A Flash of Silver in the Swamp: The Identification of a B-24 Crash Site from WWII in the Lowcountry of South Carolina

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

On Dec. 15, 1944, a B-24 took off on a night navigation mission from Chatham Air Field in Georgia, headed to Florida. The crew of nine were training to patrol the East Coast for enemy submarines. Fifteen minutes into the flight, engine #1 caught fire. The bomber crashed less than five minutes later into swampland in the lowcountry of South Carolina. This paper discusses the identification of the crash site, the condition of extant wreckage found as part of an intensive cultural resources survey in 2021, and provides a narrative history of the incident based on information obtained in the Army Air Force crash report. This site highlights the significant loss of life which occurred within the US as a result of training accidents during World War II. It is an unusual archaeological site type and it has few, if any, precedents within the southeastern US. Of the 561 fatal Army Air Force crashes recorded in South Carolina and Georgia during WWII, this is the first to be recorded formally as an archaeological site. Using Phased Aviation Archaeology Research (PAAR) methodologies adopted from the UK as a guide, the wreckage of Plane 42-50992 has been mapped, photographed, and analyzed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38150.0