A PIECE OF HISTORY
PENNSYLVANIA ARCHAEOLOGISTS SEARCH FOR SITE OF 1921 BOMBER CRASH
by Rick Steelhammer (Reprinted from the September 22, 1996, Gazette-Mail of Charleston, W.Va.)
DRENNAN- Seventy-five years ago this month, the airplane that ushered in the era of air power nosedived into a Nicholas County hillside so remote it took 400 searchers two days to find the bomber. Less than two months before the crash, Martin Bomber No.5 dropped a 2,000- pound bomb that smashed through the port bow of the captured German battleship Ostfriesland, sending it to the bottom of Chesapeake Bay in 22 minutes. The navy had deemed the 27,000 ton battlewagon unsinkable.
That successful demonstration of high altitude precision bombing- the world's first- played a key role in the creation of the Army Air Corps, forerunner of the U.S. Air Force, and established that control of the air could be at least as important as domination of sea lanes and land masses. The demonstration was arranged and orchestrated by the father of air power, Gen. Billy Mitchell, who was later court- martialed for his fervor and outspokenness.
The week preceding the crash, the aircraft was parked at an airfield in Kanawha City, where it was part of a Mitchell- led squadron of three Martin bombers sent to the coalfields as a show of force during West Virginia's infamous Mine Wars. The squadron never flew missions against striking miners; the presence of three of America's largest and most destructive warplanes in the state's southern coalfields was designed by President Warren G. Harding to serve as a deterrent to civilian uprising. The Martin bomber is so steeped in history that a pair of Pennsylvania archaeologists is making an attempt to locate the crash site, now lost to obscurity, to have it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. "This plane started the era of air power," said Pat Riley of Legionville, Pa., as he grabbed a metal detector and headed into a wooded cove, near the top of a ridge west of Drennen. " if we find it, it shouldn't be any trouble getting it designated a national historic site." By looking at old newspaper articles and going over second hand accounts of the crash site's location from relatives of people involved in the September 4-5, 1921, search for the plane, Riley has narrowed the search to a pair of hollows that drain the western side of the ridge overlooking Drennen. It's a search worth the effort, according to Charleston historian and author Richard Andre, whose articles on the airplane and its crash in Goldenseal and Wonderful West Virginia magazines inspired Riley's search. "It's much more than a search for an old army relic that crashed in the hills of West Virginia," said Andre. "It's a search for a piece of world military history." The squadron of Martin Bombers arrived in Kanawha City on September 1, and quickly became a local novelty. Housewives took pails of ice cream and coffee to the aviators, while their husbands doled out cigars and cigarettes, according to an account of the planes' arrival in the Charleston Gazette.
Photographs of the bombers parked on the grass airstrip located near the present- day site of City National Bank show the aviators supervising children as they played in the cockpits of the huge canvas and wood flying machines. When trainloads of federal troops arrived, the striking miners laid down their arms, and by September 3, Mitchell's squadron was ordered back to Langley Airfield in Virginia. After taking off at noon and climbing to 4,000 feet, the bombers soon encountered violent winds as they flew into a thunderstorm over Nicholas County. Plane no. 5 was directly in front of our plane," recounted Pvt. Ryston Zambro of Hagerstown, Md., a crew member of Martin bomber No. 4, in an interview shortly after the crash. "We saw the pilot was making a left bank with the evident intention of returning to the field in Charleston." But a sudden gust of wind as No. 5 banked steeply, flipped the airplane over. "it went into a nosedive, but before the pilot could recover; he was swept into a tailspin and fell directly to the ground." The remaining two bombers circled the wreck site. "We saw that No. 5 had crashed into the ground nose first, with her tail projecting up into the air at an almost horizontal angle," Zambro said. Soon after impact, the wreckage went up in flames. The remnants of the squadron flew onto a field in Greenbrier County, where they reported the crash. A search party involving more than 400 volunteers was quickly organized, but because of the steep, rugged nature of the terrain, the wreck was not found for 40 hours. Ben Hughes, the first searcher to reach the wreckage, was surprised to find that one crewman had survived the ordeal. Cpl. Alexander Hazleton of Wilmington, Del., was the only person not ejected from the aircraft. He suffered internal injuries and two broken legs, and was mercifully unconscious for most of the time following the crash.
Searchers fashioned stretchers from the canvas and wood of the wreckage to haul Hazleton and his dead comrades - pilot Lt. Harry Speck and co- pilot Lt. William Fitzpatrick, both of Medford, Ore., Sgt. Arthur Brown of Kentucky and Pvt. Walter Howard of San Francisco - off the mountain. The Swiss Lumber Co. arranged for a special train to carry Hazleton to the nearest hospital, in Montgomery. While Hazleton appeared to be headed for recovery shortly after the crash, he died within a year.
Biography of Brigadier General William Mitchell
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