A team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was preforming a routine dive in the Alamo sea on Saturday August 8th, 2020 when they found a WW2 era bomber.
The Bomber which is a Mammoth Mogul is in a near pristine condition and looks the same as the day it crashed! NOAA is currently working with the United States Government to get the proper documentation to raise the bomber and make it a memorial for those who died fighting for our country.
The backstory there bud!
Firsthand memories are fading fast. but even newcomers to Sandy Shores soon learn a bomber rests somewhere in the murky depths of the Alamo sea. The plane now known to be a Mammoth Mogul crashed into the Alamo on June 8th, 1944.
Summerlin, 81, was a boy standing on his daddy’s porch when he heard the plane crash. Now he wants to know what will happen to the plane if and when it is raised, He and many others alive at the time don't want to see the plane leave.
"We don't want to see the plane leave the community, it's a part of our story and should remain here as a memorial to the crew" said Summerlin, 81.
The pilot was Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Charles McDaniel, 21, whose family lived in Grapeseed, a community near the Alamo sea’s northern shore. His high school sweetheart and wife of seven months, Mary Elizabeth, was also living there with her family. McDaniel and his co-pilot, Navy Ensign John Withrow of Beaver Falls, Pa., were to ferry the new bomber from a San Andreas factory to the Marine Corps base at Cherry Point near the North Carolina coast.
On the day of the crash, McDaniel took off from a stopover point, Sandy Shores Airfield. As he flew east toward Cherry Point, he diverted his course by a few miles to circle the Alamo in a prearranged signal that he wouldn’t be back in Blaine County that night.
“The plane reportedly made the circle twice, with no apparent trouble, but on the third circuit, the family listened in horror as a sputtering sound was followed by a loud explosion,” said Coble, 78
One witness, 90-year-old Wade Adkins, told the MooseLand News staff that he was eating lunch at home in Grapeseed when the plane flew over so low that “it sounded like it was coming right through the house.”
Adkins said he and other workers from Sandy Shores’ 24/7 ran outdoors to watch the plane fly over the lake. As it began to turn, “both (a co-worker) and I said it’s going to crash because it was way too low,” Adkins recalled.
A wing hit the water, he said, and the plane smashed into the lake.
