TALLADEGA — In the years since his retirement as CEO of Kockums (previously Soderhamm) forestry products factory, Tom Richardson has taken up painting as a hobby. He’s pretty good, too. He even won first prize at an arts fair in Florida, best of show out of about 300 pieces entered in the event.But another experience he had in Florida crosses his mind from time to time — a post-World War II tragedy that has inspired books, television programs, movies and a catalog of unexplained phenomena theories that have found a place in the national lexicon under the “Bermuda Triangle” heading.
On Dec. 5, 1945, Richardson was assigned the role of duty officer at the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station, where that assignment fell to him once or twice a year. And in that capacity, he became a witness to a tragedy that has become legend.
It was one of his last duties in the Navy. With the war over, he had less than a month remaining in the service. He spent the rest of his days in the Navy flying missions in a massive and fruitless search for any sign of the lost aircraft and airmen.
Just months after the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, Lt. Charles Taylor led a formation of five Grumman Torpedo Bombers with a combined crew of 14 on a routine training mission and disappeared without a trace. Less than an hour after their disappearance, a rescue plane sent out to try to find them exploded 13 minutes after takeoff, killing 13 more men.
An aeronautical engineering student when the war began, Richardson had enlisted with a desire to be a Navy combat pilot. As most of his class of pilots was being sent to the Pacific, Richardson was sent for additional instrument training. Instead of being sent into combat, he was assigned as a flight trainer to prepare other pilots for war.
The young ensign was assigned to the Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station as a flight instructor at the time — the same job Taylor held. Richardson had been stationed at Fort Lauderdale for a little over a year when the incident occurred, training pilots and flying the same type of torpedo bombers, also called TBFs or Avengers, as Taylor. Richardson had flown thousands of miles over the Atlantic from the base.
According to an article on the Naval Historical Center’s Web site, Taylor was late for his flight briefing that day, and when he arrived he told the training duty officer he didn’t want to take that flight out, and asked that another officer take over. No other training officer was available, the novice pilots were anxious to make the flight — the final part of a three-flight sequence for that phase of their training.
The men were scheduled to fly a route called Navigation Problem 1, which ran as follows: (1) depart NAS Fort Lauderdale 26 degrees 03 minutes north and 80 degrees 07 minutes west and fly 091 degrees distance 56 miles to Hens and Chickens Shoals to conduct low level bombing and, after bombing, continue on course 091 for 67 miles, (2) fly course 346 degrees for 73 miles and (3) fly course 241 degrees for a distance of 120 miles, returning to NAS Fort Lauderdale. In short, a triangular route with a brief stop for some glide bombing practice on the first leg out.
The training duty officer who attended the briefing later said, "The aerologist sends us a report in the morning. If weather conditions are unfavorable, he will inform us … and tell us about the condition. In the absence of any further information I considered the weather favorable." This estimate was later confirmed by another TBM training flight performing the same problem an hour earlier than Flight 19: weather favorable, sea state moderate to rough.
The Naval History article, which drew from the official Board of Inquiry report, detailed the plan for the flight:
The planes had been checked out by a mechanic prior to the mission and found to be ready to go, but he noted none of the five airplanes had a cockpit clock — a popular souvenir item — but the fliers were expected to wear wristwatches, so that was not seen as an issue.
Richardson said navigation methods were crude at the time. Pilots carried plotting boards on their laps, and used their compass to determine direction, and a combination of airspeed and time to estimate distance.
“We were trained to look at the whitecaps, streaks and waves to estimate the speed and direction of the wind,” he said. “On my first flight to land on a carrier, I had to fly out by myself about 250 miles in the ocean and find it. When that carrier came into view, I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Then I was hoping it was the right carrier.”
Richardson said the technology of the day was a far cry from what we now take for granted. “The weather reports weren’t worth the paper they were written on,” he said. “The weather turned miserable that day. They should have never flown.”
The Naval History article recounts that the doomed flight took off in sunny skies at 2:10 p.m. It was supposed to be a routine 2-hour mission from Fort Lauderdale due east for 150 miles, north for 40 miles and then back to base. But the weather at sea became rough, and Taylor became disoriented. The pilots completed their practice bombing runs on time, as reported by a boater in the area who saw them at Hens and Chickens Shoals and noted the time they were there. But on the next leg of the exercise, something went wrong.
About 90 minutes into the flight, Taylor radioed that his compasses were not working and he was lost.
Taylor radioed back to the base that he was lost.
The senior flight instructor who was preparing to fly out on another training mission heard the call and contacted Taylor to try to help. Taylor told him, "Both my compasses are out and I am trying to find Fort Lauderdale, Fla. I am over land but it's broken. I am sure I'm in the Keys but I don't know how far down and I don't know how to get to Fort Lauderdale."
The senior flight instructor flew south toward the keys to try to intercept the lost fliers, on the assumption that Taylor really knew where he was, and remained in radio contact with him until his transmitter failed.
Richardson said he was called to the tower and told there was a problem with the lost flight. He remained in the tower listening to the radio communications the rest of the day, and made the notifications to senior officers.
“As duty officer, there usually wasn’t much to do unless there was a problem. I got an urgent message from the control tower that there was a critical problem we needed to solve,” he said. “It was miserable weather, it had just turned horrible. That’s what brought this on.
“They said Lt. Taylor’s compass had gone screwy. I stayed up in the tower and listened to all that was going on. I entered into it a little, but didn’t really have the authority to make any decisions. I contacted the higher-ups.”
Richardson said he listened to the radio traffic as Taylor communicated with the tower, the senior flight instructor and the others.
Land-based naval facilities, aircraft, the Coast Guard and ships in the area were notified there was a problem.
“There was a method of measuring the strength of a radio signal from several stations that was supposed to be able to tell where the signal was coming from,” Richardson said. “It really wasn’t worth a flip. We tried to zero in on them, but every time we tried it, it told us a different location.”
"I know where I am now. I'm at 2300 feet. Don't come after me." Taylor told the senior flight instructor, who was flying south from Fort Lauderdale trying to locate them — since Taylor had told him he was over the Keys.
"We have just passed over a small island. We have no other land in sight,” Taylor said. "Can you have Miami or someone turn on their radar gear and pick us up? We don't seem to be getting far. We were out on a navigation hop and on the second leg I thought they were going wrong, so I took over and was flying them back to the right position. But I'm sure, now, that neither one of my compasses is working."
At 4:26, Air-Sea Rescue Task Unit Four at Fort Everglades heard Taylor say, "Have on emergency IFF. Does anyone in the area have a radar screen that could pick us up?" The unit responded and, not having direction-finding gear, contacted Fort Lauderdale, who replied they would notify NAS Miami and ask the other stations to attempt to pick up the lost flight on radar or with direction finders.
The flight officer had been notified of the situation at 4:30 by the duty officer — Richardson. The flight officer said, "I immediately went into operations and learned that the flight leader thought he was along the Florida Keys. I then learned that his first transmission revealing that he was lost had occurred around 1600. I knew by this that the leader could not possibly have gone on more than one leg of his navigation problem and still gotten back to the Keys by 1600. ... I notified ASRTU-4 to instruct FT-28 (Taylor) to fly 270 degrees and also to fly towards the sun," which was standard procedure for lost planes in the area.
At 4:03, Taylor was heard to say, "Change course to 090 degrees for 10 minutes." At approximately the same time, two different students were heard: "Dammit, if we could just fly west we would get home; head west, dammit."
At 4:31, the Everglades station picked up Taylor: "One of the planes in the flight thinks if we went 270 degrees we could hit land."
Taylor thought he was over the Gulf of Mexico, while others on the flight believed they were over the Atlantic. Several course changes over the next 2 hours only used up fuel.
By 5 p.m., the operations officer was about to send the duty plane out to the east when he was informed that a radio fix was forthcoming. The aircraft was held on the ground pending the fix. At 5:16, Taylor called out that they would fly 270 degrees "until we hit the beach or run out of gas."
Those at the base and the flight instructor thought the course change would bring Flight 19 back to land, and cancelled plans to send a search plane east in attempt to verify their position — especially in light of bad weather that was beginning to move into the area.
At 6:20 Taylor was heard to say, "All planes close up tight ... we'll have to ditch unless landfall ... when the first plane drops below 10 gallons, we all go down together."
Flight 19 was not heard from again.
“They changed course. They’d go one way, then turn around and go back, and then they all decided to ditch together.
“I knew what was going to happen when they said they were going to ditch together,” Richardson said. “There were 20- and 25-foot huge waves. We never heard a word after that.”
Richardson said that in the best conditions, the TBF airplane would stay afloat about a minute.
“Part of our training was getting out of the plane, sliding down the side, and inflating a raft. We had a body of a plane we used in training,” he said. “They’d lift it up with a crane and drop it in the water and time us to see how quickly we could get out.”
The TBF carried a crew of three men — the pilot, a turret gunner behind the pilot, and a belly gunner in the bottom part of the plane.
George Devlin was a turret gunner who normally flew with Richardson. That day he was the gunner on Taylor’s plane. One plane on the exercise was a man short, so there were 14 men lost. Devlin was the only one Richardson personally knew.
“You had to have so many hours of flight time to get flight pay, which was about 50 percent over regular pay, so guys would switch around to different flights to get in their time,” Richardson said.
By 7:30 p.m., a Martin Mariner with a crew of 13 was in the air, having taken off from Banana River Naval Air Station on a rescue mission to search for Flight 19. A ship in the area reported seeing a midair explosion at 7:50, and searched an oil-slick sea for survivors where the plane went down. None were found.
“It was a sad thing,” he added. “I remember the memorial service we had with their family members.”
For the rest of his days in the Navy, Richardson flew with massive search missions looking for signs of the missing men.
“We flew every airplane we had, every day,” he said. “We flew over the Atlantic, southern Georgia, the Everglades, even over the Gulf of Mexico, and never saw the first sign of anything, not one bit of wreckage, not even a life jacket.”
He recalls a news report in the ‘80s or ‘90s about someone finding some Avengers in the water off the coast of Florida, and saying that the number on one of the airplanes matched the number on one of the missing planes.
“I was hoping they had found them,” he said. “I even felt I should go down there and help. But what they didn’t realize was that when a plane was lost, the Navy would reassign the number to another plane.”
The planes that had been found were some the Navy had junked and dumped in the sea. To date, none of the five missing planes has been located.
Taylor, a senior lieutenant with combat experience in the Pacific and more than 2,500 hours of flight time, had been stationed at Miami as an instructor, and had only recently been assigned to Fort Lauderdale. Flight 19 was to be his first and only time to fly Navigation Problem No. 1.
“We had heard about him (Taylor) coming, and thought that with his experience he must be a good man, but I never got to meet him,” Richardson said.
Author Larry Kusche claimed in his 1981 book, “The Disappearance of Flight 19,” that Taylor may have been suffering from a hangover that day, and further states that Taylor had ditched planes in the Pacific twice after getting lost. Critics of the book question Kusche’s research and conclusions.
“I only heard of one other Avenger that ever had compass problems, and I flew it,” Richardson said. “I flew it from Fort Lauderdale to Macon, Ga., with a group of airplanes to get it out of the way of a storm, but I had to fly it back by myself. But that was over land. I picked out some railroad tracks and followed them down to near Fort Lauderdale where I knew where I was.”
The Navy’s initial report essentially laid the blame on Taylor. After protests from his family, the cause was changed to “unknown.”
What about the theories and phenomena about the “Bermuda Triangle”?
“I’m not sure but what there isn’t something to that,” Richardson said. “There have been a lot of ships and planes lost there — it’s happened to a lot of people.”
