In 1957 a massive American bomber crashed in a fiery explosion in New Brunswick, near Perth Andover. Locals immediately headed out into the bitter cold in a desperate race against time to search for any survivors.
It was a bitterly cold -21℃ at noon on the 10th of January when farmer Reginald Merritt of Morrell Siding, heard jet engines.
He looked up to see one of the United States Air Force’s newest bombers – a B-52 Stratofortress.
“The plane was on fire in three separate places it looked like,” Merritt later told the Evening Times Globe newspaper.
The massive eight-engine B-52 bomber, which still remains in service today, was brand new back in 1957 and was still suffering from numerous unresolved mechanical issues. This incident would be the fourth B-52 to crash since the plane entered service 11 months earlier and would be the first of four deadly crashes that year alone.
Several locals watched the doomed plane careening towards the ground. Schoolboy Richard Higgins described the aircraft as “all afire in the air.” It crashed into a hillside within sight of Perth, erupting in a massive explosion.
“When it exploded there was a terrible ‘bang,’" Merritt told the newspaper “and the explosion blew open the doors of some of my neighbors and the schoolhouse door.”
When Merritt rushed home to check on his family, he noticed that a three-foot-long piece of burned and twisted metal had dropped into the yard of his neighbor, Ernest Johnson. “It fell right by his door,” he told reporters.
The doomed plane, which carried 9 crew, had taken off from Loring Air Force Base in nearby Limestone, Maine shortly before.
In Limestone, some 20km away from the explosion, Town Manager Bernard Cameron said the explosion made the pictures vibrate on the walls of the town office, and his wife said it made the dishes rattle in their home.
A mad scramble to search for survivors began immediately. However, it would not be easy to reach the crash site; a massive blizzard had slammed the region the day before and the roads still weren’t plowed. The Moncton Daily Times reported that although a large RCMP search party had been dispatched, they struggled to reach the destination.
Search and rescue crews were dispatched from American military bases, but they too struggled to get there. A fleet of American helicopters from Southern New England were heading towards
Perth Andover, but time was of the essence to save any survivors from the extreme cold.
However, local New Brunswickers had already assembled their own impromptu rescue crews and set off in the bitter cold to search for survivors long before authorities arrived.
While making their way through the woods, they were startled by the disturbing sight of the body of 27-year-old Sgt Ray Miller, still strapped into his flight seat, sitting upright in the snowy forest.
Soon after reaching the crash site, they found six more bodies.
That meant that two men had parachuted out of the doomed bomber before it crashed, and were now lost in the woods. The warmest it got on that bitterly cold January day was -17℃, and as the hours passed the temperature dropped quickly, hitting -32℃ that night.
William Goodine of Morrell Siding later recounted to The Cataract, a half-English half-French newspaper based out of Grand Falls, how he led a search party of four men looking for survivors.
Undeterred by the frostbite they were getting, Goodine’s search party ventured deeper and deeper into the woods.
As the sun began to set, just as they were just about to give up, the search party discovered Lt. Joseph Church curled up on the ground.
They feared the worst but as they drew near the airman began to move, struggling to his feet.
Church, who had recently moved to Maine from Kansas, was frostbitten and delirious, telling the rescuers that he needed to go at once to help search for his fellow airmen.
Two of the four New Brunswickers left to go find help, while Goodine lit a fire to warm Lt. Church.
An American helicopter roared overhead.
It passed without noticing them.
The other rescuer who remained, Merton Morrell, went to a nearby clearing and stomped “H E L P” into the snow.
Goodine asked Church, who had been the co-pilot, what had gone wrong.
“It all happened so fast I don’t really know what happened,” he replied. “I heard a loud noise and next thing I knew I found myself floating, alone in the air.”
Soon after, another American helicopter noticed the fire and the letters in the snow. It touched down and took the survivor back to Loring Air Force Base.
Four days later, the body of the remaining airmen who had parachuted out of the plane, Lt. Charles Cole, was found frozen, deep in the woods. One week later, his wife gave birth to their first child, a boy named John.
It was the deadliest airplane crash in the province’s history at the time.
For their part, the American Air Force said nothing about the crash for weeks. On January 29th they made their first and only comment on the disaster, in a statement by General W. K. Martin.
The General thanked the people of Perth Andover who had opened their homes to the American search and rescue crews. He then said:
“When a routine flight suddenly turns into a disaster, the shock is jarring and long-lived. Now that the scar of the accident has been burned into the top of that hill near Perth for people to see every time they look that way it is reasonable to expect one to re-evaluate that accident in terms of what it could do to his home, his family or his town. However, it is part of the high price of preserving the peace of the free world, so that you and I may enjoy the basic God-giving[sic] rights to which we are entitled.”
It is unclear whether or not the General’s statement reassured people living in the border communities close to Loring Air Force Base.
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