Mayday!

Fifty years ago, a British bomber crashed into an east-side Detroit neighborhood

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Mud, red-hot debris, and jet fuel rained down on Harbor Island, the one-street island directly across the canal from Ashland. Splintered boards and timbers from the shattered seawall flew like giant matchsticks. “A car got blown from the foot of Ashland across the canal,” Schwartz says. “The transmission was stuck in the seawall.” C.C. Gallagher rushed out with a garden hose to battle the flames licking at his boatyard.
Pieces of the plane and crew were scattered over a seven-block area. A 6-foot wing section landed on a porch, while a 1-pound fitting hit the back of a terrified paperboy. For blocks around, the force of the explosion cracked plaster walls, blew out windows, and even ripped a garage door off its hinges.

The first alarms went out at 3:40, a minute before the Vulcan hit the ground. There quickly were more than 200 Detroit policemen and firefighters on the scene, as well as three fire trucks from Grosse Pointe Park. Thousands of spectators flocked to the site, snarling traffic. Priests and nuns from nearby St. Ambrose hurried to the scene. “The Gallaghers’ roof was covered with small body parts,” Schwartz says. Father Tom McWilliams “administered the last rites to remnants of one of the plane crew,” the Grosse Pointe News reported. Meanwhile, Grosse Pointe Park police “gathered fragments of burnt flesh and bones and twisted metal in a bushel basket, taking them to their station, where the grim remains were tagged … and later turned over to Selfridge Air Force authorities.”

Aviation experts, including a panel of British investigators who arrived several hours later, set up shop at the air base near Mount Clemens. There they tried to reconstruct the plane and the accident.
Over the next few days, military police and Detroit cops roped off the crash site, allowing only residents with identification tags to enter and leave the area. Search teams sifted through the wreckage. Authorities asked souvenir hunters to turn in anything they had picked up. Inside the heated garage used as a collection center, Schwartz saw “the end of a flight shoe with a couple of toes,” among other items. A hearse was parked outside, but the county medical examiner said the fragments were too small to help him identify the airmen. “I don’t know how they ever sorted out what few remains they did find,” Schwartz says. “There was no DNA testing back then, so there must’ve been a lot of guesswork.”

The crash crater, flooded because of the shattered seawall, had to be pumped before the twisted remnants of two engines could be pulled out. A power shovel dug 70 feet deep into the muddy ground in a futile attempt to find the cockpit or identifiable remains of the pilots. The Coast Guard searched Lake St. Clair as far north as Harsens Island on reports that an airman may have parachuted into the water. A chute was found tangled in a boat propeller, but there was no body.

When the first calls went out, the assumption was that there had to be many casualties. Emergency staffs were on standby at all area hospitals awaiting a flood of victims that, to everybody’s surprise and relief, never arrived. Several people on Harbor Island were slightly injured by the blast, but 73-year-old Victoria Ozelski was the only one who agreed to go to a hospital; she was treated for minor cuts and soon released. Emily Ewald was the most seriously injured. She was taken to Bon Secours Hospital and treated for third-degree burns on her face and upper body. She survived, as did the Ewalds’ scorched collie, Lassie.

Over the coming weeks, residents slowly rebuilt their wrecked homes and interrupted lives. All told, five houses were either destroyed outright or had to be torn down. Scores of additional residences were damaged, most of them in an area bounded by Manistique, Alter, Scripps, and the Detroit River. Several boats had also been lost or damaged.

In time, investigators issued their report. Upon their findings, the electrical systems in all Vulcans were modified. However, escape procedures for the rear crew remained the same until the final Vulcan squadron was phased out of service in 1984. By then, Charles Bland had been retired from the RAF for several years.
Now 82 and living in Lincoln, England, Bland has recently been doing some housecleaning. “I have got rid of a lot of old photos because my kids will not be interested,” he explains, “and at my time of life most of the people are dead and gone anyway.”

One memory is impossible to discard. Not long before the accident, he crossed paths with Evison at Goose Bay. Evison was on his way back to England after a six-week assignment while Bland was working on a Vulcan with a failed engine. British Bomber Command wanted Evison to stay and assist. But Bland told his homesick friend — a “real family man” with a wife and son waiting for him — that he could manage on his own. “That was the last time I saw Taff,” Bland says. “He had not been home long when he went off in XA908. I have often wondered that, had he stayed with me, he would not have been in the plane that day. But fate deals out all sorts of hands.”

The day the bomber fell out of the sky was a quickly forgotten footnote of Detroit’s Cold War era. The injuries and damage, while considerable, were not nearly as catastrophic as they could have been. “Can you imagine if that plane had come in on a flatter angle?” Schwartz says. “It would’ve wiped out an entire block or two.” Guyton Elementary was only two blocks away, while the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital at the foot of Alter Road was just 1,000 yards south of the crash site. “The death toll could have been tremendous,” more than one official on the scene was quoted as saying.

Instead, no citizens were killed. The injured quickly recovered, the wrecked houses were soon replaced, and more than 100 claimants had their property losses covered by private or government insurers. The airmen’s deaths were tragic, of course, but as faceless flyovers with no connections to the city, their loss failed to truly resonate with the public or media.

Moreover, mere hours after the crash another major news event with far greater local implications pushed the Vulcan out of the headlines. Cardinal Edward Mooney — the longtime spiritual leader of Detroit’s 1 million Catholics — unexpectedly died in Rome while participating in the election of a new pope. Meanwhile, developments in the bomber crash received short shrift.

The following spring, the body of Lt. Peacock was recovered from the Detroit River. The only non-swimmer in the crew was found still strapped into his ejector seat. British military tradition calls for service members to be buried in the country where they fall. The crew of XA908 was laid to rest at Oak Ridge Cemetery, joining the 11 British airmen killed in training accidents at nearby Grosse Ile during World War II. Each Memorial Day, small Union Jacks are planted at this corner of a distant graveyard that lies in Flat Rock, but is forever England.

The hellish roar of the doomed Vulcan still resonates in Kurshildgen’s mind. “I was haunted by the memory for a long time,” he confesses. “I could never stay in a room when I heard an airplane flying near. I always covered my ears or wanted to go outside. My nightmares were always of airplanes crashing.”

Ironically, the former Detroiter learned to fly a helicopter and now works in corporate aviation in Texas. “I became less phobic about loud approaching noises,” he says. “But to this day, I still pause and listen to make sure aircraft engines sound normal as they fly overhead.”

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