On Jul. 28, 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith lost his way while flying a B-25 Mitchell bomber. Emerging from a low cloud at about 900ft, the pilot found himself among the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan
During World War II, one of America’s most well-known aircraft was the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle employed this type for the April 18, 1942, Tokyo Raid.
Following that, B-25s were used by the Dutch, British, Chinese, Russian, and Australian forces in addition to US forces in every combat area. The aircraft was widely employed in the Pacific Theater to bomb Japanese airfields and beach emplacements from treetop level, as well as to strafe and skip-bomb enemy shipping, despite its primary purpose of level bombing from medium altitudes.
The B-25 was built by North American Aviation, had its first flight on August 19, 1940, and the first five were delivered to the US Army Air Corps in February 1941. North American Aviation produced 9,816 B-25s at its plants in Kansas and California by the end of the war.
On Jul. 28, 1945, a B-25 Mitchell of the 457th Bomb Group crashed into the Empire State Building.
The 457th Bomb Group had only been in the States a short while (in fact the unit was deployed at Glatton, UK, for WW II operations over Germany until Jun. 21, 1945) when on Saturday, Jul. 28, Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith lost his way while flying a B-25 Mitchell bomber from Bedford, Massachusetts, to Sioux Falls Army Air Base via Newark Airport. Emerging from a low cloud at about 900ft, the 457th pilot found himself among the skyscrapers of downtown Manhattan.
As explained by Roger A. Freeman in his book Airfields of the Eighth Then and Now, the aircraft crashed headlong into the 79th-floor level of the Empire State Building, killing Lieutenant Colonel Smith, two servicemen ‘hitch-hikers’ and eleven office workers.
As the photos in this post show, the B-25 exploded on impact, spraying burning fuel into West 34th Street below, one of the engines completely passing through the building and out the other side! On Sep. 28, 1977, New York publishers of a new book on crash (The Sky is Falling), Grosset & Dunlop presented a plaque, which can now be seen on the 86th floor, ‘in grateful appreciation to those men and women of the Empire State Building who unselfishly gave their assistance in the crash’.
Photo by San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives and Acme Newspictures
