Days Gone By.........
Half-century later, missing bomber crew checks in
Texarkana Gazette Nov 10, 2001
Written by: John Fooks
Three years ago, Jane Kesterson Williams answered the telephone in her Pleasant Grove home and heard a stranger’s voice.
“Is this Lady Jane?” the voice inquired. Tears welled in her eyes as memories flashed through her mind. She was only 10 months old when her father, a crew chief for the 401st Bomb Group, 8th Air Force, in Deenethorp, England, named two airplanes after her. Both were B-17’s that he and his crew flew over Germany and France during World War II.
The first Lady Jane went down in a plowed field in North Holland on Nov. 6, 1944. The crew spent the rest of the war as German POWs. But Lady Jane’s father, Master Sgt. Richard R. “Tex” Kesterson, never knew until recently that the crew had survived. For 55 years, he believed the scuttlebutt that the Lady Jane went down somewhere in the North Sea and the crew perished.
But here was the very much alive navigator on the telephone, speaking to Lady Jane herself. “Yes,” was all she could say. “Where are you?” he asked. “Tell me where I can come find you” Lady Jane said the meeting between herself and her father and navigator Fred Campbell was long overdue.
“It has taken Daddy three years since that meeting to come to terms with the fact that the original Lady Jane crew survived.” She said. “Even after seeing each other and re-living their experiences, Daddy had trouble believing it, believing that the whole crew had survived. But only three of the crewmen are still alive today.” Kesterson joined the Army Air Corps at age 26 on Dec. 9, 1942. After several months of training he was transferred to Deenethorp to take over as crew chief for heavy bombers. The first Flying Fortress they were assigned was the Nasty Habit, a camouflaged craft.
Kesterson said his crew were usually up before dawn, working with flashlights as they fueled their Fortress, checked the oil and pumped oxygen into her system. They were always there in the afternoons when the Fortressess returned from their mission, ready to check and repair and get the Nasty Habit ready for the next day. One day the Nasty Habit did not come back. Kesterson later learned the Fortress force-landed with engine trouble at another friendly air base and had overshot the runway, crashing beyond repair at the end. A few days later, the replacement arrived, fresh from the factory. She was bright silver with no camouflage and glistened beautifully in the sun, as beautiful as the first photograph he had seen of his little girl.
Because a flight crew had not been assigned to the new Fortress, the honor of naming her fell to the crew chief. Kesterson promptly named her the Lady Jane, after his 10 month old daughter.
Her first three missions were less than successful, but only because of an engineering bug. Three times in a row the Lady Jane went out on missions over enemy territory, and all three times the bomb bay doors refused to open.
Kesterson tested the bomb bay doors between each mission, and every time the doors would operate perfectly, on the ground. After the third failed mission, Kesterson “red lined” –grounded her_ much to the chagrin of his captain.
“He wasen’t happy that I grounded her, but I told him we needed to find out what was wrong.” Kesterson said. “There’s no sense in sending men into harm’s way when they are unable to complete their mission.”
So Kesterson went up with the Lady Jane the next morning. He had the flight crew fly to 5,000 feet, and then he tested the bomb bay doors. They opened perfectly.
“Every 5,000 feet I’d open and close the doors,” Kesterson said. “Finally we got to an altitude where they wouldn’t open. Then I realized that the electric solenoid was freezing up”
The older B-17s had hydraulic bomb bay door systems. They were replaced by an electrical solenoid system, which would sweat and then freeze after the aircraft reached a high altitude.
Kesterson solved the problem by finding an electric heat strip and wrapping it around the solenoid. The bomb bay doors opened perfectly after that, and Kesterson forwarded the problem and his solution to manufacturers stateside.
Every afternoon he and the crew would wait on the airfield for the Lady Jane to come home. One day she came limping in late. Although it was still miles away, Kesterson could see that one of her engines had been feathered, her cooling fin knocked off, and he knew their work was cut out for them that evening. It was also a mission where the flight crew’s tail gunner had been killed.
“You never get over one of your crewmen getting killed.” Kesterson said. “But you have to go on, and the next day we had the Lady Jane ready for her next mission.
After losing the Lady Jane in Holland, Kesterson and his men got another Fortress. He promptly named it the Lady Jane 2. She went down with her flight crew over Germany. Neither the ship nor crew were ever heard from again.
It is to Kesterson’s credit, following his 2 ½ years at Deenethorp, that he was awarded the Bronze Star. He had kept his three Fortresses in the air without mechanical failure through 59 missions- an incredible accomplishment for the men on the ground.
“Everybody did whatever they had to do t keep our boys flying,” Kesterson said. “Nobody thought they were special. We were all just doing our jobs.”
Copyright 2000-2005 by Jo Autrey and Becky Cowen-Rutter. All rights reserved. This information may be used by libraries and genealogical societies, and for personal use, however, commercial use of this information is strictly prohibited without prior permission.
