. Here is what was reported: "An unidentified neighbor, disregarding the popping bullets and practice bombs inside the plane, helped an injured crew member knock the glass away from the nose in order to extricate the trapped nose gunner."

That injured crew member could have been First Lt. Thomas S. Garrett III, the instructor-pilot aboard, whose story appears on this page.

Alexander Hay, who lived at 3500 Leroy St., was quoted as saying: "When it lit, men started spewing from all directions. One boy was running down the road away from the plane, with his parachute on fire. Somebody yelled at him to get down and roll. He flopped in the sand and rolled most of the fire out."

Hay and another neighbor, Rufus Reed, a shipyard electrician, cut the parachute off the airman's body.

The Tribune story asserted that almost all of the machine-gun ammunition aboard the plane exploded in the flames. "A few of the practice bombs in the bomb bay blew their heads," the account added.

A 13,000-volt main line leading from West Tampa into Drew Field was knocked down by the plane. Electricity on portions of the base was interrupted for several hours.

  

DIFFERENT MEMORIES [From Leland Hawes article of Sep. 19, 1993]

Fred Hohnadel, a Tampa Electric Co. engineer, happened to be in the area and found the place cordoned off by military police. He gained entry and passed on word that voltage distribution lines had been disrupted.

Maurice S. Johnson, who was captain of Engine 8 at Drew Field's Station 2, said that when his 500-gallon pumper arrived, "the plane was just smoking. ... We sprayed fog into the wing."

Johnson, now 80 and retired in Floral City, said, "The odor of electrical malfunction was overwhelmingly strong within the aircraft."

Most of the injured had been removed from the crash site by the time his unit arrived, he said. But he did recall "one G.I., who was in shock, running around saying, "My buddies are in there.' " This, too, may have been pilot-instructor Garrett.

Abdella Street was then outside Tampa's city limits, and it's unknown whether any county volunteer fire units went to the blaze. From Johnson's recollection, the Drew fire units may have been the only ones at the scene.

Obviously, memories differ about details on that morning 49 years ago in the neighborhood just a few blocks from the Dale Mabry Highway boundary fence of Drew Field.

Hal Shaw, who was 9 years old at the time, living at Abdella and Lincoln Avenue, remembers crew members "landing on neighbors' roofs, on fire, and the neighbors coming out with blankets." He added: "The pilot did a hell of a job putting that big of a plane down" without causing civilian deaths or more damage.

[READ THE ARTICLES FROM MAY 20 AND MAY 21, 1944.  There was no mention of crew members landing on neighbor's rooftops, on fire or not.  This is a perfect example of the unreliability of an eyewitness's memories fifty years later, especially if the eyewitness was a child at the time.  If a crew member landed on a rooftop, on fire, certainly one of the witnesses would have mentioned it to the reporter.]

Bessie Jo Almerico, who lived on Cordelia Street, one block over, said there were such low flights that "the lights of the planes came in our window." People were predicting potential crashes.

I was only 11 or 12," she said. Her mother, Bessie Hawes, was one of the first on the scene. When there was talk of moving an injured man from the ground, she cautioned against it because of the possibility of internal injuries.

Almerico said the area westward toward Drew Field "was all marshland. We went hunting for quail, and got our Christmas trees out there."

 

 

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