Padroni – Take a bucket of bolts, a handful of screws and a glass window, toss them off a cliff in the middle of the night, come back a half-century later and find where they landed.
Welcome to Len Wallace’s world.
After 15 years of searching for long-forgotten plane wrecks, the gray-bearded native New Eng lander is known as one of Colorado’s most prolific finders of military-airplane crashes. Reputed for his museum-quality discoveries, the 70- year-old has found engines, weapons and pieces of a P-38 fighter that hit the ground at 600 mph outside Colorado Springs six decades ago.
But few crash sites have been more elusive to Wallace and other searchers than the B-24 Liberator that 62 years ago slammed into a field of scrub brush near the Nebraska border in Padroni, a sliver of a town 17 miles north of Sterling.
Even with maps, newspaper dispatches, Army reports and a witness, no one has been able to pinpoint where the 35,000- pound bomber went down. Much of the wreckage was hauled off shortly after the crash on July 1, 1944, including four engines and five dead airmen, though, as Wallace says, “Crashes never go away completely.”
So this summer, armed with metal detectors and global-positioning devices, Wallace and other wreck hunters are pursuing their white whale. And they have loftier ambitions.
Intensive project
As part of the B-24 search, the group has begun the most intensive project ever to photograph and document Colorado’s military aviation history.
They will start by covering a few dozen of the 600 or so crashes statewide that killed approximately 800 military personnel, plus record a few of the roughly 550 active and inactive airfields and nearly 60 missile silos.
The plan is to find and record as many sites as possible, then raise money to build memorials or plaques commemorating those places in history.
On a recent weekend – in a rutted prairie amid other crash seekers and a 6-foot-8-inch man named Slim who saw the B-24 go down – Wallace flips on his detector and goes to work.
“Let’s find this thing,” he says, “today.”
While some in the search party are less optimistic they will find the Liberator so quickly, they are still enthusiastic.
“The idea that you can make a discovery all these years later and fill in part of history, well, that’s amazing,” says Brian Richardson, a maintenance inspector and crash investigator for the Federal Aviation Administration, who brought this group together as part of the Colorado Aviation Historical Society.
The men on this search have located more than 50 wrecks combined, several of them on mountainsides and others in fields such as this one in Padroni, where only three crew members aboard the B-24 survived after one of the engines caught fire on a training mission from the then-Lowry Air Field.
The plane crashed, flipped and later exploded.
Searching for long-lost planes resting atop trees, in mountain crevasses and in farmers’ fields might conjure up visions of a poor man’s Indiana Jones. But the Colorado group is part of a rising archaeological subset that has used science and a little luck to locate and record military-related wrecks worldwide.
“There’s a focus now where you’re looking at the historical importance of each plane as if it were a true archaeological site, which we believe they are,” says Craig Fuller, who has found 300 wrecks and owns an Arizona- based company that sells research materials to other crash finders.
Flight crews trained and crashed at a multitude of sites across Colorado, from Pueblo to the Eastern Plains and throughout the Denver-metro area. Out- of-state crews also crashed after losing engines, hitting mountains or getting lost in bad weather.
While there is no hard evidence to support their claim, crash finders estimate Colorado has one of the highest number of military aviation fatalities in the nation.
“These are kids who died for their country, regardless if it happened in battle over the Pacific or training in Colorado,” says Wallace, an Erie resident who six years ago retired from his job as an assistant museum curator at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
Hope and disappointment
At the search site for the downed B-24, Wallace, Richardson and Larry Liebrecht – an Aurora real estate appraiser who once served as an imagery analyst at the Department of Defense – comb the prairie grass as if they were looking for a tick in a dog’s fur.
A few minutes into the search, a voice rings out. It’s Liebrecht.
“Oh, oh, Len, I found something,” he yells.
They scurry to Liebrecht’s side and scan a rusted piece of metal.
“Tin can,” Wallace says, his hopes deflated. “We’re looking for Plexiglas and aluminum.”
And later: “Hey, Len, look at this,” Richardson says, holding a black pipe.
“It’s from a tractor,” Wallace says.
The finds and rapid-fire disappointments follow for the next hour.
Glass? Yes, but from a bottle, not a windshield.
Aluminum? Maybe, but it’s from another can.
“Man, there’s a lot of trash out here,” Liebrecht says, as the men nod in agreement.
And there’s one more problem. Because of the B-24’s post-crash fire, there should be a massive dead patch in the vegetation. The land seems pretty lush over a mile of intense searching.
They recheck maps. They talk to Slim, who is certain that this is the right spot. They search other areas. They regroup and scan a quarter-mile of grass where Slim swears the plane first hit.
“Time has a way of changing memories,” Wallace later says as he trundles through a field of splintered agate.
But the men stay, covering another half-mile in the next two hours – nothing.
At a restaurant later, over a salad, some sandwiches and a few burritos, the men scan maps and share theories. Nearly everyone agrees that the group was a mile or more away.
They vow to return this fall.
Their server overhears the conversation. “Is this like buried treasure?” the man asks.
“Not exactly,” Wallace says.
“From the 1940s? You’ll never find it.”
“Yes, we will,” Wallace says, grinning at the men sitting with him. “We always do.”
