The Tragic Story of The Flying Dutchman

History & service

On Nov. 10, 1942, the C-47 nicknamed The Flying Dutchman (S/N 41-18564) hit a strong down-draft over the Owen Stanley Range while carrying U.S. Army troops from Port Moresby to Pongani, New Guinea. It crashed into the side of Mount Obree, killing seven of the 23 onboard and destroying most of the food it carried. Of the 16 survivors, eight received serious injuries and burns.

Realizing that rescue probably depended upon going for help, the survivors sent out a team of four men on Nov. 12. Three days later, another four-man team departed for help in another direction. Eight men remained with the plane, only one of whom was physically able to carry water for the other seven badly injured personnel.

The first team encountered unbelievable hardships and difficulties in the mountains and jungle. While attempting to float down a river on logs, two men were swept away, never to be seen again. Finally, after 32 days, the surviving two men found help. The second party encountered similar hardships, but they all reached the coast on Dec. 14, 1942.

Based upon the meager information provided by the first two men, a search party was dispatched to find the crash site by back-tracking the escape route. After about eight days, it had to abandon the search when its native porters stole all the provisions and disappeared into the jungle.

Aerial reconnaissance missions flew over the general crash area without success, but eighteen months later, in July 1944, the crash site was discovered. A rescue party went to the location, only to find the eight crash survivors dead.

Ironically, searchers looking for another downed airplane rediscovered The Flying Dutchman in 1967, and they found this door. The notes written on it reveal the tragic hopes of those who had been waiting for a rescue that came too late. The last entry was made on Jan. 1, 1943, and what happened afterward and how long the last man lived will probably never be known.

Aircraft change the battlefield

In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.

The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.

Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.