The Lady Be Good

The Lady Be Good

Way back in an ancient time when I was in high school an interesting news story was reported that gripped the U.S. and the world in 1960. The story started back in World War II when an American B-24D Liberator, named The Lady Be Good went on it’s first, last and only combat flight. The bombing run was to Naples Italy on April 4th, 1943, out of the Benina air strip in the city of Soluch in Libya. On the return flight the plane disappeared. It was assumed down at sea and lost. Today, November 9th, 1958 it was discovered 440 miles inland in the Libyan Desert by a British oil exploration team flying over the North African Desert.



It would not be until May 1959 that a recovery team made the first trip to the wreckage site. They found the plane had broken into two pieces and the desert had preserved it remarkably well – but there were no crewmen. In 1960 recovery teams found the first five bodies of the crew members and the news hit the world. Eventually the remains of all but one crewmember would be found.



This story has been written about on numerous websites so I will not attempt to rewrite it again. A site I found interesting is located Here

Simply put it was a mystery story of the time that kept everyone’s attention.
The Life Magazine, March 7, 1960 edition gave great photo journalism coverage to the incident.