Memorial to honor WWII bomber that crashed in England with Baldwin airman onboard

At 10:20 a.m. on Nov. 10, 1943, a B-17 Flying Fortress bomber carrying a Long Island airman and 12 other Americans took off from an air base near England’s southeast coast, bound for its home field inland.

At 10:35 a.m., the plane nosed down and crashed in the tiny village of Brome, sending “clouds of black smoke and flame” over nearby trees, according to a witness statement in a local police report. Lt. John E. Russell of Baldwin was dead, along with everyone else on the plane. Four workers and a horse on the ground also were killed. A United States Army accident report cited “fire in the cockpit … cause of the fire, unknown.”

Russell, who’d flown 39 missions and whose exploits had been told in half-a-dozen Newsday stories, was 23, one of at least 45 Baldwin men killed in the war.

Plans for memorial

Nearly 80 years later, an effort is underway to build a memorial at the crash site, and dozens of amateur researchers have contributed photographs, records and leads. The British side includes Steve Andrews, 56, a self-described “history buff” and marine engineer from Norfolk, England, along with Brome resident Clive Stevens and Maggie Aggiss, from nearby Framlingham. The Americans include Wendy Rust, 57, an amateur genealogist and retired event planner from Miami whose father’s family lived in Baldwin and befriended Russell — Jack, to his friends — when he was a civilian. 

“The more I learned about Jack, the more I wanted to know,” Rust said.

Her father, 94-year-old Robert Rust, a retired federal prosecutor, had grown up close to Russell and had stories to tell: how Russell had flown behind enemy lines “dropping incendiary bombs to light the target so the bombers behind could drop their bombs more accurately,” how he’d begun fighting before the United States declared war. Russell, the son of a former British Royal Air Force mechanic, flew with the Canadians and the British before transferring to what was then called the U.S. Army Air Corps. His final posting was with the 813th Bombardment Squadron of the 482nd Bomb Group, 8th Air Force.

For more than a year, Wendy Rust and Andrews, who met online at an aviation history forum, searched with other researchers for details in newspaper archives, genealogical records, flight logs and police and military crash reports. 

Larger than life

From a distance of decades, Russell can seem larger than life. The photograph that Newsday used in its 1940s stories shows a man full of swagger, at ease in a bomber jacket with a pipe in clenched teeth. In interviews, he talked like Hemingway wrote, telling a reporter who interviewed him in 1943 that “it is a thrill to feel the ship lift as the bombs get away and then, coming back over the target, see factories ablaze from a hit by those bombs. Those flames look like my idea of the fires of Hell.” 

Another Newsday story, written after Russell was awarded the British Distinguished Flying Cross, draws on a letter he wrote home about meeting England’s king and queen. “We chatted about Long Island and my operational actions … The Queen is the most charming woman I have ever met.”

Russell also pops up in unofficial histories of the British Royal Air Force as a Lancaster bomber pilot, Andrews said, coming across as a brash, skillful man who loved to fly.

“You’re given the controls of a four-engine bomber when you’re 21,” Andrews said. “It’s like giving a 21-year-old a Ferrari — ‘Have some fun, you don’t have to pay for the petrol.’ ”

Russell served with the Pathfinders, flying planes that carried smoke bombs to mark targets and used the then-cutting-edge technology of airborne radar, enabling long-range bombing missions at night and in bad weather, the researchers learned.

The technology later became standard, but Russell was one of the “pioneers experimenting with and then using airborne radars to find targets through cloud cover,” said Lane Callaway, a United States Air Force historian, in an email. European weather in the early 1940s was atypically cloudy, and given the scale of the air war — the England-based 8th Air Force alone conducted 600,000 sorties — the innovation was critical to maintaining "operational tempo," Callaway said. 

Dozens of missions

Researchers found records that showed Russell’s crew flew dozens of missions over France, Germany and Italy, often targeting centers of Germany’s military industrial might like Stuttgart, Nuremberg and the capital, Berlin. Sometimes there were weeks in between missions; sometimes they were daily.

In the years before 1944, when the Allies won air superiority, the job was perilous. The 8th suffered about half of the U.S. Army Air Forces' casualties, with 26,000 dead.

“If a bomber became battle-damaged, especially with several engines out or fuel issues, it could drop out of the formation,” Callaway said, and if that happened, German fighters typically kept “attacking until the bomber went down.” 

In dozens of letters Russell wrote to Wendy Rust’s father and grandfather, financier Adolf Rust, he often came across as bluff and gung-ho, she said. But a few of the letters show a side of him the newspaper hagiographies hadn’t. 

In one letter, sent to Robert Rust, he enclosed a piece of a B-17 wing, telling the teenager it was from a crash that had killed two of his friends and that he thought Robert might like to keep it. 

The last letter Wendy Rust read from Russell was addressed to Adolf Rust, who had given him a job before the war in his brokerage firm. It was postmarked Oct. 22, 1943, likely making it one of the last Russell sent. She found it, with the others, in the family's Long Island home, in a box in her grandfather’s dresser, after his death.

“Right now I’m in a little special work and I’m flying Forts,” Russell wrote, using a nickname for the B-17. “God knows I’m starting to feel as though I need a rest, though … At least I get a hell of a kick out of the detached feeling one gets up there amongst the stars.”

Wendy Rust’s interpretation of those lines, all these years later: “It’s taking a toll on him.”

Crash mystery lingers

She said her father’s hearing problems made a phone interview impossible, but she relayed questions and emailed his answers. “My dad thought the world of Jack,” Robert Rust said. Rust, who joined the Marine Reserves in 1947, said that Russell’s death had not dissuaded him. “I couldn’t wait to be old enough to volunteer to join the Marine Corps to serve my country like Jack Russell did.” 

The many documents gathered by the researchers do not explain much more about the crash that killed Russell and the other Americans than was initially known. An earlier combat mission had been scrubbed, and Russell was not the pilot of record for the doomed flight. In a 1947 letter that is as courteous as it is remorseless, a U.S. Army colonel explained to Russell's father, Stanley Russell, that his son was reported to have "died instantly of multiple compound fractures and third degree burns. No information has been received relative to the circumstances which led to the accident in which he lost his life. Allow me to extend my sympathy in your bereavement." 

Russell's name already appears on two Baldwin monuments to those who died and those who served in World War II, and  Rust's family sponsored banners with his picture that the Chamber of Commerce hung in the days leading to Memorial Day.

Andrews plans to lay flowers on Memorial Day at Russell's grave at Cambridge American Cemetery, which contains the remains of 3,811 American war dead. He and the other researchers have tracked down descendants of four servicemen killed in the crash and will invite them to a planned Nov. 10 unveiling of an informational plaque at the crash site, now occupied by a historic hotel. They have raised about 4,000 British pounds for the project, or nearly $5,000, and hope to raise more to fund a sculpture that will represent the plane and the crash victims. 

Andrews grew up listening to his parents’ stories of the war and said he heard their echoes in the news of the war in Ukraine over the past year. He hopes the memorial will be a timely reminder that “the serviceman is one day a civilian, the next day flying 13,000 feet over a foreign country and putting his life at risk.”

Rust said she was motivated to honor a family friend and the men he served with. “His life matters, and people should know his story, not only just Jack, but the rest of the crew.”