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CRASH AT CAIRNS
On the 21st of
August 1944 unnamed B-24J-135-CO serial #42-110121 of the 2nd
Squadron of the 22nd Bombardment Group crashed at Cairns Airport,
Queensland, Australia, killing four of the crew. One of the survivors was
co-pilot John A. Hellstrom who put his recollections on paper in 1991. His
account is interesting for several reasons, including the fact that he fills in
the account with much background anecdotal material. Aerothentic has published
John’s letter, verbatim, below:
Letter
from John A. Hellstrom, P.C,
of Carlin,
Hellstrom & Bittner, Davenport, Iowa,
dated 4th
October 1991, to Michael John Claringbould
The pilot of the B24 which crashed on August 21, 1944 was Capt. Calvin Flogstad. He was Squadron Operation Officer of the 2nd Bomb Squadron. I also knew the navigator well. He was Lt. Nieme, who had been a friend for some time. After all these years I am not entirely positive of the spelling of the name but I remember him vividly. I don't believe the other members of the crew were as familiar to me. I don't, now, remember their names. The evening prior to the flight, Capt. Flogstad stopped at my tent and asked if I would fly as his copilot to Townsville, Australia the following day. I accepted with delight, since it might provide a chance for a meal with fresh food instead of the dehydrated food we existed on. We were stationed, at that time, on Owi Island (just off Biak Island), having moved from Nadzab a week or two earlier. We had flown a few missions from Owi ‑ one that I recall to a Japanese strip in the Halmaheras. Later that evening the Squadron Mess Officer gave me a double handful of Australian money and requested that I buy fresh meat or milk or anything of that nature and bring it back for him. Shortly thereafter the Group Mess Officer came to me with a similar request ‑ he provided me with Dutch guilders. I remember I buttoned each wad of money in the pockets of my shirt to keep them separate. I believe the purpose of the flight was to pick up spare parts and items of that kind at the air depot in Townsville. Since it didn't make any difference to me I don't have a specific recollection at this time.
In any event, we took off in
the morning of the 21st of August, 1944 and crossed the Owen Stanley Mountains
and the Torres Straits and somewhere over the Coral Sea or in that area we ran
into bad weather. We undoubtedly should have turned around, but in those days,
if we aborted every flight when we ran into bad weather, we would probably have
never accomplished anything. In any event, we tried to fly through the weather
and it kept getting worse. We finally made landfall in the vicinity of Cairns,
Australia, and were able to contact the tower at the strip there. We assumed
that the weather was bad all along the Australian coast and made no effort to
proceed down the coast to Townsville. I later learned that the weather at
Townsville was not nearly as bad. With our radio compass we homed in on the
tower and located the strip. It was raining extremely hard. We made several
passes at the field and with the assistance of the tower operator we did touch
down on the strip.
As co‑pilot, I immediately
commenced my duties with respect to the mixture control, wing flaps, cowl
flaps, prop pitch, and all of the other assorted chores. As a result I had my
head in the cockpit and did not know our situation. I realized that Capt.
Flogstad was standing on the brakes very hard but did not become aware of the
seriousness of the situation until he said "Hellstrom, this looks like our
first crack‑up". I looked up and saw the end of the runway in front
of us. We were probably still doing 90 miles an hour. We had obviously touched
down in the middle of the strip. At the end of the runway was a large ditch,
apparently a drainage ditch. On the right hand side of the cockpit was located
a long row of toggle switches which controlled all of the electrical systems.
Above it was a bar on a pivot which I immediately depressed and turned off all
of the electrical systems. I then threw my right arm in front of my face and
remember nothing else until I woke up in the ambulance, with the rain pounding
on the roof.
The next recollection I have
is waking up in a hospital surrounded by nurses in red and white habits. There
were also several doctors in attendance and a priest who was administering the
last rights to me. I later learned that the nose wheel of the B24 went into the
ditch and the nose crashed into the opposite side of the ditch crumpling it
back past the top turret. Capt. Flogstad continued to fly the plane until it
crashed. His skull was fractured and he was killed on impact. The top turret
broke loose and crashed down killing the radio man and the engineer. I don't
know where Lt. Nieme was riding but I apparently was the only one that survived
for any appreciable amount of time. I saw photographs of the plane while I was
in the hospital and it was largely a mass of crumbled metal. The crash crew at
the Cairns strip chopped me out of the wreckage. My injuries consisted of a
badly broken right arm, which took the impact instead of my skull, and a broken
pelvis as a result of flying forward into the seat belt. I had innumerable cuts
and laceration and bruises over the rest of my body. I specifically remember
the nurses attempting to remove my clothes and discovering the rather large
amount of money buttoned in my shirt pockets. They were astonished. I remained
only a day or two in this hospital which was a civilian hospital located not
too far from the Cairns airstrip. As soon as my condition was stabilized I was
moved from there to a small naval station hospital in Cairns. It was composed
of a small compound of Quonset huts and apparently furnished routine medical
care for the naval vessels in the area which could not be handled in sick bay.
They performed a lot of appendectomies and treated illnesses too severe to be
handled on board ship. I remained in that hospital for approximately six weeks
until my pelvis had healed to the extent that I could limp around and then I
was moved to an army field hospital somewhere outside of Townsville. This
hospital was a very small unit with probably only a dozen doctors and an equivalent
number of nurses and some medical corps men. Just exactly who they served I
don't believe I ever knew. I think it was largely a surgical unit. Sometime in
November my arm, which had suffered a compound comminuted fracture of the right
ulna, appeared to be healed and I was about to be discharged, given a weeks
sick leave in Sydney, and then sent back to duty, when the doctors discovered
that the bone had not joined in a proper manner and a false union had resulted.
I was immediately sent to
the 42nd General Hospital in Brisbane where I was thoroughly examined and it
was determined that an operation and bone graft would be necessary. Since I
would be incapacitated for a lengthy period of time it was determined that I
should be sent back to the States. It was also in the hospital in Brisbane that
my mail caught up with me and I learned that my younger brother, who was the
pilot of a B-26 Bomber in the 9th Air Force in England, had been shot down and
killed north of Paris, France, on August 10, 1944.
I was sent home on the S.S
Lurline which was a ship belonging to the Matson Line under contract to the
United States Armed Forces as a hospital ship. Approximately two weeks after
leaving I landed in early 1945 at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco
and was then sent by hospital train to Winter General Hospital in Topeka,
Kansas, where a bore graft was performed and my arm repaired. The war ended
while I was still in the hospital and I was given my disability discharge in
October of 1945. My disability is rather minimum and the use of my right arm
has not been affected to the extent that it has changed my life greatly, other
than that it prevented me from remaining in the air force and making it my
career as I had planned. It might interest you to know that a gentlemen named
Kenneth W. Hopper, a Townsville, Australia, bush pilot, contacted me a few
years ago inquiring with respect to the crash at Cairns. In the course of our
correspondence I asked him what had happened to the wreckage. He located a couple
of people who had participated in salvaging the wreckage after the war. The
wrecked plane had apparently been pushed off into the brush at the time and
abandoned. He obtained for me, as a souvenir, one of the hydraulic cylinders
from a wing flap on the B-24. I have it as a memento.
The above information
contained may have little significance but it is as I remember it.
Sincerely,
John A. Hellstrom
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