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In early April, 1943, a B-24D Liberator bomber lifted off from a desert airfield in Libya. Groundcrews gritted their teeth against the torrents of dust swirled about by the bomber's four propellers, and watched as the plane disappeared into the distance. On her nose were stenciled the words "Lady Be Good," the name of a popular song at the time. Along with the load of high explosives inside her were nine men who were destined never to be seen alive again.

They were raw. Having just arrived in Libya a short time before, the crew of William Hatton had barely had time to adjust to their surroundings before being called up for their first mission over Italy. They had had all the necessary training, true, but training is rarely ever close to the real thing.

Nervous and jittery, they joined up with their flight and headed north towards their target at Naples. Along the way the sun began to set, and shortly after the bomb run the group turned south for home. In the fading light, the inexperienced crew became separated from the rest of their group. Now, all alone above the desolate darkness of the Med below, they turned to Hayes, their navigator for redemption. He and he alone would be the guiding force that led them home safely to their field in Libya.

But he was raw too. He had neither the training or intrinsic skill to face the task that loomed over him that night, and soon the bomber and the nine men inside her were hopelessly lost. Sometime during the mission, the wind had shifted fiercely from south to north. So now, as Hayes looked at his charts, and plotted his location, he was unaware that a ferocious tailwind was pushing his plane south at a rate far faster than he was predicting.

The hours droned on, and Hayes - who thought his plane was fighting a vicious headwind, when in fact it was being pushed quickly southward by an unusually strong tailwind - continued plotting his course in error. Every time Hatton would call to ask for their position, Hayes would respond "Still over the med, chief." What none of them could see in the darkness was that the Libyan coast had long slunk away behind them and all that awaited them below as a sea of cold, unforgiving sand.


The dull throb of the Liberator's four Pratt & Whitney Wasp engines created a sort of lull, as everyone in the aircraft settled in. Surely, they'd be descending soon... wouldn't they? Hayes was the only one who knew, and as he sat there in his cramped compartment, doodling absentmindedly on his notes, even he began to feel the twinge of fear. They should be close.

It was then that the men's ears perked up. One of the Wasps had coughed. The soothing lull soon became a cacophony of gyrating propellers as one after the other lost and then again regained power. The engines were gasping for life as they began to ingest air from the fuel tanks. Soon it was clear to Hatton and his crew that they were going to have to leave the aircraft rather than face ditching in the dark Med.

Donning their parachutes and "mae west" life preservers, they one by one slipped out of the aircraft and into the tranquil darkness. As they fluttered silently down, they could hear the Liberator make her way off in the darkness, one engine still faltering on the right wing. Fear gave way to utter confusion as the cold Sahara rushed up to meet them. “What the hell happened to the Med,” one of them wondered as he brushed himself off in the darkness.

Calling out to each other, eventually most of the rattled crew found each other and huddled for warmth. Their Bombardier, John, hadn’t answered any of the calls, however and there was no sign of him. For hours they called out his name but he was never seen again.

The anxiety of their situation, their lost airplane, and their lost friend weighed heavily on their minds as the sun slowly rose over the desert sea. Discarding their unnecessary equipment, they began to walk. It was obvious to them what had happened. Hayes had gotten them lost over the desert, not the Med, and now they were all going to pay for his mistakes. They didn’t show him any animosity though. They were a team and they new they had to work together if any of them had any hope of survival.

For days they walked. Behind them lay a string of discarded equipment. Jackets, parachutes, belts and other gear all thrown away as the afternoon sun baked their already burning skin. Water was a problem too. They had barely a canteen among the eight of them and with no idea how far they had to go, they began a strict rationing program: half a capful a day for each man. It was ludicrous. Half a capful was barely enough to wet their cracking lips and they still had miles to go.

How many miles they didn’t know. Truth be told, they really didn’t have much of a plan. They knew what direction they’d flown and for how long, but the variable they didn’t know was the tailwind and how far it had pushed them. For all they knew they could have been twenty or two hundred miles from civilization.

"Just walk." That’s all each man told himself as he wearily lifted one foot and placed in front of the other. "Just keep walking."

By night they chattered and froze under a pristine sky. By day they roasted alive under a burning sun. The desert was taking its toll on the poor flyboys and soon they would succumb to it. Finally, after days of walking, the group made a decision. Several of the men who were in better shape would take the remaining water and continue walking in hopes that they could find help and form a rescue effort. The others would stay behind and wait for them.

And that is where they died. For as the men continued walking north, they too perished one by one, each body quietly covered and enveloped by the ever-shifting sand. There would be no help; no rescue efforts. The last of the Lady’s men fell to the sand and disappeared roughly 130 miles from where he and his crewmates first gathered in the darkness of the Sahara.

For seventeen years the men of the Lady Be Good lay in silence and isolation. It wasn’t until 1960 when an oil survey team from British Petroleum first sighted the remains of a mystery bomber lying on the desert floor several hundred miles south of Benghazi. Curious, they explored the wreck only to find it abandoned and untouched. Personal effects and navigation logs were still sitting in their proper place inside the airplane. Aside from being broken in half at the mid section, it looked as though she had made a perfect belly landing. But where was the crew?

Over the course of the next few years, USAF and other US personnel made various expeditions to the Libyan desert in an effort to locate the bomber’s missing crewmen. In time they did. First, they came across the remains of five crewmen; bleached white bones amidst a scattering of WWII era equipment. On one of them, the copilot, they found a diary. Though it was scarce in its entries it painted a chilling picture of the crew in their final days. Undertones of fear, desperation, and isolation mount in each subsequent entry until the final defeated, “no help yet very cold nites…”

As the search teams continued, seven of the eight men who gathered the night they bailed out were located, one over 130 miles north of the bail out point. By mid April of 1943, Tech Sgt. Harold Ripslinger had walked over 130 miles in the burning heat of the Sahara on little more than a half capful of water per day. He didn’t know it, but he was still several dozen miles south of his base near Benghazi.

The body of their bombardier, John Woravka was finally located some 12 miles north of the B-24’s wreckage site. Tangled around his shattered and broken body were the remains of his parachute and rigging lines. From some points of view, he might be considered the lucky one.

One of the greatest ironies of the entire saga of this doomed crew was a discovery made by some of the first BP oil crew to find the aircraft. As stated, the plane was largely intact and appeared to have made a relatively soft landing on a hard gravel plain. Inside the storage lockers on board the aircraft, the oil crews found various desert survival gear and several canteens, each full to the brim.