Gordon's Pics : the SDASM B-24 wreckage collection

I got these pics from Gordon last night, with the following explanation.

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Cheers

Dave Kearton






Field of Nightmares

I have been working on a gigantic project at the museum that is really
messing with my head. With all the personnel changes we've had, the curator
has come to rely on me quite a lot lately. He called me in last week and
laid out a huge cluster**** that was left behind when all the fired people
left - the museum bought the contents of a guy's backyard out in the sticks.
He was a B-24 guy and collected every kind of scraps he could find, from
tiny little data plates to entire fuselages. With the San Diego connection
to that plane, its appropriate that our museum has a cockpit section on
display to memorialize the thousands built here. Soooo, it made sense that
we bought all his junk in order to use the parts to rebuild one cockpit
section out of all the mess. I had heard some of the background so it was
troubling to me - one of the wrecks was apparently a Class Alpha and I have
no desire to deal with bone bits and stuff like that.


But Tony kept pressing, playing on my need to help out whenever asked.
Among 250 volunteers, I am the only one in his forties, and literally, my
old broken down body is in the best shape of anyone in the building. there
isn't anyone else that can lift-drag a 200-pound MLG strut or climb up and
over a huge debris pile for six hours at a time. My little demons aside,
I'm the only candidate for sorting through the piles of twisted aluminum and
blackened cockpit flooring amid the lifeless hulks.

For the last couple weeks, I have been working in what I call the Field of
Nightmares. I could have inserted the words 'Migraines' or 'Sleepless
Nights' too I suppose. Its extremely hard to deal with some of these bits -
and several times, I have turned over sheeting and uncovered torn-off
earphone snaps or other traces of the 10 man crews that once rode these
things through the skies.

We have part of at least three aircraft in the pile - two B-24Ds and a
Privateer that lived on as a water bomber after the war. Its just a
fuselage, but its intact enough to at least be recognizeable. There is also
a naked fuselage section that looks like a cross section cut from the center
of the fuselage. Nothing attached to it or in it, just a bizarrely empty
cross section. We have several large containers of unsorted parts from
wreck sites, and then we have the gruesome thing that just haunts the ****
out of me - during the war, a B-24D that got lost in foul wx in Alaska, and
came down on one of the Aleutians and came down hard. The fuselage broke
up, wings sheered off, and judging from the decapitated cockpit, most
everything in the forward fuselage went straight through the pilots and the
instrument panel. The steering yokes have both been snapped off at the
stem, which is common when the seat and the soft pink thing sitting in it is
driven through the dash. The seat rails are broken off and empty, a mute
testiment to the last moments of a couple brave pilots.

The pix show the pile as I have it today - spread out under the wings of our
unwanted B-26. (The owner let all the inspections expire and is letting it
slow rot on our lot.) I am sorting out all the parts by cockpit section,
fuselage, engines, etc. and we are already selling parts to museums that are
restoring their Liberators. We sold a door for $10,000 today! Still,
rummaging through the asbestos to dig out tiny data plates is excrutiating
for me.

yf Gordon