(Editor’s Note: Over the next two days — leading up to Saturday’s Ohio historical marker dedication and commemoration of the 1964 air crash over Clinton County — the News Journal presents stories taken from our archives as we covered its aftermath in 1964. Below is a combination of two stories written by the News Journal’s Bob Bowman.)
“Somebody … please help me with these stretchers.”
A plaintive call for help came from a mud-splattered, shocked young Air Force medic, standing alone amid the wreckage and bodies that minutes before were airmen and paratroopers flying over northeast Clinton County Saturday night.
That was before the two giant “Flying Boxcars” came together and went down about a quarter-mile behind a farmhouse on Melvin Road.
There wasn’t much a reporter could do just then. Pieces of one plane were smouldering about 200 yards from the other. Most of the scattered bodies were mutilated almost beyond recognition, lying over parts of several good-sized farm fields.
So the call of the young medic was answered by an airman and this reporter.
The first victim I saw was a young paratrooper, his face a bloody pulp, laying in the shrouds of his partly opened parachute.
One hardened paratrooper officer then arrived. He was a major, I think, and too moved to speak as the young body was carried past him, a flashlight playing on the lifeless face.
“He couldn’t have been over 20,” another trooper said.
By now there were more volunteers to bear stretchers, big, husky paratroopers who had seen some horrible sights in their lives, but none worse than they witnessed in the middle of this peaceful Clinton County field where hogs rooted by day.
“Here’s another one,” the medic said.
“I think it’s an officer,” came from the paratroop major as the gold oak leaves on shoulder straps were caught in the flashlight beam.
The major was a pilot of one of the craft, identified only by papers in his wallet. Everything above his neck was unrecognizable.
The major, still strapped in his pilot’s seat, was lifted onto a stretcher. Guided by a single flashlight and the stronger lights mounted on a crash truck, his body was placed in the ambulance side-by-side with the young paratrooper who bore no markings of rank on his jumpsuit.
I saw about a dozen such men lying the various grotesque positions of death, Air Force emergency vehicles, state patrol, and sheriff’s deputies were waved through the cordon of airmen, who were instructed “to let no one pass, including reporters and civilians.”
The Air Force was now in command of the situation and they meant business.
Flasher lights up the fog-laden sky. Large crowds of morbid sightseers were shooed on their way.
There were more bodies lying around and being discovered. Searchers cried “Here’s another one,” or “Send an ambulance quick.”
Soon, from out of the maze of red flashers and mournful sounding sirens lumbered an ambulance through ankle deep mud and puddles.
These vehicles had room for four stretchers and while I was watching, two were filled to capacity.
The major and paratrooper were joined by two other corpses and went off to wherever the Air Force sends its crash victims.
I saw several bodies close-up. What out in my mind now was that by flashlight only, all seemed to have suffered terrible head injuries. Some were still in the aircraft while others were thrown a hundred yards by the impact.
The young medic who earlier pleaded for help was relieved and I joined him back at the farm house where reporters were phoning in what little they knew for certain had happened.
Known is the fact that two planes collided and crashed in northeast Clinton County and 17 men today are dead.
The medic walked in the brightly-lit room, his usually spotless surgical whites now besmirched with mud and gore, after filling one ambulance with a pathetic cargo.
I guess this medic, whose name I’ll probably never know, was a reservist. I remember how he bore up Saturday night under something that would break many lesser men. He would make a fine doctor, I thought.
On entering the room, he quietly asked “Could someone please give me a cigarette and a glass of water?”
In response, the correspondents shoved numerous packs toward him as he took one, stuck it in his mouth unlighted and sank down into the room’s only chair which was quickly vacated for him.
AIR FORCE INVESTIGATORS START PROBE OF CRASH; 17 DEAD
Two local men were among the 17 reserve servicemen killed in Saturday night’s twin air crash of two C119 “Flying Boxcars” east of Wilmington. Two survived.
Dead are: Capt. Ernest B. Milligan, 32, of 506 Florence Ave., S-Sgt. Richard F. Davis, 31, New Vienna Route 1.
A six-man investigation board from Tactical Air Command headed by Col. Irvin M. Parsons from L.G. Henderson, Bedford, Mass., arrived here Sunday at 6:30 p.m. to try to determine cause.
Brig. Gen. Donald J. Campbell, commander of the 302nd Troop Carrier Wing, CCAFB, said in a preliminary statement:
“This mission had been aborted, due to deteriorating weather conditions and it was felt that an inadvertent entry into a scud of clouds while the aircraft were in their initial approach pattern was a contributing factor to the accident.”
The largest single tragedy in the history of Clinton County was also the first fatality incurred due to mission flying operations of the 302nd TCW. In operation since 1952, the 302nd, based at Clinton County Air Force Base had compiled an excellent safety record.
There were 19 men aboard the two planes. Eye-witnesses said the planes apparently collided in air just before starting an approach to the field. This has not been confirmed.
CCAFB Information Officers Ed Schurr and Major Hillman said that if necessary, the investigation board from Langley would reconstruct the planes, either at CCAFB or elsewhere in the hunt for clues.
Rumors of cause are numerous. Popular theories and eye-witness accounts mention collision and explosion, not necessarily in that order. One report said a propeller flew off one plane, causing it to veer into the other. Another report indicated that a propeller of one plane chewed into a wing tank on the other, causing an explosion.
One man miraculously escaped injury. “I had just changed seats with another fellow so I could glance outside when all at once I was sitting out in the darkness with the feeling of falling, the wind going past my ears,” said the jumpmaster of the No. 2 airplane. (That would be the right wing plane of the three-plane formation in the nine plane flight).
Sgt. William Kremer Jr., Second Special Forces, Group 20th Corps, U.S. Army Reserve, was one of nine green-bereted members of the commando-type reserve force participating in the night paratroop dropping exercise.
The sergeant said he was sitting on the left side near the exit door. “We were told by the crew chief we would be landing in about 10 minutes,” he said.
He went on, “I had to reach around it (his ruck sack) twice to grasp the D-ring and pull it. I finally realized my chute was open. At this point I saw a large ball of fire in front of me. I don’t know whether it was falling or on the ground …. The next thing I knew, I hit the ground …. All around me was wreckage. Bodies were strewn on the ground.”
Sgt. Kremer was not the only survivor. In Clinton Memorial Hospital is S-Sgt. William L. Zugelder (Air Force) Springfield. A third injured victim died Saturday night.
Within a short time, the area north of Melvin, around Melvin and Stone Roads, was a bee-hive of activity with Army and Air Force, area fire departments, several local police departments, State Highway Patrol and Sheriff’s departments, as well as early-arriving onlookers and newsmen.
The paratroop dropping area, where the planes had been twice waved off, reportedly, is near the end of the runways.
THE YELLOW glow from the crash was visible at the base, six miles away, and from many points in town.
One plane, in flames, fell on the John Hook farm, west of Melvin Road and north of Stone Road. The fuselage of the other plane also crashed 100 yards or so from the burning wreckage. The detached airframe of the other plane, wing and tail assembly, apparently glided nearly a mile southwest before crashing in a pasture south of Stone Road and north of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Wreckage was strewn over several fields between the areas. Time of the crash was fixed as 8:53 p.m.
Rescue operations were slowed by softness of the rain drenched grounds, which had been soaked by a downpour Saturday afternoon. Local farmers loaned the use of their tractors to pull emergency vehicles out of the mud. The fire slowed recovery of bodies and identification was difficult in many cases. In the mud, impact of falling victims left human-shaped depressions.
The prop-driven “Flying Boxcars” carried a total of 19 men. Nine were Air Force reservists from the 302nd TCW, nine were Army reservists with the Second Special Forces group of Ft. Hayes, Columbus, and one man was an active duty Air Force officer from Shaw Air Force Base, S.C.
The planes had been airborne an hour and 20 minutes. The mission was described as “a routine night formation mission.” The special forces Army group from Ft. Hayes boarded the planes at CCAFB for the weekend drill.
Pilots of both planes were killed. They were Lt. Col. Richard Griswold, Cincinnati and Maj. James A. Hopkins, Dayton.
John Hook, local farmer, told newsmen that he was at the kitchen table of his home near Melvin when the crash occurred. “We were playing cards — my wife, her brother, his wife and myself.”
Hook sat facing the open kitchen door. “I was looking right out there when that big ball of fire appeared with a terrific explosion.” Seconds later he went outside. He rushed back to call the State Highway Patrol.
