The Santa Barbara B-24 Disasters

In one of the most inexplicable and practically unknown homefront tragedies of World War II, three separate but eerily linked events left sixteen people dead along the California coast. On July 4, 1943, a B-24 Liberator on maneuvers over the Pacific ran low on fuel. The U.S. Army Air Corps crew parachuted out, two into the ocean, and the unmanned heavy bomber crashed near Santa Barbara. A second B-24, assigned to the search-and-rescue mission over the ocean, literally vanished. That plane’s remains and those of its twelve airmen were found eight months later on San Miguel Island. In 1954, the Coast Guard cutter carrying Air Force investigators to wrap up details of the San Miguel disaster rammed a yacht, killing two others. Author Robert A. Burtness re-creates this tragic trilogy of errors in this painstakingly researched volume.