The weather was breezy and unsettled on that June 4 80 years ago when George Lyons, a 26-year-old co-pilot from New Haven, climbed into the cockpit of a B-26 bomber at Stansted Airbase northeast of London. His mission: Fly across the English Channel to France to drop bombs on Nazi fortifications along the Normandy coast.
Lyons didn’t know when the Allied invasion would take place, but he had sensed a steadily increasing atmosphere of urgency all around the airfield. He did know he was part of a large-scale military mobilization, two years in the making, that aimed to weaken the Nazi entrenchments before the ships and men would cross the channel and fight their way ashore.
Over the previous two months Lyons had flown 21 of these missions. His experience made it obvious what he could expect within a few hours after takeoff. When his plane approached the appointed drop zone, severe flak would be exploding all around it. He had seen that flak injure or kill those on board and sometimes make a direct hit on the planes near him, sending them down in flames. He knew he would be staring death straight in the face.
As the plane lifted off, heavily laden with several thousand-pound bombs, the pilot, 25-year-old John Pikula, banked left to head toward the Channel. With the 27,000-pound plane several hundred feet in the air, the landing gear was pulled up. It was a normal takeoff until suddenly both engines quit. Nothing Pikula or Lyons did could get the engines restarted.
The plane had just enough forward momentum to make it to a nearby cornfield. The pilots told their crew to prepare for a crash landing. Moments later the plane hit the ground, bounced hard and slid to an abrupt stop. Amazingly, Pikula was able to keep the plane level enough so that neither wing tip was caught by the ground. That would have destroyed the entire plane. However, by then, both engines were on fire. The pilots and crew had to get out immediately.
The six crew members had spent two years learning to fly the plane and how to escape from it. Lyons and Pikula pushed open the hatches above their heads and pulled themselves out. As they did so, superheated vapors burned their hands, faces and necks. Still, they dropped to the ground and started running for their lives.
The bombardier, John Strauss, positioned in the nose cone of the plane, would have followed them out. But very likely he was killed when the plane hit the ground. Two other crewmen, the radioman and the engineer, scrambled to the side exit and jumped to the ground. Following the pilots, they raced toward a slight rise in the cornfield and the safety of a depression behind it. Lyons, Pikula and those two made it there just in time.
The tail gunner, Boyd Faulling, was the last one out. Tragically, before he could get far enough away, the fire reached the bombs in the plane causing them to explode. He was killed by the tremendous concussion of an monstrous explosion that sent plane parts flying in all directions and left a crater more than 20 feet deep.
Lyons and the rest of the surviving crew were transported to a hospital to begin what would be many months of surgery and skin grafts to recover from their injuries and burns. Less than 48 hours later, in the darkness early on June 6, they could hear from their hospital beds their 344th Bomb Group taking off from Stansted. The weather had cleared. Their fellow crews were paving the way for the vast seaborne invasion of France.
Lyons eventually recovered from his burns and returned to New Haven where he rejoined his family’s long-time business, the Bilco Company, as a vice president. Soon he married his pre-war fiancée and together they would raise a family of seven children. My wife, Daria, is the middle of those seven.
As Daria grew up, her father would describe the crash on rare occasions. It gradually became clear to her that he felt a deep and continuing regret, particularly concerning the deaths of two of his crewmen. While he knew he was not responsible for what happened to them, he felt, as their officer, that he should contact their families to tell them about the heroism of their loved ones and the circumstances of their deaths. But he was unable to bring himself to do that.
Today we would recognize that his inability to take those steps was caused by the pain and regret of a survivor’s guilt.
Still, in 1978, Daria’s father had visited England and knocked on the door of the farm where the plane crash occurred. The grandson of the owner at the time of the crash greeted him warmly and guided him out to the field. The grandson had been three years old at the time of the crash and had no memories of it. But, as he grew up, he heard his family and their neighbors on countless occasions describe the memorable scenes of the crash, explosion and rescue of the survivors.
Yet, despite Lyon’s ability to return to the crash site, he was never able to bring himself to contact the families of the two men who died in the crash.
It now seems that his unresolved feelings were passed down to his daughter. By 2007, her father had been a long-time resident of Madison. Sensing his feelings, she was motivated to visit his fellow pilot, Pikula, who lived outside of Boston and was then in his 80’s.
Daria told him about her father’s undying admiration for him. She heard his stories of the training they completed to fly the B-26 and the trip they took early in 1944 to bring their plane to England. To avoid detection by Nazi planes and gun batteries, they flew it from Florida to Brazil, across the Atlantic to Ascension Island, then to Liberia, then Madagascar, and on to England.
Her father was pleased to hear about her visit, but it didn’t make him able to make one of his own. In 2008, not long after her visit with Pikula, her father passed away at the age of 91.
In the fall of 2023, Daria and I traveled to England and visited the same farm her father had visited. It is still owned by the family that owned it in 1944. The same grandson who had shown her father the site, now aged 83, remains the owner. It is no longer a cornfield. The family now grows wheat and the farm is managed by his son. It had recently been harvested and was ready for a new planting.
We walked out to the site of the crash with the owner, his son, his daughter-in-law and their two boys. While there, the owner told us of how Daria’s father had walked confidently to the site of the crash, paused for a moment, then pointed to the hill that he and his crew had run over to avoid the plane’s explosion.
Our visit to that farm gave rise to an unexpected but powerful desire in Daria to contact and share information with the families of the two men killed in the crash. Once we were back in the states, she set to work with a passion, poring over her father’s mission diaries, military records, and photos to capture details of the crew, their training, their previous missions and their mission on that fateful day. At the same time, she used her amatuer genealogical skills to identify the names of people who seemed likely to be relatives of the two men.
She was first able to make contact with the three nieces and two nephews of John Strauss. They and their families now live across the country, in Connecticut, Maine, Virginia, Ohio and California. Strauss’ two brothers had tried to keep his memory alive for their daughters and sons. But they had never met him or nor did any of them have details about how he died. This made them grateful to learn that their uncle had not been forgotten. They were clearly interested to learn more about what happened to him.
Daria sent them photos, documents, and stories she had collected about him. In time, she invited them to meet with us and, in the fall of 2023, we met virtually with four of them. It had all the feelings of a long-awaited reunion.
Daria shared with them what she thought must have been their uncle’s experience, with details about the role he played on the plane, the rest of the crew, the flight that day and the crash itself. Strauss’ nieces and nephews had known none of this and relished those details.
After the meeting, she was able to connect the Strauss family with a little-known agency of the U.S. government that seeks to locate and return home the remains of American soldiers missing or killed in action whose remains have yet to be recovered. The agency, known as the Defense POW & MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), was able to provide them quickly with a very detailed official report on the crash in which their uncle had died.
After several months of further searching and outreach, Daria was able to make contact with the family of Boyd Faulling, the second man who had died in the crash. His granddaughter is now in her 50’s and lives in South Carolina. She had done some research of her own on her grandfather, but struggled to find details. She was grateful to hear from Daria and receive the photos, documents, and stories she could provide. Her mother, Fauling’s daughter, was born just a few months after the time of the plane crash and is now nearly 80 years old. She looks forward to sharing the memories about her grandfather with her mother. We have made plans to visit them, in person, later this year.
Over the last year, my wife has found it difficult to speak of these men without being overwhelmed by a rush of emotions that caught her breath and brought tears to her eyes. Her father’s regrets had taken root in her. She has embraced her father’s desire to meet these families and share his memories with them. She made sure the families of those men know their loved ones have not been forgotten. Eighty years after the crash and 16 years after his death, she has managed to accomplish what her father could not.
David O’Connor