1945 Empire State Building B-25 Crash

On this episode of Our American Stories, in July 1945, a U.S. B-25 Mitchell got lost in heavy fog over Manhattan. Here’s The History Guy remembering the B-25 Empire State Building Crash.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:12):
And we continue with our American Stories. Our next story
comes to us from a man who's simply known as
the History Guy. His videos are watched by hundreds of
thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The History
Guy is also heard here at our American Stories. In
July of nineteen forty five, a US B twenty five

(00:33):
Mitchell got lost in heavy fog over Manhattan. Here's the
History Guy remembering the B twenty five Empire State building craft.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
The summer of nineteen forty five represented hope for a
war weary nation. Germany had surrendered in May in the Pacific,
General Douglas MacArthur announced that the Philippines had been liberated,
and in New Mexico the United States test at the
bomb that would finally put an end to the war.
There was plenty of reason in July nineteen forty five

(01:08):
for New Yorkers to look forward to a period piece,
but their piece was shattered with a spectacular accident involving
a United States Army Air Force plane and the tallest
building in the world. The morning of Saturday, July eighteenth,
nineteen forty five, and the United States Army Air Force's
B twenty five Mitchell was flying from Bedford Army Airfield

(01:31):
in Massachusetts to New Jersey's Newark Airport. At the controls
of the plane was Lieutenant Colonel William F. Smith, Junior.
The twenty seven year old Smith was an experienced pilot,
a veteran of more than thirty missions in one thousand
combat hours flying B seventeen bombers over Europe during the war.
The B twenty five was a twin engine bomber, smaller

(01:51):
than the B seventeens that Smith had fun over Europe.
This plane, using callsign five seven seven and nicknamed Old
John feather Merchant, had converted to five VIPs. Smith had
piled the plane from Sioux Falls Army air Base in
South Dakota and was scheduled to pick up his committing
officer in Newark before continuing back to Sue Falls. He
was accompanied by thirty year old Army Air Force staff

(02:13):
Sergeant Christopher Demetrovich and nineteen year old Navy machinist mate
Albert Perna, who was hitching a ride from Massachusetts to
see his family in Brooklyn. As the plane approached New
York City, it ran into heavy fog. Smith requested permission
to land at New York's municipal airport, La Guardia Field,
but was advised that the visibility was too low and
told to go on to Newark. The Guardian Air traffic

(02:36):
control signed off with a warning about visibility in the
fog at the present time. The controller said, I cannot
see the top of the Empire State Building. The words
turned out to be huntingly cryptic. Smith responded, thank you
very much. It's not exactly clear what happened next, but
it seems likely that Smith mistook the East River for

(02:58):
the Hudson. That was a fatal mistake. Had he turned
left as he came by the Chrysler building, he would
have been safe, but disoriented, he turned right, taking his
plane straight over the island of Manhattan. Air Traffic control
had advised that he'd stay above fifteen hundred feet over
the city, but apparently disoriented and thinking himself clear of

(03:19):
the city, he had dropped a five hundred feet, perhaps
thineping that he was on approach to Newark, or perhaps
trying to get a view of the ground to orient himself. Suddenly,
the fog cleared just enough for Smith to realize that
he was flying in the middle of skyscrapers. Stan Lomax,
a radio sports announcer, was driving to work when he
heard the plane's engines. As he looked up, he recalled,
he yelled, climb you full climb from his car window.

(03:41):
At two hundred miles per hour. The plane was on
a collision course for the eight hundred fifty foot RCA
building at thirty Rockefeller Center. Smith veered at the last moment,
averting disaster, but the turn took him on a collision
course with the tallest building on earth, New York's iconic
one hundred two story Empire State Building. Mort Cooper, a
big league pitch who had helped the Saint Louis Cardinals

(04:02):
when two World Series, witnessed the crash from the sixteenth
floor of the Hotel Commodore. He said, I heard the
roar of a plane and I picked it up as
it roared between me and the RCA building. Suddenly it
flashed across my mind that it was flying very low
and that it would hit the Empire State Building. The
streets of downtown Manhattan were relatively empty on a foggy Saturday,
but there were some witnesses along Fifth Avenue and thirty

(04:24):
fourth Street who heard the roar of the engines. They
described the plane climbing steeply. William Utley, vice president of
a public relations firm in the Mercantile Building at ten
East fortieth Street, was quoted in the Scranton, Pennsylvania Times Tribune.
The plane went passed my window at eye level, or
just above it. This office is on the thirty eighth floor.
The engine was apparently going, and it looked like the

(04:44):
pilot was trying to gain altitude. Smith was apparently trying
to climb out of the city, but it was too late.
At nine forty am, Old John Feather, merchant, traveling some
two hundred miles an hour, struck the thirty fourth Street
facade of the Empire State Building at an altitude of
nine hundred and thirteen feet between the seventy eighth and
seventy ninth floors. Albert Fuller at the b Altman Department

(05:08):
store across the street told The New York Times that
the floor moved. I looked at the clerk and I said,
isn't that strange? And I thought it couldn't be an earthquake.
Harry Weiskoff, on the sixty third floor of the Empire
State building said there were two terrific explosions. The whole
building shook, and looking out the windows facing down, we
could see flaming de Brieze falling down. Daniel Nordon on

(05:31):
the eighteenth floor was thrown out of his chair amid
the glass, with four windows that were blown out in
his office. Twenty four year old bookkeeper Althiitt Leadbridge was
on the seventy second floor. She said, everything shook. We
ran to the window and looked down. We saw flames
below us. We looked up and soft flames above us.
Lethbridge walked down seventy flights of stairs in the dark.
The plane ripped a hole eighteen feet by twenty feet

(05:53):
in the limestone and granite facade of the building. The
Knoxville Journal of Knoxville, Tennessee reported that so tremendous was
the explosion that it ripped away the fog which had
hid the topmast stories of the skyscraper, and for two
minutes the pinnacle of the chromium Empire State stood out
sharp and clear in the drizzle, while orange red flames
looked around. Many New Yorkers feared it was an enemy attack.

(06:16):
Miss Weiskoff said that the staff in the office feared
it might have been a buzz bomb that named for
the German V one rocket that had terrified England during
the Blitz. Others saw it may have been a Japanese
bomb balloon, like the one that had killed the Sunday
school teacher and five children in Oregon in the previous May.
The plane struck so hard that the wings were torn off.
One engine chopped through the building, landing on the roof
of the building on thirty third Street and starting a

(06:38):
fire that destroyed a penthouse art studio. The second engine
and parts of the landing gear were down an elevator
shaft were found in the basement. The body of Albert Perna,
the young Navy corman, was also throwed down the shaft
and wasn't found until two days after the accident. He
had been headed to Brooklyn against all his family over
the death of his brother, who had been killed in combat.
The plane's fuel tanks ruptured exploded, sending a shit to

(07:00):
flame into the building. It was lucky it was a Saturday,
otherwise the building would have been much more crowded. On
a normal day, as many as fifty five hundred people
worked in the building, but that Saturday, only about fifteen
hundred were thought to be in the building. The offices
where the plane stock were occupied by the War Relief
Services and the National Catholic Welfare Council, both Catholic organizations

(07:20):
dedicated to helping European refugees of the ongoing war. Some
twenty people were working in the offices that Saturday, coordinating
aid for war refugees throughout the world. Several of those
were killed instantly by the flames. Others crowded in a
room hoping to escape the flames and smoke. One of
those was Teresa Willig, who told The New York Times,
I don't think any of us had any idea what happened.

(07:41):
Who'd have thought a plane crowded in the room with
other Catholic War Relief employees, she thought she was not
going to make it. She took off her rings, a
high school graduation ring and a friendship ring from her boyfriend,
and threw them out the window. She said, I thought
I won't be around to have them. Someone else might
as well have use out of them. One of the
work a man named Paul Deering, jumped to escape the

(08:03):
fire and was killed. Twenty year old Betty Lou Oliver
was the elevator operator of Elevator number six. She was
on the eightieth floor when the plane struck. The crash
caused to be thrown across the buildings while suffering from
severe burns. Two office workers render first aid and placed
her on an elevator to be taken to the ground
floor where an ambulance was waiting. But parts of the

(08:23):
plane had flown through the elevator shaft and had sheared
off cables. When Betty was placed inside the elevator on
a stretcher, the cable snapped with a sound like a shot.
Betty plummeted seventy five stories. Seventeen year old Donald Maloney
was a coastguard hospital a prentice second class who was
on thirty fourth Street when he saw the plane crash.
He rushed into a nearby pharmacy, telling them he needed

(08:45):
first aid supplies to go help. The pharmacy gave him bandages,
burn ointment, sterile water, and a dozen syringes with morphine.
As he ran in, someone shouted they needed help in
the building's sub basement. Maloney was small, so it could
fit easier into the ruined elevator shaft, where a girl
was screaming. It was Betty Lou Oliver. Miraculously, after falling
more than seventy stories, she was still alive. The elevator's

(09:09):
landing was softened by the huge coils of cable that
had piled up beneath it like a spring, and some
experts speculate that the rapid descent might have caused air
pressure to build up under the shaft under the elevator.
The rest of the elevator was ruined, full of steel
shards and broken concrete, all but the corner that held Oliver.
Malina gave her some morphine for the pain and put
burnt woman on her face and stow bandages on her burns.

(09:30):
Her fall, some one thousand feet still, according to the
Guinness Book World Records, holds a record for the longest
survived elevator fall. To her own surprise, Theresa Fortier Willig survived.
When firemen rescued she and her friends from the room,
she said she was just happy to be alive. She
didn't suspect she'd ever see her rings again, but they
were discovered by rescue workers and returned to her. She

(09:53):
ended up marrying the man who had given her the
friendship ring Betty Lou Oliver. Before her seventy five story,
Plummet had only been scheduled to work in the Empire
State Building another three days. It took her eight months
to recover from her injuries, but she moved to Arkansas
with her husband. She had three kids seven grandkids. Passed
away in nineteen ninety nine the age of seventy four.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
And a special thanks to Greg Hengler on the production
and storytelling. And a special thanks to the History Guy.
And if you want more stories of forgotten history, subscribe
to his YouTube channel, The History Guy. History deserves to
be remembered, and my goodness, this story deserves to be remembered.
Many feared an enemy attack when this happened and soon

(10:36):
found out that it was an accident. The story of
the Empire State Building B twenty five crash here on
our American Story