In the short period of a couple of months Major Patrick lost two B-29’s.
He ditched one in a river north of Calcutta during the monsoon, and crash landed one in dry river bed a few miles off the runway at Charra, India.

     In May of 1944, still in the dry season, on taking off to the west
from Charra, his #3 engine burst in to flames. I watched as he
disappeared to the west. He was flying very low trailing smoke. Just as he was going out of sight, a mile or so off the end of the runway a column of smoke appeared on the ground.

    I was at the field in my jeep, a couple of other men climbed in with
me and we took off in hot pursuit of the airplane. When we arrived at the scene of the smoke it turned out to be one of the engines that had burned of the aircraft. It was still burning right in the middle of a small Indian village. I still remember the amazing numbers of Indians that would appear as if from nowhere and gather in a crowd.

     Excited Indians pointed to the dry river bed nearby where we saw
the B29 out on the sand a mile or so away. I put the jeep in 4 wheel
drive and proceeded ‘posthaste’ to the crash site. We got stuck in the sand a couple
of times but my passengers pushed our jeep out and finally we made it.

    Upon arriving at the plane we found the crew all safe and looking for shade
from the hot Indian sun. Major Patrick had made a perfect gear up landing
hardly damaging the plane.

     Later that day I was at meeting of officers where Col. Alva Harvey described Major Patrick’s crash landing as the best emergency landing job of any pilot in his more than twenty years in the Army Air Corps. The virtually new B-29 had to be salvaged piecemeal as we could not get heavy equipment out onto the deep river sand to pull her out in one piece.


Scotty McCall

678^th BS Operations

444^th Bomb Group