In the cold, dark and deep waters of Gander Lake, NL, a team of divers on Monday confirmed the underwater location of a World War II plane that crashed there in 1943. The plane, a B-24 Liberator bomber, was carrying four men when it crashed on takeoff on September 4 of that year. All four men died. Jill Heinerth, an explorer-in-residence at the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, was part of the team of divers who confirmed the plane’s location. “Gander Lake is very dark. The water is a tea-red color and it just absorbs all the light, so it’s like a perpetual night dive,” Heinerth told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. “At about 120 feet [36.5 metres] deep, I saw the landing gear with … what appeared to be fully inflated tires. So the whole plane is upside down with, you know, wheels sticking, basically,” he said. “And it’s kind of crumpled up, but other than that, the stuff that we saw underwater is extremely in incredible condition, well-preserved. “ One of the wheels on the plane’s landing gear appears to still be holding some air, according to Heinerth. The plane is upside down. (Submitted by Jill Heinerth) In total, the team made six dives at the plane’s location, between 37 and 48 meters below the surface of the lake, in water with a temperature of 5C. Heinerth said she was “humbled by the experience” of seeing the plane. “I mean, these are war graves. And we can’t, you know, forget the horrors of World War II,” he said.
Previous recovery efforts were abandoned
Heinerth said the bomber experienced some sort of engine failure during takeoff. “Something went wrong because people who saw the crash said the plane spun and rolled three times before it crashed right into the lake,” he said. In the days following the crash, military divers found the wreckage and attempted to recover the bodies of JM Young, John G. MacKenzie, VE Bill and G. Ward. “There were efforts early on to try to deal with the wreck and recover it. And in the process, some Navy hard hat divers recovered one body, Mackenzie’s, and hoped to recover the other three [men’s] it remains,” Heinerth said. A hardhat diver wears a brass or copper helmet, a diving suit, and breathes compressed air pumped through a hose from a vessel on the surface. “But the wreckage slid onto that ledge and it’s perched precariously to the point where it’s about to fall into the depths of Gander Lake, which is extremely deep. And so they decided it was too dangerous to continue their efforts,” he said. Heinerth. For 79 years, the bomber remained undisturbed. Heinerth, left, with Russell Clark, expedition co-leader and fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. (Robert McClellan/Submitted by Jill Heinerth) Tony Merkle, one of the team’s divers, had been trying for more than nine years to find the plane’s exact location. Merkle is also a member of the Shipwreck Protection Society of Newfoundland & Labrador (SPSNL), one of the organizations supporting the mission to confirm the plane. Merkle found approximate geographic coordinates for the plane from an old Royal Canadian Air Force report, and another SPSNL member, Kirk Regular, was able to take a sonar scan that showed the plane’s location. Heinerth said Merkel is in contact with the descendants of the men who died and says she will reach out to share images with them.
The challenges of diving
Heinerth said visibility at the bottom of the plane is less than a meter, and even with bright lights, she and her dive partner had trouble seeing each other. “But we were able to document some important points in the wreckage that would help us determine that this was indeed this B-24 Liberator,” he said. They found a certain emblem on the tail stabilizer section, for example, as well as a .50 caliber machine gun, ammunition and instruments. A July 2022 sonar scan by Kirk Regular of the Shipwreck Preservation Society of Newfoundland & Labrador showed the plane’s location on Gander Lake. (Newfoundland and Labrador Shipwreck Preservation Society/Submitted by Jill Heinerth) Heinerth on Tuesday was at the home of a man in St. John’s who is restoring another B-24 bomber. “He has literally piles of aircraft parts in his garage and in his yard. And I wander around the pieces and compare them to my photos and video to try to identify all the things we saw,” he said. There are plans to donate the images of the plane to SPSNL as well as local museums, he said. “We’re really interested in helping tell the story and giving people the supplies they need to do that,” he said. Written by Andrea Bellemare. Interview with Jill Heinerth produced by Shannon Higgins.
