Warbird Information Exchange

It's the stuff of legends.


WWII fighter plane recovered in Green Swamp
A World War II-era P-47 Thunderbolt fighter plane crash lands in a boundless swamp on a routine flight out of Wilmington. For the next 52 years it sprawls there, damaged and vandalized, but still able to inspire reports of downed aircraft from alarmed passing pilots.

News stories recounted the fighter pilot's rescue by a team of volunteers who hacked through underbrush for 24 hours to reach him, but mysteriously the pilot's name remained obscured in the muck of time and military secrecy.

That would have been that, except for the determination and curiosity of a 56-year-old Illinois crop duster with a passion for history, and recovering and restoring antique warbirds.

"When I was a kid I always had a thing for the Thunderbolt," said Randy Ferris of Marengo, Ill. "I said, ‘Someday I want to go and recover an airplane, rebuild it and go fly it.'"

His father was a B-17 bomber pilot during World War II, and became a flight instructor in civilian life, so Ferris grew up around aviation.

But life took Ferris in another direction. He ran a string of gas stations until he was 50, when he sold out so he could concentrate on crop dusting and making parts for hobbyists restoring old airplanes.

His interest in recovering and restoring military aircraft prompted Ferris to contact the Smithsonian, where he bought microfilm containing Air Force accident reports.

One day while talking with his friend and fellow aviation enthusiast Mike Stowe about Thunderbolts, Stowe said, "You know, there's one down in the Green Swamp down there" in North Carolina.

Further research into those accident reports spurred Ferris to begin a quest in 1995 for information about a P-47B Thunderbolt fighter plane that bore the serial number 41-5920. His research revealed that the P-47B rusting away in the Green Swamp was the 30th of its kind to roll off the assembly line and, more importantly, the oldest surviving Thunderbolt in the world.

His desire for more information about the Thunderbolt led Ferris to make a phone a call a few years later to a retired Federal Aviation Administration employee living in Lincoln, Neb. The man, in his late 70s, flew fighter planes – P-39s and P-51 Mustangs during World War II before settling into the tamer life of government service.

The man, Wesley A. Murphey Jr., it turns out, was the pilot flying the P-47B Thunderbolt 41-5920 the evening it crash landed in the Green Swamp.

Flames and a forced landing
Twenty-six-year-old 2nd Lt. Murphey was ferrying the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter plane on Jan. 5, 1944, from Wilmington's Bluethenthal Field to Fort Myers, Fla., when trouble started and a legend was born.

Murphey took off about 5 p.m. that Wednesday evening. He was in the air for only 10 minutes, but he was already 25 miles southwest of Wilmington and over the Green Swamp, a 140-square mile longleaf pine savanna with a patchwork of swampland. Although Murphey's ultimate destination was Fort Myers, he planned to spend the night in Charleston, S.C.

From the very beginning, his flight was troubled.

"The right landing gear would not stay in up position so I dropped the wheels several times to try to remedy this trouble," he wrote in an official accident report. A fellow pilot reported that a broken hinge on the gate of the right landing gear cover was the culprit.

While Murphey was trying to correct the landing gear problem, the P-47 climbed to only 2,000 feet.

Second Lt. Virgil D. Newby was Murphey's wing man on the hop to Charleston and an eyewitness to the trouble brewing in the skies.

"When we were approximately 25 miles from the Bluethenthal Field, the underneath of the plane was covered with flames," Newby wrote. "The fire went out and black smoke started coming from underneath the engine cowling."

Newby said Murphey made a 180-degree turn and was headed back to Wilmington.

That's when the situation became more dire. The P-47's automatic propeller control – used to control the pitch of the propeller – went out. Murphey controlled the propeller manually before the Thunderbolt gradually lost power, dropping to 500 feet and forcing him to attempt a landing.

"I landed in a marsh which was straight ahead," he wrote. "The ship skidded to a stop, turning about 30 degrees, and stopped in a normal position."

It was about 5:30 p.m., with winter's darkness closing in. Murphey hunkered down in the P-47's cockpit for the night, alone and with the vastness of the swamp stretching in every direction. While temperatures had climbed into the mid-50s during the day, they dropped into the mid-30s overnight.

A rescue party reached the Thunderbolt and Murphey about mid-afternoon the next day, Jan. 6. Murphey later told relatives it took them most of the day to walk out of the swamp. And with that walk, Murphey's name was lost to history – until Ferris came along on his quest for information about P-47B 41-5920.

From motor pool to flying ace
Murphey joined the Army Air Corps as a mechanic in the motor pool before the start of World War II, but he always wanted to be a pilot, his brother-in-law, James Mutthersbough of Lincoln, Neb., said.

Eventually he got into flight training and in August 1943 was flying P-39s out of Venice, Fla., as part of the Air Training Command. His bad luck with fighter planes began there.

"He lost one on takeoff down there. The engine quit on him," said Mutthersbough, an Air Force veteran who is married to Murphey's sister Barbara.

An article on the 506th Fighter Group website, credited to the book "Very Long Range P-51 Mustang Units of the Pacific War" by Carl Molesworth, traces the evolution of Murphey from Air Training Command in Florida to the front lines of the Pacific.

Murphey flew a P-51 Mustang as a member of the 457th Fighter Squadron and an assistant flight commander.

"One night we were taking off to fly a group formation – all three squadrons. I had an old A-model, and shortly after take-off it had an engine fire. By the time I got back on the ground and the crash crew had put the fire out, the aeroplane was damaged beyond repair."

By the summer of 1945, Murphey and his fellow P-51 Mustang fighter pilots were flying out of Iwo Jima as they accompanied bombers on bombing and strafing runs against Japanese airfields, railroads and shipping ports, Mutthersbough said.

One of those strafing runs almost cost Murphey his life, Mutthersbough said.

As Murphey's fighter plane strafed an airfield, he was unaware that the Japanese had placed bombs at the end of the runway. Just as he reached that point, the bombs were detonated, sending shrapnel skyward.

"It almost wrecked him," Mutthersbough said.

Oil from his damaged engine covered the windshield of Murphey's fighter as he flew out over the Pacific, where American submarines were stationed to rescue downed pilots.

But when Murphey attempted to release the canopy of his fighter plane so he could bail out, he found a piece of shrapnel had jammed it shut.

With his fighter plane still losing oil but unable to bail out, Murphey kept flying toward Iwo Jima, eventually reaching the American runway and safety.

"He wasn't able to taxi off before the engine froze up" due to the lack of oil, Mutthersbough said. "If he'd of ditched, he would of drowned."

Murphey's exploits while flying P-51 Mustangs are chronicled in Molesworth's book.

"1LT Murphey earned the victory flag on 16 July 1945 when he shot down a ‘Tojo' and damaged a ‘Zeke' over Nagoya" Japan, Molesworth wrote. ("Tojo" was the American nickname for the Nakajima Ki-44 Shoki, a single-engine fighter aircraft flown by the Imperial Japanese Army Air Force. "Zeke" was the nickname for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, a lightweight, carrier-based fighter aircraft flown by the Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service.)

At the end of the war and for a time afterward, Murphey trained fighter pilots for the Air Force, a testament to his skill and survival instincts, his brother-in-law said.

His interest in aviation continued into civilian life, where he went to work for the FAA, serving in Lincoln, Neb.; St. Louis and Kansas City in Missouri; and Michigan before retiring in Des Moines, Iowa.

Murphey was living in Lincoln, near his sister Barbara, when Randy Ferris caught up with him sometime in 1999 or 2000.

Murphey told Ferris about his career as a fighter pilot and how he came to be ferrying P-47B 41-5920 from Wilmington to Fort Myers in the winter of 1944. It was the last time the two would talk.

The lure of relatives led Murphey to move to Sioux Falls, S.D., while in his 80s. He died there on March 30, 2007, at the age of 89.

Recovery of a recluse
After seeking the blessings of the N.C. Nature Conservancy, which owns tens of thousands of acres in the Green Swamp spanning Brunswick and Columbus counties, and the U.S. Air Force, Ferris went to North Carolina and flew over the Green Swamp crash site.

The P-47B landed by Murphey – or what was left of it – was as inaccessible as it always had been, its ribs forming a ghostly outline of an airplane visible from the air.

"The next day we cut a trail in to the airplane and started disassembling it," Ferris said.

Over the next year he would make a dozen trips to the crash site. Finally, in March 1996 – 16 years ago – Ferris, his son and Stowe set out for North Carolina to retrieve the plane.

Trucks and trailers were driven to a road near the site, but the plane was still a good hike away.

Photos show Ferris and his crew climbing among twisted propeller parts, picking debris out of the muck and wiping away mud to expose the P-47B's all-important serial number – 41-5920.

That was the payoff for Ferris, proving his research was right. The ill-fated P-47 that nearly killed Murphey was still where he'd left it in 1944.

A helicopter hired by Ferris hovered over the crash site as crew members loaded pieces of the plane into large wooden boxes and cargo nets. A half-dozen loads later, the Thunderbolt was free of the swamp and on its way to Ferris' Illinois home.

For now the wings sit in one hangar while the fuselage sits in another.

"I literally have shoe boxes full of parts that I've manufactured," Ferris said.

Parts for World War II military aircraft used to be available for purchase on eBay, but hobbyists and collectors have bought most up. Now those looking for parts must trade or barter among themselves, or make them, he said.

"The logistics and putting this all together is more exciting than putting it together and flying it," he said.

But when that day comes – when all the parts are in place and the Thunderbolt is rolled out of the hangar – Ferris has a decision to make: to fly or not to fly?

"You know, by the time I get it rebuilt I'm going to be too old and decrepit to handle something like that," he said. "Just to go out there and look at it and know the history of it, that is so gratifying you can't believe."