The Bomber at the Bottom of Badin Lake: The 1944 Crash of a Marine PBJ Mitchell

It is true. There is a World War II bomber on the bottom of Badin Lake, and it has been there since the afternoon of Thursday, June 8, 1944. The airplane was a PBJ-1, the Navy and Marine Corps version of the twin-engine B-25 Mitchell. Its pilot, Second Lieutenant Charles McDaniel of the Marine Corps, was twenty-one years old and had grown up at Palmerville, on the shore of the same lake. His co-pilot was Ensign John E. Withrow of the Naval Reserve. Both men died, and neither body was recovered.

The story has been told around Stanly County for eighty years, and it has collected the usual additions: a secret bombsight, a cover-up, catfish the size of a man. This account sets those aside and follows what the Navy’s own messages, the Badin Historic Museum‘s research and the work of a professional underwater archaeologist actually establish. Where the sources disagree, it says so.

The airplane

The North American B-25 Mitchell was one of the most widely used American bombers of the war, the type flown on the Doolittle Raid in 1942. By 1943 the factories were building more of them than the Army Air Forces could use, and the Marine Corps took the surplus. The Navy gave the airplane its own designation, PBJ: PB for patrol bomber, J for the manufacturer, North American Aviation. Marine PBJ squadrons trained at Cherry Point on the North Carolina coast, and nine of them reached the Pacific before the war ended.

The Badin Lake aircraft appears in the Navy’s records as PBJ 89050. Our State magazine, working from the archaeologist’s report, identifies it as a PBJ-1H, the Navy’s name for the B-25H, a version with a solid nose that carried a 75-millimeter cannon. It was painted ocean blue with a white star, and it was new. A wheel later found on the lakeshore is stamped with a date of March 1944. The plane was being ferried from Columbus, Ohio, to Cherry Point, a job that needed only a pilot and a co-pilot.

The pilot from Palmerville

Charles McDaniel came from Palmerville, the community on the west shore of the lake just north of Badin. He graduated from Badin High School and worked at the Alcoa plant before the war. In November 1943 he married Mary Hill, a girl who had grown up across the road from him, at the Baptist church near her parents’ farmhouse. By the spring of 1944 he was a Marine second lieutenant with 128.4 hours in PBJs, assigned to ferry new aircraft to Cherry Point.

Less is on record about the other man in the cockpit. Ensign John E. Withrow of the Naval Reserve was the co-pilot. His middle initial is printed as P in one local account and as E in most others, and a memorial listing gives his full name as John Earl Withrow, born in 1921.

The last flight

The ferry flight from Ohio did not go straight through. On June 7 the two men landed at Morris Field, the Army air base at Charlotte’s airport. The Badin Museum’s account, drawn from official messages, says bad weather forced the stop. Our State reports that McDaniel told his wife it was a mechanical problem, and that no mechanic’s log has ever been found. Either way, Charlotte was an hour from home. McDaniel went to Palmerville for the night, had supper with the family and promised Mary that he would fly over the house on his way to the coast the next day.

He and Withrow were cleared out of Morris Field at 12:23 p.m. on June 8. Cherry Point lies east-southeast of Charlotte, about 231 miles away in a straight line. Badin is about 48 miles to the east-northeast, so the visit took them well off the direct course. Around one o’clock people from Albemarle to Badin heard a low, loud airplane and felt their windows shake.

Mary ran into the yard with her mother, her brothers, a neighbor and her two younger sisters, who were four and fourteen. They heard the engines before they saw the blue airplane come over the house. By family tradition McDaniel had promised three circles; some accounts say he completed two. Then the plane dropped behind the trees toward the lake. Several people heard an engine sputter. There was a sound like an explosion, and afterward a smell of gasoline on the wind. No one saw it strike the water.

Mary wanted to run to the water. Her brother and a neighbor coaxed her back into the house, and Charles’s father went down to the shore instead. There was little to see. Over the following hours and days the lake gave up loose papers, a brown sock and the sleeve of a uniform shirt.

The Navy’s own clock ran about an hour behind events. At roughly two o’clock Morris Field telephoned Cherry Point to report that PBJ 89050, with two men aboard, was an hour overdue, and a lost-plane procedure began. About three o’clock two staff cars and an ambulance from Morris Field reached Badin. About four a call to Cherry Point confirmed that a B-25-type airplane had gone into what the message called the Yadkin River Reservoir at Badin at 1300 hours.

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The Navy tries to raise it

The military response was fast. Military police were posted at the nearby dams and at the aluminum plant, which was a war industry. The Cherry Point survey party reached the lake on the day of the crash and went out on a barge lent by Alcoa. Its first idea was blunt: it set off 2,700 pounds of dynamite in the hope that the blast would bring the airplane, or parts of it, to the surface. Only fragments and flecks of blue paint came up.

On June 10 the survey team reported that salvage was impossible with the men and equipment on hand, and Cherry Point asked the Navy for trained divers. A team of about 25 Navy and Marine personnel was assembled, with an amphibious boat fitted with cranes and a large barge, and flown in by transport on June 11. The divers went down in the heavy helmet-and-hose gear of the period.

What they found explains why the airplane is still there. One report put the depth at 134 feet and another at 150. The bottom was soft silt about ten feet deep. Rising out of it was a standing forest, trees twenty to fifty feet tall that had been left in place when the valley was flooded in 1917. Below about ninety feet the divers could see nothing at all. The trees tangled the divers’ gear and snagged the grappling hooks, cables and wires hung in the branches, and the men worked by feel. Our State reports that one diver was hauled up unconscious after his equipment failed. The divers located wreckage but no bodies. In mid-July the Navy closed its investigation and hauled away a truckload of salvaged metal. The report described the airplane as virtually demolished.

The reports were frank about what a successful recovery would have taken. The airplane lay broken in deep mud under ten feet of silt, inside a grove of standing timber. Lifting it would have meant cutting a way in through the trees and floating the wreck with pontoon buoys or flotation bags, with divers who could not see their own hands. After about a week the Navy judged the risk to its divers too great and stopped.

Why did it crash?

The Navy’s finding was pilot error. Its report said that the plane was flying low over the water, made a wide turn, and dipped a wing into the lake. The service had a word for showing off at low altitude, flat-hatting, and it applied that word to McDaniel.

People in Badin did not much care for the verdict, then or later. Witnesses had heard an engine cut in and out and had smelled raw gasoline, which suggested to some that an engine failed, or that the crew dumped fuel when they knew they were going down. Others noted that the wind funnels hard through the gap between the hills where the old river channel runs. Still others believed McDaniel turned over the water on purpose to keep a crippled airplane away from the houses. None of these ideas can be tested without the wreck. What can be said is that the airplane had already made one unplanned landing the day before, for a reason the surviving records do not settle, and that the Navy, having failed to raise it, reached its conclusion without examining the engines.

The archaeologist who has studied the wreck most closely does not claim to know. Wendy Coble has said that either pilot error or a mechanical failure is plausible. Mary McDaniel’s sisters, who watched the plane come over as children, have always believed the airplane failed, not the pilot.

A forest under the water

Badin Lake is not a natural lake. It filled in 1917 behind the Narrows Dam, which the Aluminum Company of America completed to power its new smelter, and it drowned a deep gorge of the Yadkin River along with farms, roads and woodland. The timber in the valley was not cut before the water rose. The lake covers about 5,350 acres, has about 115 miles of shoreline, and is roughly 190 feet deep at its deepest. Its water carries enough silt and tannin that divers describe it as black. Our history of the Narrows Dam and the company town of Badin tells how the lake came to be.

Badin, Palmerville and the lakeTopoSatelliteStreets

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Sonar, a nosewheel and a marker

For half a century the plane was left alone. Then in 1998 Wendy Coble, an underwater archaeologist who specializes in sunken aircraft, heard the story at a church potluck in Albemarle while visiting her parents, and took her first notes on a napkin. The next year she began a formal investigation with the permission of the McDaniel family, the State of North Carolina, the Navy and Alcoa, which owned the land under the lake. Her side-scan sonar produced images of what may be wreckage. Equipment failures kept her divers from reaching the spot. She wrote a 43-page report, and the question of exactly what lies where on the bottom is still open.

A few pieces of the airplane are above water. Small debris, papers, a brown sock and the sleeve of a uniform shirt came ashore in 1944. Years later a nosewheel was found on the bank by a local man who put it to use on his farm. Curt Dorsey of Badin eventually bought it for twenty dollars, and it is now in the Badin Museum on Falls Road. Albemarle artist Roger Thomas painted the bomber’s last moments in a picture called Final Run and sold prints to help pay for the search.

On Veterans Day 2001 a memorial marker to the two airmen was dedicated in Badin. Mary McDaniel did not live to see it. She later remarried and had children, and she died in 1986. She is buried in the small cemetery near the church where she and Charles were married, and a stone with his name stands beside hers.

The wreck is not a salvage prize. Sunken military aircraft remain the property of the United States under the Sunken Military Craft Act of 2004, and disturbing one without a Navy permit is against federal law. This one is also the grave of two men. Divers and anglers should treat it that way. For visitors, the Badin Museum and the lakefront are the places to go; our pages on the history of Badin, the Stanly County lakes and the county’s museums and historic places have directions and hours.

The rumors deserve a short answer each. Some people in Badin grew up believing that the airplane was a small private plane lying just off the boat landing; it was a medium bomber with a wingspan of about 67 feet, and it lies in deep water. Some say that souvenir hunters carried off pieces from the shore and kept quiet about it, which is at least partly true, since that is how the nosewheel survived. And the tale that the bomber carried a secret Norden bombsight has no document behind it. A brand-new airplane on a stateside delivery flight with a two-man crew was not on a combat mission, and the Navy’s messages about the loss say nothing of the kind.

Story versus record

Timeline

Questions and answers

Sources

1. Debrah Lovan, “The Badin Bomber,” Badin Museum, summarizing official Navy and Marine Corps messages of June 1944.
2. Robyn Yiğit Smith, “The Mystery of Badin Lake,” Our State, July 30, 2018, drawing on Wendy Coble’s investigation and interviews with the family.
3. Wendy M. Coble, report on the Badin Lake PBJ wreck for the Navy’s underwater archaeology program (1999), as cited in “Badin Lake,” Wikipedia. See the Naval History and Heritage Command.
4. WRAL News, report on the Badin Lake bomber, January 25, 2012.
5. “Badin Lake,” Wikipedia, for the lake’s area, shoreline and depth.
6. Sunken Military Craft Act, Title XIV of Public Law 108-375 (2004).
7. Memorial listing for Ens. John Earl Withrow (1921–1944).

Photo and image credits (10)

Marine Corps PBJ-1D Mitchell bomber in flight — U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
PBJ-1D Mitchells of VMB-443 in flight, 1944 — U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
North American B-25H Mitchell — San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Marine Corps PBJ-1J Mitchell bombers — U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons, public domain
Restored PBJ-1J Mitchell in Marine Corps colors, 2022 — Tomás Del Coro / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Badin Lake at dusk, fall 2014 — Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Badin Lake viewed from Uwharrie National Forest — Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Badin Lake from the Badin boat launch — James Willamor / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
Narrows Dam and power plant on the Yadkin River — Wasrts / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
Downtown Badin, North Carolina — Indy beetle / Wikimedia Commons, CC0
Charts, tables, timelines and map overlays: original work by The Stanly County Guide. Basemap tiles © Esri and data partners.