More than 13,000 were killed in WWII flight training, including in B-24 bomber crash on South Side

On May 20, 1943, a B-24 bomber of the 1014th Pilot Transition Training Squadron took off from an Army airfield in Texas and headed to Chicago. It was a miserable day for flying, let alone teaching student pilots. Rain and fog unceasingly accompanied the plane, which had to be flown by instrument.

The bomber’s crew was fated to be among the estimated total of more than 13,000 aviators killed in World War II training accidents before they could be deployed overseas.

Approaching Chicago, the pilot got conflicting reports and was having trouble communicating with the airport tower. It cleared him to land on Runway 4C at Chicago Municipal Airport, as Midway was then known.

But downstate Springfield air traffic controllers had alerted the pilot that Chicago’s airport was reportedly closed. Civilian flights were being diverted to other airports.

Capt. James Gilcrease responded that he “would try to make it anyway.”

Descending through the glide slope, he still couldn’t make out the runway. So he pulled up, intending to circle around and try again.

Again airport control cleared him to land but didn’t hear back from him. He hadn’t gotten high enough to clear an enormous natural gas tank about 2 miles south of the airport.

“The bomber came in very low, and I think, struck and tore down some wires on poles before hitting the tank,” said James Brown, a guard at a construction site a mile to the west. “It disappeared in a flash of fire.”

The bomber’s port wing tip struck the storage tank, reported Lawrence Kinsella, an employee of Peoples Gas Light and Coke Co., the tank’s owner. The forward section of the aircraft fell inside the structure, and its contents exploded.

Pieces of the tank’s steel plating, some the size of a two-story house front, were blown 100 yards by the blast. Parts of the aircraft and its four motors were strewn across a wide swath.

Kinsella and eight other gas company employees on the ground escaped unharmed. The plane’s 12 occupants were incinerated.

“Searchers had little success in finding identifiable bodies,” the Tribune reported, “and small hope was held that any would be yielded by the remaining sub-structure of the 500 foot circular steel tower.”

In addition to Gilcrease, the Consolidated Liberator bomber was carrying another flight instructor, a navigator, two student pilots, four aerial engineers and several passengers. In wartime, it’s common for GIs to hitchhike on whatever transport is available.

The tragic crash of the B-24 Liberator bomber provoked questions of why the world’s largest gas storage tank had been built in a part of the city crowded with residential neighborhoods and heavy industry.

“This accident is another argument in support of a lake front airport,” said 44th Ward Ald. John J. Grealis. “It would not have occurred had the pilots been approaching an island airport in Lake Michigan.”

Instead, the towering column of thick black smoke that rose above 73rd Street and Central Park Avenue reminded contemporaries that learning to fly is inherently dangerous.

Eighty years later, World War II is chiefly remembered for battles fought in Europe, Asia and North Africa.

But even then, the cruel irony of modern warfare was that powerful weapons intended for use against foreign enemies can turn on their makers. Gen. Hap Arnold, the Army Air Forces commander, spoke candidly about the problem. The only way to avoid such appalling statistics was to ground its training aircraft.

But exactly the reverse was imperative. Every potential pilot had to be aloft while being trained for combat.

When the U.S. belatedly entered World War II, Japan occupied much of China. Nazi armies had defeated France, and England was on the ropes. Hitler’s tanks would shortly roll into Russia. It would take years before an American army could be raised and trained for an invasion of the heartland of the Nazi and Japanese empires.

The best way to deliver a counterpunch against the Axis was from the air. That meant confronting assembly line snafus and psychological hang-ups.

Aspiring pilots could be trained only by experienced pilots who were itching to be flying combat missions. “The thought of sitting out the war as a damned flight instructor in Texas or somewhere tore me up,” Chuck Yeager, later to be a famed test pilot, recalled in his memoirs.

After completing his share of World War II combat missions, Yeager was brought back as an instructor to a stateside airfield. There, he was resented by jealous instructors “who had spent the war in Texas … and hated every moment of it,” Yeager said.

An Air Force historian described instructors demoralized “by the sheer boredom generated by a standardized teaching system, which allowed little room for individualized initiative.”

In fact, both students and instructors realized that flying cannot be learned from textbook assignments or by memorizing appropriate readings of cockpit dials. It required honing a tactile sense of an aircraft in motion.

One pilot recalled a notably effective teacher: “Demonstrating, he told me how to feel it in the seat of my pants when we slipped or skidded, and to note how the wind came through the side of the cockpit when a turn was uncoordinated. Hanging on grimly, with an increasing queasiness, I tried to feel what he said I should.”

Brig. Gen. Cleo Bishop noted the high washout rate of his class of student pilots. “I think not so much that the people they washed out couldn’t learn to fly, but they couldn’t learn to fly fast enough,” he recalled. “You were expected to solo within eight or 10 hours.”

Given the constant demand for pilots, the Air Force couldn’t afford to invest more time in a student flyer. Those who made it past that cutoff had progressed from single engine trainers to multiengine bombers and fighters. Each had quirks and faults that were reflected in the grim humor of their nicknames.

The B-24, like the one that crashed in Chicago, was known as the “Flying Coffin” because of design flaws that made it difficult to fly.

Learning to fly in the era of thousands of training disasters made pilots philosophical about dying before seeing combat. First it’s something that happens to others, someplace else.

Then “you see death on a runway or in a field, in a cloud of dust and column of smoke,” recalled one pilot, Samuel Hynes. “At that moment the life of flying changes.”

Yet that didn’t deter stateside pilots. They weren’t chasing medals. Beyond reach was even a posthumously awarded Purple Heart that might ease their parents’ grief by reminding them that their son had died defending America.

When Mabel Rawlinson’s Douglas A-24 Banshee dive bomber crashed at Camp Davis, North Carolina, fellow members of the Women’s Airforce (or Auxiliary) Service Pilots, or WASPs, took up a collection to ship her body to her parents in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

The government didn’t pay funeral expenses for members of the WASPs. Yet she, and thousands of other pilots, men and women, had done much the same as Capt. James Gilcrease when coming in for landing in Chicago.

They took a look down at their country and decided it was surely worth a shot.

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