Residents remember bomber crash
Garrison Hilliard
at a wheat field in rustic Warren County.
Ask Warren County old-timers and they will surely remember the day -
Thursday, July 13, 1950 - when, as United Nations forces began to
engage in the Korean War, a U.S. Air Force Strategic Air Command
bomber plummeted to earth and crashed at the Bishop farm west of
present-day Ohio 741 and north of Hamilton Road in Turtlecreek
Township.
The day was clear and sunny, the high temperature a mild 75 degrees,
according to the National Weather Service. About five miles
north-northeast of Mason, a B-50 Superfortress was flying at 7,000
feet on the way to Dayton's Wright-Patterson Air Force base while en
route to England, according to Air Force records.
As a redesign of the B-29 Superfortress, the B-50 could be easily
mistaken for its more famous counterpart. Two separate B-29s named
"Enola Gay" and "Bockscar" had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, respectively, almost five years earlier.
On this day, the B-50, serial number 49-0267, was carrying four
officers and 12 airmen, members of the 97th Bomb Group based at Biggs
Air Force Base near El Paso, Texas.
At about 3 p.m., the hulking four-engine propeller-driven bomber nosed
down out of a bright blue sky, crashed, and exploded in a
bomb-and-fuel powered blast.
? Photos: Bomber crash aftermath
A thunderous roar thudded outward from the obliterated plane, which
could weigh in excess of 86 tons fully loaded. The explosion was felt
as far away as Milford, 20 miles away, and residents in Pleasant Ridge
reported feeling a "shock" accompanied by rattling windows. The entire
crew perished.
Closer to the crash, 23-year-old Ralph Spaeth was working at his job
machining cash register parts at Deerfield Manufacturing in Mason when
he and fellow workers heard the loud, rolling rumble.
They rushed outside.
"We looked out that way and saw the smoke," said Spaeth, 83, of Mason.
Dick Brant, 89, then a 29-year-old Lebanon volunteer firefighter, was
among the first to respond to the chaotic scene.
Fires roared, pieces of aluminum were scattered across a 900-foot
area, according to news reports, and a crater, 125-feet wide and
20-feet deep, was torn out of the ground where the B-50 smacked into
the earth. Bodies, and pieces of bodies, were in the wreckage and
dotted the field.
"There were highway patrol officers," said Brant. "Nobody was allowed
near where the plane crashed. We roped it off."
Spaeth, himself a volunteer firefighter for Mason, was close behind
Brant's company.
To his surprise, the bomber had crashed near his aunt's farm.
The force of the explosion knocked off barn doors there and blew out
windows in the farmhouse.
"It was just unreal," Spaeth said. "That plane just went into millions
of pieces."
An Enquirer photograph shows fires burning hours after the crash. In
another photo, 50 yards away from the crater, part of the bomber's
landing gear is seen lodged in a tree. Three policemen, one of them
smoking a cigarette, stand over plane wreckage in another picture
while in the background, hundreds of people stand in a line watching
the scene.
Air Force officers soon arrived from Wright-Patterson and took charge.
"There was something on that plane that they wanted to find," Spaeth
said. Clamshell diggers and bulldozers rolled up and churned the
earth.
What "they" wanted, according to government records, was the casing of
a Mk-4 nuclear weapon.
Similar to the "Fat Man" bomb used in the bombing of Nagasaki, the
Mk-4 carried by the B-50 had no fissile material, according to the
Department of Defense. The weapon did have its high explosive
component, and that detonated on impact, contributing to the large
crater blown in the ground.
The cause of the crash that summer day that killed 16 men but harmed
no one on the ground has never been determined or at least hasn't been
declassified, said Carl Grusnick, a spokesman for the U.S. Air Force
at Kirtland Air Force Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The U.S. government paid a damage settlement of about $12,000 to
Spaeth's aunt.
"We spent a lot of time boarding up her windows," Spaeth said.
Soon, life went on in Warren County, which had a population of 38,500
then - not much higher than today's city of Mason.
But even if most residents today don't know about it, the crash was a
big deal to residents of rural Warren County in 1950.
"It was the talk of the town I'm sure for a month," said Spaeth.
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