Image courtesy U.S. Navy

WWII Bomber Wreckage Being Recovered in Rural Florida
| published March 2, 2015 |

By Thursday Review staff

 

About three years ago, Rodney Thomas, of the small rural town of Osteen, Florida, began finding what appeared to be ancient metal components and mechanical parts in the brushy, heavily overgrown areas of his remote property, which is in southwest Volusia County about a 35 or 40 minute drive from Daytona.

To Thomas, the rusted and battered items appeared at first to be discarded parts of old cars, trucks, engines, or appliances, along with smaller scraps of waste. He made the reasonable and safe assumption that it was junk deposited there on purpose back in an age when the Sunshine State had little or no regulatory control over how things were disposed of—toxic or otherwise. But after about a year of finding the stuff in the hard-to-access wooded area, he contacted a friend who confirmed that it may be debris from an airplane crash.

In 2013, Thomas called volunteers at the Naval Air Station Museum in DeLand, Florida, and after a brief verification of what Thomas was finding, Scott Storz of the museum in turn contacted officials with the U.S. Navy. More inspections of what was strewn about Thomas’s property revealed something remarkable: those metal, rubber, and wooden parts and pieces are in fact the surviving debris of a World War II era bomber, which crashed in the woods some 70 years ago.

So far, a team of volunteers—a mixed bag of help from metal detection clubs, archeological groups, K-9 rescue teams, archeology students, and retired military personnel—have located more than 300 pieces of debris, all of it attributed to the crashed plane. Volunteers have plotted a grid and search pattern of the area, and—weather permitting—have been combing the property and the woods for more pieces of the bomber, tentatively identified as a Douglas SBD-5 Dauntless.

Navy officials have not confirmed the plane’s exact identity by serial number or by its assigned mission, but they speculate that the Douglas crashed in rough weather on a routine transport flight between nearby U.S. Navy facilities, possibly in Jacksonville, Deland, Orlando or further south in the Sunshine State. Military officials are attempting to match the plane and its location to ancient records of Navy crashes or missing planes.

O’Steen was tiny in the 1940s—a nearly non-existent crossroads—and there isn’t much there now. Thomas’s property covers acreage much of which has been untouched by human feet or hands for decades, and the airplane parts may have gone undetected or unseen for all that length of time. Navy and National Guard investigators also suggest that even if someone—civilians, hunters, hikers—had come across the fragments, those pieces would have been of little interest, scattered and broken as they were, and covered or overgrown in the heavy scrub forest.

O'Steen is near Lake Monroe, about a 20 minute drive east from U.S. Interstate 4 near Sanford, Florida. Much of the land nearby, especially to the south and west, is protected as part of the Lake Monroe Conservation Area. Areas to the north and east are just plain remote, and though the great ubiquity of Florida growth has encroached around little O’Steen (especially in the areas closer to Sanford), to the north and south of the O’Steen-Maytown Road, a long two-lane which connects the town to points in the distant east—such as Edgewater and Oak Hill on the coast—there are still vast tracts of land largely untouched by developers or by any human footprint.

This means that the plane’s crash could have gone undetected, especially if the crash occurred in a thunderstorm. Anyone living in the area might have mistaken the sound of the crash for distant thunder. But officials have also said that based on research about the population, roads and development in that part of Florida in the 1940s, the Douglas could have crashed in perfect weather but made no sound detectable to the nearest population centers, which might have been as far as ten miles away. It is also possible that the Navy has a record of the crash, but under wartime circumstances simply chose not to attempt to recover the wreckage.

Military buffs and aviation enthusiasts hope to gain valuable knowledge from the material being found, and the Navy hopes to match the debris with its records so that it can go back and close a possible open crash case file. Volunteers are documenting every piece of wreckage found on the property and in the adjacent wooded areas. Many of the artifacts are being placed on display in the DeLand Naval Air Station Museum, which is located near the DeLand airport.

(U.S. Navy photograph by Lt. Commander Heidi Lenzin)

Related Thursday Review articles:

The Last Fellows of Easy Company; Earl Perkins; Thursday Review; March 18, 2014;

The Little Boat That Won The Big War; Earl Perkins; Thursday Review; June 9, 2014.