The gooney bird and the bubblehead

If you’re over forty years old, chances are pretty good that at one time or another you were aboard a Douglas C-47, or its civilian equivalent, the DC-3 airliner. When you were, chances are pretty good that the only quaking you did about your flight was whatever fear roiled in you already because nobody—no, nobody—was ever scared of a C-47, even decades after World War II, when the Skytrain was everyone’s favorite, meaty pack horse.

Tell you what—imagine for a moment a two-engine plane, jet or prop, makes no difference. Inside there are three seats to a row, two on one side, one on the other. For the last half century, C-47s, which is to say DC-3s, went everywhere. That’s how it is I’m saying, chances are better than good you know what kind of bird I’m talking about even if you’re not looking at a picture.

I don’t know that anyone ever said it, so let me be the first: the Douglas C-47 won the war. Okay, that’s overstatement, but not by much. They toted gliders, carried and dumped paratroopers, and ferried GIs all over the world, including back here when injuries and wounds sent boys home. During the Normandy invasion, the Army’s own C-47s carried 50 thousand troops over and beyond the beach.

Somehow—no one knows exactly why—the C-47, or one of its variants, earned a nickname. Those who ran ‘em started to call them “gooney birds,” out of pure devotion. They were big and clumsy but sure as an old boot. And they were repairable; few had to be sent back to the tax-payers.

In August of 1944, one of the hundreds military C-47s was jockeying a couple dozen in-training pilots from Nebraska training base to another in Pierre, South Dakota, where these young guys would be training on planes they considered a breed apart from the old Skytrains that brought them there.

Up at Pierre was the real prize, a P-47 Thunderbolt, a fighter, not a freighter. The P-47 was a heavyweight that still was the fastest-diving American aircraft of the war—it could reach speeds of 550 mph. Uncle Sam wanted its fighter pilots to be risk-takers, pilots who knew what it meant to apply brakes, but rarely did and never wanted to. You can only imagine how much those hot shots loved the P-47, mounted as it was with eight 50-caliber machine guns. When called upon, the P-47 could become a fighter-bomber capable of carrying five-inch rockets or a bomb load of 2,500 pounds. The Beast of the Airways, they called it. During the war, the Thunderbolt was responsible for downing 7000 enemy aircraft, half of those in one-on-one battles in the skies over Europe.

On that August night in Nebraska, that C-47 was toting a full house of 24 young pilots, each of them itching to get more training on the Beast of the Airways, all of them anxious for dogfights over Germany. None of them knew anything about the Bulge, but then no one did. They were just a bunch of young jackass pilots, full of the Devil.

You may well have guessed by this time that this Nebraska story will not end well.

No one knows what happened, but that gooney bird got ripped into pieces—maybe through a storm, maybe not. When it went down, it left parts over a two-mile stretch of Nebraska pastureland. Here a wing, there a motor—there the cabin with all the passengers, none of them alive.

A State Historical Marker calls that crash “the largest single military air disaster in Nebraska history—and there were others. Four members of the crew were killed, and 24 young, high-spirited soon-to-be pilots. None of them—not one—survived. Allied forces lost a battery of young gunners that night, August 3, 1943, 28 boys—we called them—the Allies honestly couldn’t afford to lose. 

What’s worse, 27 families (there was a pair of twins) lost boys, never to return. Their families almost certainly have not forgotten them.

That horrible crash got a couple inches on the third page of the New York Times a day or so later, once the dead were transported out to the nearest road by horse and buggy. There were bigger stories: in Germany, Hitler was issuing death warrants to those he thought responsible for trying to kill him.

I happened to be out there not long ago, a half-mile east of a little burg named Naper, on highway 12, where I spotted the sign. I didn’t know the story, hadn’t heard of it at all, just happened to stop and read the story.

Tell you what, if you’re out there on highway 12, stop and read the sign for yourself.

Soon enough it’ll be Memorial Day, isn’t that great? We can all throw the doors open to summer. Just remember the gooney bird.