Coin toss saved airman from crash 60 years ago
By Dennis Passa
Associated Press
MACKAY, Australia — Former World War II American airman Del Sparrowe often picks up a 1937 King George VI coin and flips it high into the air, recalling the day it saved his life.
Associated Press
It was early on the morning of June 14, 1943, and Sparrowe, an assistant crew chief and mechanic on a B-17, was eager to get back into the air after a week on the ground.
Del Sparrowe, 81, of Sonoma, Calif., holds a bronze replica that he helped design of a B-17 Flying Fortress. Sixty years ago, Sparrowe and a friend flipped a coin to see who would get the last seat on a B-17. Minutes after takeoff, the plane crashed, klling 40 of the 41 men aboard.
Sparrowe and other mechanics accompanied the Flying Fortress planes as they ferried airmen from Papua New Guinea — where American and Australian troops were fighting Japanese forces — to Mackay on Australia's northeast coast, where they would spend a week at a rest and relaxation base the United States Army Air Force had established there.
He'd just celebrated his 21st birthday and wasn't scheduled to fly that day. But Dale Curtis, another assistant crew chief who was scheduled to leave, agreed to flip a coin with Sparrowe and give up his seat if he lost.
Sparrowe lost the toss — he doesn't recall whether the coin came up heads or tails — and remained on the ground. Minutes after the B-17 took off from Mackay, the plane crashed in fog at nearby Bakers Creek, killing 40 of the 41 servicemen in the bomb bay and crannies of the aircraft.
Now 81, Sparrowe, of Sonoma, Calif., is back in Mackay for memorial services held during the weekend marking the 60th anniversary of what remains Australia's worst air accident and the biggest loss of life involving a B-17 crash during World War II.
"At first I couldn't believe it when I heard the plane had crashed," Sparrowe said. "I must have walked around in disbelief.
"It only really hit me one or two days later when I helped load the bodies on an airplane. I felt bad for Dale. I was trying to talk him out of it, but he wanted to go."
Sparrowe wanted to be a pilot in the war, but didn't pass the eye examinations. After the crash, he was assigned to another B-17 of the U.S. 5th Air Force and spent the rest of the war in Townsville, north of Mackay. His wife, Eleanor, didn't hear about his lucky coin toss for many years.
"Nobody could tell anyone about it because of censorship laws at the time," Sparrowe said. "Even when I wrote home during the war, all I could put in my letters was (that I was) 'somewhere in Australia, or Papua New Guinea.' "
The crash was kept top secret at the time under a general order from Gen. Douglas MacArthur that the "presence or movement" of all allied troops in Australia, then under threat from Japan, not be revealed.
Relatives of the 40 victims were told that the men were killed in action "somewhere in the southwest Pacific," and the local Mackay newspaper could only report that one American serviceman had been injured in a plane crash.
Almost 50 years passed before families of some of the victims began exchanging details on the Internet, and information groups formed on both sides of the Pacific.
To this day, fewer than half of the families of the 40 victims from 23 U.S. states know the true story of how the men died, said Col Benson, a former Royal Australian Air Force member who organized commemorative services for the American families in Mackay. The other families haven't been found.
At a sunrise service on Saturday, a bugler from the 5th U.S. Air Force from Yokota Air Base in Japan played "Taps" at 6:02 a.m., the time the plane went down. Mackay High School students placed 40 red roses in a wicker basket at a memorial as the names of the dead were read out.
Also in attendance were 14 relatives representing four Americans killed in the crash.
Yesterday, a bronze replica of a B-17 made by Sparrowe was unveiled at a memorial to the crash. There was also a flypast by a C-130 Hercules transport plane from the 5th U.S. Air Force, the unit to which the crashed B-17 was attached.
This week, Sparrowe returns to the United States and his home, where he left his lucky coin on his bedroom dresser. He says he'll probably contact some of his three children, four grandchildren and one great-grandchild to tell them about his Australian trip.
Illinois airman Staff Sgt. Lovell Dale Curtis, the man who won the coin toss with Sparrowe all those years ago, lies buried in the the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl.
"It was wartime, and we knew these things could happen," Sparrowe said. "We were all young, and we knew that if things were going to happen, they would, no matter where you were."
"I guess someone was looking out for me on the day."
