ARMY & NAVY: In the Dust

ARMY & NAVY

High over droughty Kansas, one afternoon last week, a U. S. Army bomber flew into a dust storm. Lieut. Harold Neely eased his ship out of the sudden dusk and up to 11,000 feet, where the air was clear. Noting that the gasoline gauge was low, he turned on an auxiliary tank. Both motors spat, stopped. The plane nosed into a slow, singing glide. Pilot Neely peered down at the billowing, blinding sea of dust between him and the ground. Small indeed were his chances of landing safely. On the plane’s interphone he spoke an order to another lieutenant, a corporal and a private in a rear compartment: Jump!

Lieut. Neely thought he saw one parachuted form, then another, dive away through the dust. He opened the canopy over his cockpit, prepared to follow. He paused: what of the third man, whom he had not seen? If he for some reason had stayed in the ship, he would surely die. Pilot Neely decided to stay, too, and fly the ship down. In the dusty dark, unbroken as he neared the ground, he had only his lighted instruments to tell him whether he was on an even keel, only his altimeter to tell him when he was close to the unpredictable earth. Harold Neely’s luck equaled his pluck. The bomber missed all the gullies, fences, poles, wires, barns, houses, livestock and civilians in that part of Kansas, glided into an open field. Damage : two bent propellers, a crumpled nose. Unhurt, Pilot Neely discovered that Lieut. John O. Neal and Private Henry Zielinski had parachuted safely down, three miles away. Unseen by Harold Neely, the fourth man in the ship jumped, fumbled with mittened hands at the rip cord of his chute, pulled it too late. On a barbed wire fence, 100 yards from the spot where the plane landed, farmers found the body of Corporal Kenneth Seamans.