Lady's Men Review

Ever since I first heard about the Lady Be Good I was fascinated by the tale and the mystery surrounding her. I think my first taste of the Lady's story came in the early 70's when I saw a made for TV movie called Sole Survivor, which was loosely based on the story of the Lady. I was a WWII buff at the time anyway, so my natural curiousity pulled me further and further down the mysterious path of the Lady's Men.

Lady's Men by Mario Martinez is a book filled with the facts of the Lady's first and only combat mission, conjecture about what went wrong, and an account of what the men were probably thinking and feeling during their torturous week walking through the Sahara desert with little to no provisions.

A Little Background might be in order for those of you who don't know about the ill fated Lady Be Good. She was a B-24D Liberator built by Consolidated Aircraft in 1942, and flown to Soluch Airbase, Libya, in early '43. Her crew were all newcomers and would fly their first combat mission on April 4th, 1943. She took off with the 2nd wave of bombers leaving from Soluch and heading on a bombing run on Naples, Italy. Section A took off without much difficulty, but by the time Section B began to get airborne a sand storm had brewed up out of the desert. Most of the other B-24's that took off in Section B had to turn back due to sand clogged air cleaners and other sand related problems.

The Lady flew on alone.

She never made it to Naples, and her crew never made it back home. Nothing was known of their fate until 1958, when a D'Arcy Oil crew spotted the Lady during a reconnaisance flight, some 440 miles southeast of her home base, in the middle of one of the most inhospitable areas on Earth: The Sahara Desert. When another oil crew, on the ground this time, found her, there was no sign of her crew or any indication of what might have become of them: Begin the mystery!

Mr. Martinez does an excellent job of bringing all the facts together, along with interviews with the men who found her, other B-24 crewmen from the 376th Bomb Group who were also on the April 4th run over Naples, and logical deduction of what happened that night to cause the crew to fly directly over their base and 440 miles southeast into the desert. Not to mention the indomitable will it must have taken for the eight survivors (one crewman's parachute failed to open) to walk 78 miles in grueling 130 degree heat with nothing but half a canteen of water and some emergency chocolate rations. One crewman actually made it 115 miles, but died in the Calanscio Sand Sea, still 300 miles away from his destination.

It is a story that will haunt you, make you feel for these doomed, heroic men, and leave you wondering: What really did happen to the Lady's Men?