A bomber turned up intact 700 km deep in the Sahara

Flying low over the Calanscio desert, in Libya, looking for geological structures where they might drill, prospectors from a British oil company saw below them a four-engine bomber lying in the sand, broken in two but whole. It was November 1958. The aircraft was about 700 kilometres from the coast, in a place where no Second World War machine had any business being.

A ground expedition reached it in May 1959 and found a scene that was hard to explain. The machine guns worked. So did the radios: the technicians switched them on and transmitted. There was water, rations and a thermos with tea still inside. Painted on the fuselage was the name: Lady Be Good. What there wasn't was a crew, not a single body, no trace that anyone had died there.

The military record gave the aircraft's name: a B-24D Liberator of the 376th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces, missing since 4 April 1943 and given up for lost at sea sixteen years earlier. That day it had taken off from the Soluch airfield, near Benghazi, on its first combat mission: to bomb the port of Naples. A sandstorm delayed the departure, the formation broke up and the aircraft dropped its load and turned back after dark.

The error lay in the radio compass, the instrument that shows which direction a radio signal is coming from. It gives you the line, but it does not tell whether the source is ahead or behind: if the pilot does not check it against another reference, he can fly toward the signal believing he is closing in when he has already left it behind. The Lady Be Good passed over its own base without seeing it, at night, with the desert and the sea equally black, and kept flying inland convinced it was still over the Mediterranean, searching for a coast it had already crossed.

When the tanks ran dry, the nine crew members bailed out by parachute. The aircraft, with no one aboard, glided a few more kilometres and set itself down, belly first, on a plain of hard sand. That is why it turned up almost whole: it did not crash, it landed.

The men came down north of the aircraft and set off walking toward the coast, not knowing they had hundreds of kilometres of nothing ahead of them. Their bodies began to appear in 1960, far from the jump point. With one of them was the diary of the co-pilot, Robert Toner, a small notebook with one line per day: the rationing of the water, the cold of the nights, the ones who could no longer go on. The last entry is dated 12 April 1943, eight days after the jump, and by then the group had covered more than a hundred kilometres on foot with barely half a litre of water each.