A WWII mystery on the Bay of Biscay

PLATTSBURGH — The lives of U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Benjamin Bernard Bromley, a B-24 Sea Hawk Engineer, and Kapitänleutnant Günther Krech, a German U-558 commander, intersected over the Bay of Biscay on July 20, 1943.

Only Krech lived to tell the tale of what happened on that fateful day during World War II, which still haunts Bromley’s family members to this day in the North Country.

Benjamin Bernard was born Dec. 8, 1911, the son of Herbert James Bromley (1877-1948) and Madeleine (Cramer) Bromley (1876-1953), according to Ancestry.com.

“When I was a child, my dad told me about our relatives who have served in the military,” Jacob Woodward, a grandnephew, said.

“We have a very long history of that. That was when I first became aware of him, and it was always something that stuck out because even though we lost relatives in the war as well, they came back. We were able to get their bodies back, but him it was always like we didn’t know. My great-grandparents, his parents, didn’t know what had happened to him. My grandmother, his sister, for years afterwards, was always expecting her brother to kind of walk in the door, kind of say, ‘I’m home.’ No one really knew.”

ANCESTRAL TREE

Jacob is the son of Todd Woodward, who was the son of Barbara Virginia Bromley Woodward (1921-1988), Benjamin’s sister. Their siblings were: Mary Margaret Waddill (1917-1991), Roger Russell Bromley (1913-1976), James Stark Bromley (1923-1985), and Dorothea Mae Lawrence (1918-1976).

The former Peru farming family hails back to patriarch Edward Bromley and his wife, Lois (Lobdell), Bromley (1785-1858), who later married Moses Edward Vail.

The ancestral farm with Vermont vistas still exists on Military Turnpike, though it is no longer owned by the family.

FALLEN STAR

Jacqueline Stewart, a retired Plattsburgh City Schools history teacher and genealogist, has researched Staff Sgt. Bromley for the Stories Behind the Stars Project. Her research includes the following:

Benjamin Bromley was a graduate of Plattsburgh High School in 1930. He was the editor of the yearbook, The Barker, and a charter member of Adirondack Chapter, DeMolay. He was selected to attend the Casey Jones School of Aeronautics, Newark, N.J. where he graduated in airplane mechanics in 1941. He was a student at the Diesel School of Engineering at Hempstead, Long Island.

He married the former Miss Ethel Anderson of Mineola, Long Island on 4 October 1942, while she was a secretary at Mitchell Field. The late B.S. Cramer of Plattsburgh was the grandfather of the missing soldier.

He registered for the draft at Huntington, Suffolk, New York on 16 October 1940. He was employed by Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps on 12 March 1941.

S/Sgt. Bromley was reported missing in action as a member of the crew of a flying fortress on a North Sea mission in 1943. His mother was notified from Bromley’s wife who is secretary to the Chief of Staff of all the airports on the Atlantic Coast, located at Mitchell Field, Long Island. S/Sgt. Bromley was a member of the flying fortress crew which had become widely known as the ‘Sea Hawks,’ and they were on convoy duty at the time.

Mrs. Ethel Bromley, wife of Staff Sergeant Benjamin Bernard Bromley, 31, received from the War Department an Air Medal, awarded to her husband who has been missing in action since 10 July 1943, at ceremonies recently, the award presumably being a posthumous honor, no word has been heard from the non-commissioned officer in more than six months. He is thought to have lost his life in the service of his country. Presentation of the Air Medal was made to Mrs. Bromley at Mitchell Field, by Col. Douglas Johnston, Commander.

The general order read: “For meritorious achievement while participating in more than 200 hours of anti-submarine patrol flight accomplishment. Many of these missions were carried out under unfavorable weather conditions that made flights hazardous. The possibility of encountering enemy planes and anti-aircraft fire from armed vessels added to the danger of these missions. The courage, skill and untiring energy displayed by these officers and enlisted men reflect the highest credit upon themselves and the armed forces of the United States.”

TWO GRAVE SITES

In his profile, Stewart notates Bromley’s grave sites, one in Peru and the other at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in England.

“We go to his grave,” Jacob said.

“Well, it’s not really a grave. It’s an empty grave. We clean it. If there’s a faded flag, we change it. We try to keep him with us. We try to keep the stories that have been passed down about him, the kind of person that he was. He was a very intelligent man. He had a lot to offer the world. He was like the golden child of the family. The guy who could really kind of go far in life.”

His great uncle is a mystery, and that fuels part of his interest.

“Because we didn’t know what happened to him,” he said.

“He went to war. He didn’t come back. Part of it is a mystery. Part of it is this legacy of loss kind of gets passed down. It started with his parents, then my grandmother, then my father, then myself and my brothers and my cousins. It never goes away. The loss never goes away. In a lot of ways, it is a burden because it wasn’t something that was intended to have happened.

“Obviously, he didn’t go to war to die. Every soldier accepts that as a reality of being in service, but when it happens sometimes you don’t get to have the remains returned. It becomes very difficult to kind of process that loss.”

LONE WOLF ENCOUNTER

Jacob has scoured Krech’s interrogation report and other documents from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

“My great uncle was an aerial engineer aboard a B-24 Liberator,” he said.

“The unit he served with was the 19th Antisubmarine Squadron attached to the 479th Antisubmarine Group. His job as an aerial engineer was to maintain the plane. He was a very educated man. He went to school to learn how to work on planes. I would assume that after the war, he probably would have made some kind of career out of it based on what I’ve seen.

“The day it happened, this submarine, U-558, was sitting on the surface of the Bay of Biscay, a body of water between France and Spain. It was kind of sitting in a fogbank, so the Germans were thinking like hey, this is a pretty good opportunity to maybe air out the sub. From what the captain wrote, some guys were kind of out on the deck sunbathing. Some guys were down in the mess hall eating when the plane suddenly came over and kind of scared the crap out of them. Normally according to their protocols, as soon as a plane appears the sub has to immediately dive. So, everybody kind of piles in, and they go under obviously because they are under attack. Because this happened so suddenly, they weren’t able to do that.”

The Sea Hawk flew over U-558, checked it out, banked and came around again, and started dropping depth charges upon the sub.

“Some of them exploded pretty close to the sub,” Jacob said.

“Some of these guys started scrambling to get to their weapons stations. There was a lot of panic because they were under attack. The plane came around again. By the time the plane came around, the Germans had got to their stations. They opened fire upon my great uncle’s plane. They struck it, and the plane kind of banked away into the fog, and that was kind of like the last anybody physically saw my great uncle’s plane.”

A SOS was received by Allied aircraft and ships in the region, which launched a search and rescue.

“But they didn’t find anything,” Jacob said.

“No debris. No oil slick. So, I have some theories about what might have happened, but again they’re just theories on what I think would logically fit the scenario from the research that I’ve done.”

In scenario A, the Sea Hawk would try to return back to base at St. Eval, Cornwall, England, United Kingdom, where it was attached to the British Royal Coastal Command, according to americanairmuseum.com

“That’s what you do when you’re in trouble, you go back to where you can get some help,” Jacob said.

“My great uncle because he was an aerial engineer, he understood the mechanics of the plane, so he would have been the guy that the pilot would would have said, Okay, what’s going on with the plane and how can we keep her going long enough so that we get some help? So either scenario A is that upon trying to go back to base, they lost control of the plane and they hit the surface of ocean like a meteor and it just killed everybody. Scenario B is that at some point going back to base, they tried to make an emergency ditch the plane because they figured that they just can’t keep going and that didn’t work out and they just crashed and killed everyone. But regardless, no one survived this event. There were never any bodies recovered from any of these people.”

ULTIMATE SACRIFICE

The 10 U.S. Army Air Corps B-24D personnel that perished were: Staff Sgt. Bromley of Plattsburgh, 1st Lt. Harold E. Dyment, pilot, Rocky River, OH; 2nd Lt. Claude M. Ferrini, navigator, West Bridgewater, MA; Sgt. Dale C. Hubbard, radio operator, Chatham, OH; Cpl. Patrick France Kerns Jr., radio operator, Schuylkill County, PA; 2nd Lt. Laurence McCormick, co-pilot, Shelby County, TN; 2nd Lt. James A. Miller, bombardier, Lake County, IN; Sgt. Clarence H. Olsen, gunner, Cook County, IL; Technical Sgt. Carl Edward Owen, top turret gunner, Fort Payne, AL; and Technical Sgt. Theron Londus Rose, gunner, Beckley, WV, according to honorstates.org

U.558, a 500-ton U-boat commanded by Kapitänleutnant Günther Krech, was sunk at 1313 on 20th July, 1943, in position 45032’N., 009026’W., by U.S. Liberator “F” of 19 Squadron. Two officers, including the Captain, and three ratings were picked up from a rubber raft by H.M.C.S. “ATHABASKAN” at 1930 on 24th July. All the survivors were suffering from exposure, and the Commanding Officer was in addition wounded in two places, according to uboatarchive.net

“There was a crew of about 45 individuals on this sub,” Jacob said.

“Only five of them survived including the captain. That’s why they were able to get this incredible report. This sub had been very successful during the war. It had been up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States sinking Merchant Marine ships. So, it was a real pain in the butt for our side.”

Jacob, a Civil War re-enactor with the 118th NY Infantry Regiment, is dedicated to raising awareness about his great uncle’s plight and has reached out to those with expertise in underwater archaeology such as Project Recover that goes out searching for plane wrecks all over the world.

“With the advances in today’s technology, there is really no reason why he should remain missing and that the plane should just remain at the bottom of the ocean,” Jacob said.

“Something needs to be found. Obviously, the plane’s body was aluminum, so I imagine that’s all gone. But the gunnery was steel. That’ll still be there. The wheels were steel. Anything that’s steel was going to last. Wherever it is, it’s definitely going to be beyond the ability for a human to dive. It will require specialized technology.”

The U.S. government closed the case in the 1950s.

“They basically deemed him nonrecoverable at that point, but the technology was so limited,” Jacob said.

“Now it’s like, you know, here we are 80 years after the fact and we have all these advances in underwater robots that can go out and scan hundreds of miles of the seafloor without a human being involved in the process.

“It’s like the government’s got the technology. There are private groups that have the technology. There are deep sea oil drilling companies that have this tech. I mean somebody sooner or later is going to find it, just by accident, you know, somebody looking for some place to drill or whatever and they’ll find it and, oh here’s a plane wreck. I wonder what’s that about, you know.”