The 10 Young Men Who Died Giving Wyoming's Bomber Mountain Its Name

Crumpled pieces of metal are scattered in the boulder field, remnants of a crash that earned Bomber Mountain its name.

The mountain is part of the Bighorn Range, 23 miles west of the small town of Buffalo, Wyoming, and when the sun is just right, it reflects off pieces of the wreckage that are still there more than eight decades later and can be spotted from miles away.

On 28 June 1943, a B-17 F-55-DL Flying Fortress nicknamed "Scharazad" took off from Pendleton Army Air Base in Pendleton, Oregon. The crew’s destination was Grand Island, Nebraska.

From there, the bomber was to join the other members of its bomb group and continue to England to participate in the ongoing World War II bombing campaigns.

Second Lt. Billy Ronaghan piloted the new Flying Fortress with nine other young men aboard. They were attached to the 2nd Air force, 2nd bomber command, 17th Bomber Wing, 383rd Bomb Group, 541st Bomber Squadron.

They never arrived in Nebraska.

Around midnight, Ronaghan radioed that their position was near Powder River, Wyoming. It was the last anyone heard his voice.

After they failed to arrive in Grand Island, the plane was declared missing. The Army immediately mounted a search effort with no results.

A second search was conducted the following year, concentrating on the Wind River Mountains, Absaroka Mountains and Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming.

No wreckage was spotted, and for two years, the families were left without any answers of what had happened to the men.

Mystery Solved

On Aug. 12, 1945, two cowboys spotted something shiny on a ridge line in the Cloud Peak area of the Bighorns.

What they discovered solved the mystery of the missing Flying Fortress. The cowboys had stumbled upon the wreckage and by then long-dead crew.

They contacted authorities, and within days an Air Force investigatory crew was sent in. They recovered the bodies of the crew and returned them to their families.

Sylvia Bruner, director of the Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum in Buffalo, said that reports from the scene described how nobody survived the crash and the bodies they recovered showed “complete and utter destruction.”

The impact had catapulted the plane over the west side of the ridge and down the east slope. The force of the collision was incredible and catastrophic. The plane had been torn into hundreds of pieces with multiple areas catching fire.

It was believed that during earlier search efforts, the paint color of the aircraft blended in closely with the mountain side, making the wreckage difficult to spot. After a few years, the paint wore off, and the shiny aluminum underneath made the plane more visible.

For years, locals would visit the site, and pieces were brought back as mementos of the crash, some of which ended up in the Jim Gatchell Museum in Buffalo.

Scott Madsen grew up listening to the stories of the crash and seeing the remnants for himself. His interest in the site led him to research the crash, originally as a high school research paper. Eventually, he had enough information and published a book about the accident in 1990, “The Bomber Mountain Crash Story: A Wyoming Mystery.”

No Answers

“It was a big mystery of how or why it crashed, and that was part of what got me interested in it, trying to uncover what happened, because they didn't really have much in the newspaper at the time,” Madsen said. “It wasn't until I got the crash report from the Army that it showed a little more, but a lot of it’s still hearsay. Nobody survived so we don’t know for sure what happened.”

No official cause for the crash was ever determined, but it is presumed that malfunctioning navigational equipment, and a moonless night combined with bad weather caused the pilot to not see the ridge until it was too late.

“The root issue is that they didn't have enough time,” Bruner said. “They didn't have enough training to handle any kind of obstacle that came their way. These guys were just brand new, and they had been skipping phases of training. They had been pushed through very quickly for the war effort, so they just simply did not have the experience.”

“It's just amazing how many deaths there were in the military during World War II that were over here in training accidents or different things,” Madsen said. It's kind of shocking.”

After two years of waiting, the family members of the men finally had some closure, but no real answers. There was no explanation as to why the aircraft was off-course, and that meant no acceptable reason for the crash. The families received the remains and buried them at their respective hometowns.

“It sounds really bad that the plane was not found for two years,” Bruner said. “However, it does make sense when you realize the Army Air Corps had a massive area to be searching.”

The Army had conducted searches on foot and in air and didn’t realize that the plane was 150 miles off-course. In addition, the crash site was well above the tree line so there was no fire and no trail of damaged trees.

“I visited with a retired search and rescue person last summer,” Bruner said. “He had explained that when they're out looking for a crash site, they usually see some kind of ground disturbance, or usually there's a lot of trees that are broken over, or they see some smoke from a fire. None of that would have really existed here. With the snow on top of it, it was even more difficult to see.”

Remembering The Crew

“The oldest was 25,” Bruner said, “They represent a microcosm of America during World War II. They were from all across the United States and came from different backgrounds, but they were all thrown together.

“They could have been anybody's son, brother, husband or father. There’s the human connection, that they were just average American boys.”

For Madsen, a deeper connection to the story was made when he met the actual family members of several of the crew.

“It was kind of surprising when the first picture I got of one of the crew members was sent by the family,” he said. “That sent chills through my spine. It made it real. Before, it was just more abstract.”

Bruner has spent the last several years researching the crew, also bringing their stories to life and finding the rest of the photos of the 10-person crew.

• At 25, flight engineer James Hinds was the oldest on-board.

• Navigator Leonard Phillips was an only child who had been serving in the army since 1940.

• Radio operator Ferguson Bell was the third of his name.

• Vaughn Miller was to be married to his longtime sweetheart, Ruth.

• Co-pilot Tony Tilotta and his wife had one son and another on the way.

• Bombardier Charles Suppes, nicknamed “Suppie,” spent his downtime drawing cartoons.

• Charles “Junior” Newburn had left his family in Oklahoma where he had enjoyed hunting and fishing.

• Prior to the military, aircraft gunner Lewis Shepard had concentrated on meeting girls at his local roller-skating rink.

• Aircraft gunner Jake Penick had met the love of his life while stationed in Oklahoma.

• Pilot Billy Ronaghan was only 24, but he carried the responsibility of the lives of these men on his shoulders. Having received his private pilot’s license after high school, he bought his own airplane, which he loved to fly over his home state of New York.

When the United States joined the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, Ronaghan was a police officer in the Bronx.

Wreckage Will Remain

The local War Dads organization in Buffalo placed a plaque bearing the crewmen’s names at the base of nearby Florence Lake to honor the men who died. In 1946, the U.S. Forest Service approved the christening of the ridge as “Bomber Mountain” in honor of the crew.

Over the years, many family members of the crew visited the area for themselves. Climbing Bomber Mountain is a scramble over rocks and boulders and the crash site is near the summit so visitors reach over 12,000 feet in elevation.

“You really don't see it until you get up close to the wreckage site,” Madsen said. “A lot of parts and pieces are down between the boulders. It made a pretty good impact.”

Madsen has visited the site beginning with his family as a young teenager. He explained that once you get to the top of the peak, there is a small debris area where most of the plane landed. A few heavier items, such as the engine, were thrown a little farther away on the east side.

Bruner first visited the site in 2014 with her husband and seeing the debris field from the wreck was an emotional moment for her.

“It was overwhelming because it is massive,” Bruner said. “When people hear about a plane crash, we think of a plane recognizable in some kind of crash location. That is not what this site is. It's just pieces of wreckage all over this debris field.”

She explained that you can expect to see some large pieces, such as the engine Madsen mentioned, and then there are little pieces shattered into a million different parts.

“It was absolutely catastrophic,” she said. “I cried a little bit just thinking about how they were so young and they should have had all these long lives in front of them, and instead it just was taken from them in an absolute instant and very unexpectedly.”

Looking Forward

As time marches on, the crew of the Flying Fortress will forever be remembered in the town of Buffalo and by those who visit the site for themselves.

The Jim Gatchell museum hosts a permanent display featuring the crash on Bomber Mountain which first piqued Bruner’s interest in the crew and Madsen helped put together over the years.

It was missing photos of some of the crew members and she devoted years of her time to finding the missing men. This February, the exhibit will be updated to include the pictures of all 10 of the crew.

After years of research on the men, tracking down their stories and trying to piece together the accident, Bruner wrote a book about the crash. “The Wyoming Bomber Crash of 1943” will be released this coming April through History Press in memory of the boys that she got to know so well from her research.

The Jim Gatchell museum will also be hosting a World War II conference the same month which will include a presentation on Bomber Mountain and the crew who lost their lives on their way to fight in Europe during World War II.

Madsen had written the first book about Bomber Mountain 30 years ago and is considering reprinting the book because of the demand and modern technology being available. For him, as it is to Bruner, it is the crew who he remembers.

“It's always been the human connection, the human stories that I find the most interesting and lasting,” Bruner said. “I may not remember troop movement information from a particular battle, but I'm going to remember somebody's personal story.”

It is these stories that Bruner and Madsen have worked over the years to preserve so that the crew that crashed on Bomber Mountain may never be forgotten.

Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.