Wreckage of the plane dangles from an office window on the 79th floor of the Empire State Building.

A Plane Hit the Empire State Building It was the accident that couldn’t possibly happen. But it did. As hundreds of New Yorkers gazed upwards in disbelief, a plane appeared through the clouds, weaving its way among the skyscrapers. Looming ahead of the aircraft was the 1250-foot Empire State Building. . .almost empty except for the people on the 79th floor.

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George Stuart had just finished a rushed, four-day business visit to the United States and he felt he really deserved a relaxed, sightseeing weekend in New York. As the British machine-tool salesman strolled down Broadway at around 9.15 on the morning of Saturday, July 28, 1945, he decided he ought to follow the traditional tourist routine and take a trip up to the observation platform on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. The New York weather, however, had other ideas. Stuart glanced up at the fog that seemed draped over the skyline and, on second thoughts, decided it would be too disappointing to drug himself all the way up the 1250-foot-tall skyscraper merely to find that the dramatic, 25-mile view was blotted out.

Later—in the light of what was to happen that morning—Stuart tried to explain his change of mind. “I was still a bit undecided." he said, "and beginning to wonder whether, after all, I should take a chance on going up to the top—perhaps the fog would clear soon, anyway—when I had the oddly distinct feeling that I must stay away from the building. I looked up at the seemingly endless windows—6000 of them, according to my guidebook—and suddenly the whole Empire State seemed to take on a special kind of

ominous appearance. I can't even now offer a rational explanation, but somehow I Just knew I wanted to put some distance between myself and the building."

Unlike Mr. Stuart, some 60 visitors, including many children, had taken the express lift up to the Empire State's observation levels—and suffered the frustration of being able to see little through the curtain of murk. Younger children became restless and older women lost interest in the recital of impressive facts about the building intoned by the guides. They just wanted to sit down and rest their feet.

Normally, the Empire State would have been as busy as an anthill, with 15000 men and women working at their desks on the 102 floors. But this was a Saturday, and only some 1500 people were in the building, and the vast majority of office suites were empty and locked. There were many people around the junction of Fifth Avenue and 34th Street, the site of the Empire State, but they were still a mere fraction of the 200,000 who passed by during any working weekday.

Most of the buildings 74 lifts, continually traversing the Empire State's seven miles of liftshafts on weekdays were out of service. For once the mad carillon of thousands of telephone bells were silent.

On one midway floor a lone executive, catching up on a backlog of work, was dictating letters into a recording machine near an open window. But the 79th floor was the single biggest center of week-end activity. For there, 20 men and women of the National Catholic Welfare Conference were absorbed in the technicalities of organizing relief for victims of the recently ended World War Two. They worked away quietly and steadily, pausing only occasionally to fill their coffee cups.

Fewer than 100 miles away to the north-east and making its gradual descent from an altitude of around 18000 feet, was a twin engine B25 U.S. Army Air Force Mitchell bomber on its way from Bedford, in Massachusetts to Newark, New Jersey. The Mitchell, stripped of its wartime armament, had taken off at 8.55 a.m. and was expected to touch down at Newark soon after ten o'clock that morning.

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Forest of Towers

The B25's pilot, Lieutenant-Colonel William Franklin Smith, Jr., was deputy commander of the 457th Bomber Group and had distinguished himself in the war-time air battles over Europe and taken part in the great February 1944 raids which helped to cripple Hitler’s armament-plants in advance of the Allies' D-Day invasion. On the breast of his uniform he wore the ribbons of the D.F.C., Air Medal and Croix de Guerre.

With Smith flew only two others: his crew chief, 31-year-old Staff Sergeant Christopher Domitrovich, of Granite City, Illinois, and a hitch-hiking passenger, Navy machinist’s mate, Albert G. Perna, who had lost his brother in the Pacific war and was anxious to take the swiftest route home to his mourning parents in Brooklyn.

Smith had been notified of reports of fog on his route before he took off from Bedford, and conditions showed no signs of improving as the flight advanced. As he approached New York he called up the city's La Guardia airport on his radio and asked for permission to go on to Newark.

La Guardia was not happy at the thought of an aircraft flying directly across the city in such conditions and warned Smith, "We are unable to see' the top of the Empire State. We suggest you land here."

There could be no reasonable doubt that Lieutenant-Colonel Smith had received and understood the warning. He replied to La Guardia with the brief acknowledgement, 'Roger', but gave no further indication of a likely change in his flight plan.

Airport officials were puzzled by the pilot's silence and the absence of any positive reaction to their landing proposal. They shared the concern, often expressed by New York’s colorful mayor, Fiorello La Guardia—in whose honor the airport had been named—that military aircraft should not fly across Manhattan Island. Towering skyscrapers, especially the Empire State, were a constant, nagging hazard in any kind of weather and more so than ever in days of heavy cloud or fog.

Smith continued his descent, and, for some baffling reason that can never be explained, he decided to stay on course and take the shortest, most direct air route over New York in the low 'ceiling' to the Newark field, some eight miles south-west of Manhattan.

Somewhere just above the city, and perhaps now too committed to turn away and seek for La Guardia, the fog-shrouded B25 roared on towards Manhatten’s one-and-a-half-mile-wide concrete-and-steel heart.

New Yorkers in the streets below were the first to know for certain that some-thing had gone terribly wrong for the B25 and its three occupants. They stood rooted in horror as the bomber suddenly broke through the fog at around 900 feet and weaved a crazed path between the skyscraper peaks.

It flashed past the huge Rockefeller Center and was level with the 22nd floor of the New York Central Office Building. People staring, incredulously, from the upper windows of other office blocks saw the plane beneath them, frantically banking to keep its 67-foot wingspan away from the sides of the buildings.

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A radio newscaster, Stanley Lomax, spoke for the hundreds of people now scampering to the shelter of doorways, and he pushed his head through the open window of his car and screamed hysterically at the bomber, "Climb, you fool, climb!" It seemed, however, as though some giant, mysterious hand was pressing upon the plane and preventing its escape. It careered onwards, trapped among the forest of towers.

George Stuart, the English business-man who had experienced that strange premonition about the Empire State, ran from the hamburger grill where he had gone to study his tourists’ map of the city and saw the bomber flash by, south-bound.

"You could almost sense the pilot battling with the controls," he said. "Everyone on board must have been going through unbelievable agony. But I had the feeling that, having found himself among the buildings, the pilot was somehow mesmerized. At that speed, in that situation, it must have been impossible for anyone to think straight. As soon as he cleared one building another reared up in front of him."

Whatever his natural fear, there could be no doubt that Lieutenant-Colonel Smith was making a supreme effort to extricate himself, for, a moment later, the B25's wings began to lift in a desperate effort to clear the north face of the Empire State Building. But it was already too late.

With a tremendous crash that sent a shudder through the streets below, the B25's 10 tons ploughed through the building's thick steel-and-stone between the 78th and 79th floors. Two or three seconds later there came a roar from within the gaping, 18-foot hole, as the bomber's petrol tanks exploded and a vast tongue of fire shot out into the air and licked its way furiously down towards 34th Street.

The heat was sufficient to lift the fog from the top of the Empire State, and, before they fled, onlookers in the streets plainly saw pieces of hot metal and burning fuselage issue from the building's wound and begin their long, gyrating fall. Some charred and tattered remnants of the bomber hit the ground as far as five blocks away.

By a ghastly mischance the B25 had struck at that one part of the building where people were working—the offices of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. They were turned instantly into an inferno.

Immediate Impact

Six girl clerks, who had given up their Saturday to help with the urgent welfare work, died at once, their bodies hurled beside those of two of the men from the B25. Three other girls survived the immediate impact but died in the flames as they vainly tried to escape through the torn office doorway. One man, overcome with terror, leaped from a neighboring window and fell to his death below.

Incredibly, the body of Navy man Albert Perna-the hitch-hiker to Brooklyn-was hurled through the shattered interior of the building into a lift shaft. It was not until two days after the disaster that salvage workers, perplexed by the Army Air

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Force insistence that there had been three men aboard the aircraft, found Perna's remains at the foot of the shaft.

One of the B25's engines, catapulted into another lift shaft, fell 79 floors and hit the lift car, pounding it into wreckage in the basement. The other engine cut a swathe through seven inner walls, tore its way out of the building's south side and fell to a rooftop 900 feet below.

By an extraordinary chance there was incontrovertible evidence that the B25 had been on full power at the moment it struck-flying at around 225 miles an hour. For the precise sounds of the engines, right up to the moment of impact, were preserved on the recording machine being used by the lone, letter-dictating executive in his office.

Because of the smoke shrouding the building, the rescue workers who had poured into the Empire State were unable to pinpoint the exact area of the crash. They estimated that it was somewhere on the '70s', but it was only after they had made a floor-by-floor search from the 70th storey upwards that they came upon the center of the disaster.

On the 78th floor, which was mainly a storage area, they found a janitor—dead. Two lift operators, one on the 75th floor and another on the 80th, were lying badly burned by flames which had spread fiercely both up and down the interior of the building, but which, as quickly, had exhausted themselves.

For the lift girl on the 75th floor, 20-year-old Betty Lou Oliver, one night-mare succeeded another. Her rescuers put her into another lift, with an unharmed girl operator, but as the car began its descent the cable snapped. It had been weakened by the shock of the crash. Although the car fell, terrifyingly, for almost the whole depth of the shaft, automatic safety devices saved it from crashing through the bottom.

Towards the top of the building the shock waves from the impact were so powerful that the visitors on the observation level were thrown to the floor. As they dragged themselves to their feet, bewildered and frightened, a huge flame roared up towards them from below.

Battering Ram

Women and children screamed as smoke engulfed the floor, but calmly the guides gathered the visitors together and escorted them to safety--down the emergency, fireproof stairs, 86 long flights to the street. The visitors could hear the appalling cries of fear and pain as they passed the walls where the injured lay.

Some people in the building found that the force of the crash had caused their office doors to 'spring' and jam fast. They kicked and pummeled at the wood- work or used furniture as battering rams until the doors gave way. Others were trapped in lifts that had been put out of action by the vibration and had lurched to a stop between floors.

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One group of 20 people, caught between the 30th and 40th floors, owed their escape to Herbert Fabian, a 17-year-old student from Brooklyn who found them and ferried them down to the street.

One of the heroes of the disaster was another 17-year-old-U.S. Coast Guard pharmacist's mate, Donald Maloney. He witnessed the crash from the street, collected morphine and hypodermic syringes from a nearby drug store and was among the first rescuers to reach the building, Young Maloney roamed the damaged floors, treating and comforting the injured, and using a borrowed lip- stick to mark the letter 'M' on the foreheads of those to whom he gave morphine. Experienced doctors, who subsequently took over the care of the injured, were astonished at his courage and presence of mind.

In their state of shock some people reacted oddly to the disaster. One man walked, dazed, from the building and then, remembering his unfinished work, tried to return to his office. One woman wept—because she had left her shopping on an upper floor. Others in the building, who had not seen the crash, were convinced that New York had suffered an earthquake. One or two assumed that the Japanese, with whom the United States were still at war, had finally bombed the city.

Mayor La Guardia, who had served in the Air Force in World War One, plodded his way up the interminable stairs to the site of the crash, railing against the 'recklessness' of the Army in allowing one of their aircraft anywhere near the city of New York.

The Risks of Progress

The disaster also had its 'miraculous' aspects. It was remarkable, for example, that when the final count was taken it showed that only 14 people had been killed and 26 injured. Officials who afterwards examined the remains of the 78th and 79th floors could not believe it possible that anyone should have escaped from that area alive, and yet some 11 people did, fleeing instinctively in the instant of the crash and finding their way to an undamaged staircase.

The strong impression the disaster left on New Yorkers was the incomprehensible and arbitrary nature of sheer chance. If only the B25 pilot had been a degree or two to the north or south, had just 20 feet or more of altitude, he would have cleared Manhattan Island, safely, in little more than 30 seconds.

For many people the incident was a reminder of the risks of progress—in this case the combined technologies of modern flight and skyscraper construction. Many Americans, too, saw the tragedy as a minor preview of what a new, devastating global war could mean in any great urban area, and an editorial writer on the Herald Tribune summed up their reactions when he declared "The crash ... leaves the city in a sober and thoughtful frame of mind."

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Disaster struck on a Saturday when the building was not fully occupied, but 14 people were burned to death, and 26 injured, by flaming gasoline from the exploding airplane.

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The gaping hole in the side of the world's tallest skyscraper, where a U.S. army bomber crashed at a speed of 225 miles an hour.

Taken from tabloid, “Out of This World” volume 1, pages 52-56