July of 1943, an Allied strategic bombing had been intensified with Operation Point Blank,
an all-out strategic bomber offensive coordinated between the Royal Air Force Bomber Command and
the United States Army Air Force's. It was part of the Casablanca Directive,
so named because of decisions made by US President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister
Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom at a conference held in Casablanca, French Morocco,
in January of 1943. In short, the Casablanca Directive directed the Allied air forces to
destroy the ability of Nazi Germany to wage war in order to pave the way for an Allied invasion
of occupied Europe using strategic bombing. US bombers alone, many of them B-17 bombers
flying with the 8th Air Force out of England, dropped more than a million and a half tons
of bombs on Europe as part of the combined bomber offensive. And so you would think in July of 1943,
when the local butcher woke up to hear a bomber overhead and bombs dropping that that was a
terrible, but routine part of fighting the largest war in human history. But this time
it wasn't quite routine, because that butcher was in Boise City in the panhandle of Oklahoma,
in what seemed far removed from the war. And the story of the only city in Oklahoma
to suffer aerial bombardment during the Second World War, deserves to be remembered.
On the night of July 5th 1943, four B-17 bombers of the 333rd Bombardment Group took off from
Dalhart Army Air Base near the town of Dalhart in the Texas Panhandle. They were on the night
practice bombing run heading for an illuminated target near Conlen, Texas some 20 miles away.
The Boeing B-17 is one of the most iconic aircraft of the Second World War. Originally
designed for a 1934 US Army Air Corps proposal for a multi-engine bomber to replace the Martin
B-10. The newspaper of the Seattle Times saw the machine guns bristling from the prototype,
the Boeing Model 299, and coined the term Flying Fortress. The name stuck. Thirteen
were ordered in January of 1936 under the name Y1B-17 and delivered in August of 1937.
Development progressed at a slow pace, and less than 200 B-17s had been delivered by the time
of the attack on Pearl Harbor. But production quickly ramped up, by the end the war more than
12,000 of the heavy bombers were delivered. B-17s were used in all theatres of the war,
and during world war II, the B-17 equipped 32 overseas combat groups. Prior to 1944, a crew
men's tour of duty was set at 25 missions. As a measure of the hazards they would encounter,
it is estimated that the average crewman had only a one in four chance of actually completing his
tour of duty. In June 1943, the month before the training mission took off from Dalhart,
the US Army 8th Air Force operating heavy bombers from England supporting Operation Point Blank
largely designed to help prepare for the invasion of occupied Europe by destroying Germany's fighter
aircraft strengths, suffered 903 casualties, killed, wounded or missing in action. The Air
Force had to make good those losses, and in fact, significantly expand the number of bomber groups
to continue the strategic air campaign. The 333rd Bombardment Group was a Replacement Training Unit,
or RTU, that trained individual pilots or air crews. Graduates of the training
would be assigned to new combat groups, or be sent directly to the European Theater
of Operations for assignment as replacements for the growing losses among strategic bomber crews.
The town of Dalhart, Texas is in the sparsely populated Texas Panhandle and is actually closer
to Cheyenne, the capital Wyoming, than Austin, the capital of Texas. While Dalhart is the county
seat of Dallam County, much of the town actually lies in neighboring Hartley County to the south.
An agricultural community, the town's population prior to the Second World War was approximately
4,600. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the town petitioned the US Army Air Corps to build
a training base, saying that is the best way for the small town to contribute to the war effort.
Dalhart Army Airfield opened in May of 1942 using land southwest of Dalhart, and therefore
in Hartley County. The airfield was initially used for training glider operations with the Fourteenth
Troop Carrier Squadron. In February 1943 the mission changed, and Dalhart Army Airfield was
transferred to the 2nd Air Force, assigned to trained bomber crews for the Bomber Command.
Training to become a crew member of a heavy bomber was thorough. By the time a trainee
had reached Dalhart they had already undergone at least six weeks of basic training, and four
weeks of advanced aviation related coursework including math, physics, and flight mechanics.
Pilots and copilots had undergone primary pilot training in light two seater instructor planes,
basic pilot training in more powerful training aircraft that included formation training, flying
by instruments and flying at night, and advanced pilot training where pilot cadets were identified
for either single engine or multi-engine training in more advanced trainer aircraft. The training
at Dalhart was the last part of the process, where pilot cadets finalized the training on
actual fighters or bombers. Other members of the 10 person crew of a B-17 would have received six
weeks of gunnery training, plus an additional 12 to 18 weeks training for bombardiers,
radio operators, or navigators. Around half past midnight, on July 5th, the young navigator aboard
the lead B-17 of the training mission saw the bright lights, four lighted corners that
represented their bombing target area, and the crew of the B-17 began its practice bombing run.
Piston-engine bombers of the Second World War were complex to operate. In many ways
much more complicated than flying aircraft today, which are assisted by computers.
During the Second World War only around 1/3 of casualties among air crews occurred in combat,
in fact, a crewman had almost twice as much chance of dying in a training accident,
or being transported to the front, than being shot down by the enemy. Accidents
were tragically common. Between 1941 and 1945, the United States Army Air Force suffered more
than fifteen and a half thousand men killed in accidents inside the United States.
After midnight on July 5th, most of the population of the town of Boise City, Oklahoma were sound
asleep. The county seat of Cimarron County, the farthest Western County in the Oklahoma Panhandle,
Boise City had a 1943 population of about 1,100. In 1908, the Southwestern Immigration
and Development Company of Guthrie Oklahoma had sold Lots in the town. Describing it as an elegant
tree-lined city with paved streets, numerous businesses, railroad service, and an artesian
well. It was a scam. Not only were the claims false, the developers didn't even have actual
title to the Lots they sold. The developers were convicted of fraud and sent to prison, but the
people caught in a scam managed to incorporate the town anyway in 1925. A ranching and farming
community, Boise City had suffered greatly during the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression.
The post office in Boise City was operated by a man named Forrest Bourk who resided in
the upstairs of the building. When he heard what sounded like a crash and an explosion,
he thought maybe someone was trying to bust into the post office safe. In fact what he had heard
was the explosion of a practice bomb dropped by the Dalhart B-17 Group. Somehow the navigator
had been off, and instead of the bomb target in Conlen, Texas, the B-17s were 40 miles off course,
where the navigator had mistaken the four lights surrounding the Cimarron County Courthouse for
their bombing target. Practice bombs are very different than real bombs but they are nonetheless
dangerous. Loaded with four pounds of dynamite and 60 pounds of sand. The first bomb had gone
through the roof of Forrest Bourks garage near the post office, just missing the home of SC Ferguson
where eight people slept, and leaving a four-foot deep hole in the floor. Town butcher Hurlie Reid
and his wife Hazel had been jolted out of bed by the noise and had run into the street. R.D. Dodd,
the pastor of local Baptist Church and his wife had also been awakened but hadn't
turned on the lights as they did not want to wake their sleeping eight-year-old son.
Fred Kreiger the editor of the local newspaper,
the Boise City News, said later that he ran out in the street if he heard the
first bomb thinking, “Why in the heck would anyone wanna bomb Boise City?”
The growing number of residents roused by the noise could hear the sound of
the plane engines and could tell that the plane had circled around and was
coming back towards the town. There was the tell-tale whistling sound of a bomb falling,
and a second explosion happened near pastor Dodds church. Dodds threw on overalls and went to see
the extent of the damage. The bomb had narrowly missed the church, exploding just outside,
knocking out several the church's windows. As the bomber turned around again, County Sheriff Harris
Powell had figured out where the planes must have come from and got on the telephone and called
Dalhart. The base started radioing the bomber crew to tell them they were off course. By then
the third bomb had made a crater in Cimarron Avenue, just 60 yards from the courthouse.
Town resident Don Rudy, just five years old at the time, later recalled seeing his dad staying
in the doorway remarking to his mother, “Well god damn Irene! They’re bombing us!”
Not everyone had been asleep when the bombs started falling. The town had an all-night
cafe which was a popular spot for truck drivers passing through town. Several had been in the cafe
when the bombs started falling; they immediately realized the danger. They had been driving fuel
trucks; they raced to the trucks trying to get out of town. A fourth bomb only narrowly missed the
last truck, hitting Cimarron Avenue and throwing mud all over the porch have resident Lee Wright.
By then Frank Garrett, the superintendent of the Southwestern Public Service Company,
in charge of the town's power and utilities, had rushed to the city's power plant. As a six bomb
fell outside the home of the Boise City Attorney, EB McMahon, Garrett through the main power switch,
cutting off the city's power supply and shutting off the lights. It is not clear whether the bomber
crew received notification from Dalhart, or whether it was because the lights went out
but the bomber left, and the 30-minute air raid on Boise City, Oklahoma came to an end.
In the morning, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the US Army Air Force showed up
to try to assess the damage, and determine what happened. Lee Wright, who had slept through the
entire incident, was just trying to figure out who had thrown mud all over his porch in the middle of
the night. There were real risks, some of the bombs landed very close to houses where people
were sleeping and someone could have been killed, but no one was. In fact, the entire assessed
damage to Boise City was assessed at around twenty five dollars. The people of the city
were surprisingly unperturbed by what happened, they pretty much universally agreed that they've
been through much worse during the Dust Bowl era. In fact, Frank Garrett, the utilities manager,
was quoted in the Amarillo Daily News as worrying about the navigator of the plane. He asserted that
the men's equipment must have failed, and he hoped that the army wouldn't be too hard on him. Boise
City was not the only town in the United States to be accidentally bombed with training bombs
during the Second World War. The towns of Tarnov, Nebraska and Sierra Blanca, Texas also were struck
accidentally by training bombs and thankfully no one died in either of those incidents either.
But the navigational errors carried over into the Theatres of War, and the United States and Great
Britain accidentally bombed neutral Switzerland at least 70 times due to navigational errors
during the Second World War killing 84 people. The crew of the plane went on to serve in Europe
with distinguished service and they all returned home alive. In July 1993, the town of Boise City
commemorated a small memorial to remember the fiftieth anniversary of the day the Boise City
was bombed. The plaque reads, Boise City. Bombed July 5th 1943. Still booming July 5th 1993.
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