“Roger, I just want to get down to the field as soon as possible, I’m low on gas. Over.” These were the desperate words of pilot 1st Lieutenant Warder Skaggs as he contacted the U.S. Naval Air Station in Oakland just minutes before crashing into White’s Hill in Fairfax on a foggy night on May 16, 1946.
The crash, nearing its 70th anniversary in 2016, has sparked nuclear conspiracy theories and extensive independent field research and it has become immortalized as one of the county’s most puzzling curiosities.
The day before the accident, the B-17 “Flying Fortress” Bomber took off from Clovis Army Airfield in New Mexico. After routine stops along the way, it continued from Mines Field in Los Angeles to Novato’s Hamilton Air Force Base. But around 1 a.m., the aircraft’s nine-man crew lost its way in the thick fog over the Bay Area, according to a description of the accident from the United States Air Force. Soon, the Oakland Airways traffic control began issuing instructions to descend.
But both the plane’s crew and traffic control misunderstood the location of the plane when they made initial radio contact. After being issued instruction to descend into Oakland, they nosedived into the top of White’s Hill. Two of the nine crewmembers died on impact, and another shortly after due to complications in the hospital. The rest of the critically injured crew lived.
Archived photographs portray the tattered plane without wings, and while the backmost fuselage and tail remain relatively intact, the hardly-recognizable cockpit is a sprawling mess of tubes and wires fully exposed to the open air. “You just crashed a plane moving at 140 m.p.h., not to mention you are injured and lost. These guys must have had an incredible amount of willpower to walk four miles away to get help,” said Marin Open Space Ranger Mike Warner, who has been leading tours of the crash site for the last two years. Looking at pictures of the initial wreckage, Mr. Warner marvels how Lt. Skaggs and co-pilot Lt. Richard Beach could have survived the violent impact.
Today, some of the B-17’s remnants are scattered; one of the missing engines rests at the nearby Tamarancho Boy Scout camp, where it settled after a violent rainstorm in the early ‘80s. “It has been part of the legend of the camp to have this engine on our property,” said Dana Hanley, a Boy Scout Ranger. Other pieces of the vessel have been occasionally excavated by diligent searchers near the crash site (now Marin Open Space land), but Hamilton Air Force military personnel buried the majority of the wreckage on-site just hours after the crash. “It was standard protocol at the time” says Mr. Warner, who has unearthed small parts of the plane from the hillside in his free time.
The Bikini Atoll Connection
Just months after the Flying Fortress crashed into the peak of White’s Hill, the United States flexed its Cold War muscle by broadcasting explosions of atomic bombs as part of Operation Crossroads at Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands.
In July 1946, the United States detonated two bombs—nicknamed Able and Baker—over dilapidated military vessels just miles from a fleet of reporters in sunglasses. A third bomb called Charlie was scheduled for detonation, but cancelled shortly after, ostensibly due to the unexpected extent of contamination.
Given reports printed in local newspapers at the time of the Flying Fortress accident—which implied there might have been radioactive material in the aircraft—it’s no wonder that locals have speculated about nuclear contamination associated with the crash. Just a week after the accident, the Fairfax Gazette reported, “Had the Flying Fortress…not been loaded with secret equipment having to do with the Bikini atomic bomb test, perhaps there would not have been such a wild rush to heavily guard the wreck.”
As it happens, the Flying Fortress was indeed bound for Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, and the crew was part of Operation Crossroads. But the claim that any radioactive material was on board has been discredited by subsequent interviews with the crewmembers and the Air Force’s official accident reports. “The B-17 at this time was an outdated, unpressurized aircraft nearing the end of its service life,” asserts Mr. Warner, who believes the radioactive cargo theory is mostly local conjecture. “Why would you put top-secret material on an outdated aircraft that’s on a ferry flight making several stops on its way?”
However, Mr. Warner admits that there may have been bomb igniters on the aircraft. “It wasn’t top secret technology at that time in the ’40s, pretty much consisting of circuits and wires,” he said. That may explain the use of an older aircraft–as well as the military’s haste to secure the wreckage.
In the early 1990s, two men delved deeper into investigating the 1946 crash than anyone else to date. Mill Valley taxi-driver Gary Peak began working with freelance writer John Romer to see if they could get to the bottom of the local mystery. It wasn’t apparent to Mr. Peak at the time that investigating the tale, which he features on his website garypeakadventurestories.net, would be nearly a three-year endeavor.
“The story took a minimum of two and a half years working on it bi-weekly,” Mr. Peak told the Light in a recent interview, “You had to ask yourself, how far do you want to go?”
In 1991, Mr. Peak and his partner conducted an interview with the co-pilot,Mr. Beach, at his home in Santa Cruz. According to Mr. Peak’s records, Mr. Beach said, “Yes, the B-17 was carrying Detonators for the three bombs to go off on Bikini Island in July 1946.”
This might explain the military’s hasty extraction of the cargo crate onboard, but for Mr. Peak, the ramifications of the accident had a massive butterfly effect on world history. His research comes to the ultimate conclusion that one of the Operation Crossroads detonators was seriously damaged, explaining the cancelation of the final bomb test at the Bikini Atoll.
After a curious sequence of events that involved confirming the validity of their research with an Air Force major, Gary Peak said he lost touch with his partner John Romer, who never published their story in a book. On his website he ponders the fate of his friend, who died in 2010, “Did they intimidate him, appeal to his patriotism, or pay him off…?”
As for Mr. Warner, the ranger, he began investigating the crash in 2009, when he first visited the site. “My great-uncle was a tail gunner on a B-17 in Europe during World War II,” said Mr. Warner, who credits him for sparking his interest in aviation history. A historical geography major, Mr. Warner is unshaken by local conjecture. “When there is a vacuum of information, people will make their own narratives,” he said.
He plans to continue his annual tours of the crash site. He approaches the accident with reverence for the crew (three of whom died, the rest critically injured) and hopes to erect a plaque at the crash site to honor their story. For Mr. Warner, there is no better time to commemorate the tragedy than the upcoming anniversary next May.