11 July 1944 Crash of A-26 in South Portland, the Deadliest Air Accident in Maine History Vina Hannan Sawyer was a 17 year old babysitter on 11 July 1944 at a South Portland Redbank neighborhood trailer park in Maine that was set up as temporary housing for the families of war time New England Shipbuilding Corporation shipyard employees. Phillip Phee Russell was a Second Lieutenant in the United States Army Air Force. Russell had played basketball, baseball and football at South Portland High School before graduating in 1939 to attend the University of Maine. Russell married his high school classmate and sweetheart in June 1943. A year later, Russell received a furlough from his duties as a flight instructor at Barksdale Field in Louisiana to visit his wife and 3 month old daughter in South Portland and to make it a long range training mission. Russells family and friends gathered at the Portland airport to await his arrival in heavy fog. The airport had officially closed at 1635 because of the fog but at 1641 hours, his family heard Russells voice requesting landing instructions on the airport radio and saw his A-26B-5 Invader airplane appear briefly out of the fog at an estimated altitude of 200 feet. The airport radioed instructions to Russell to climb to 1500 feet and the plane disappeared into the fog. Waiting for a radio response from Russell, the people at the airport heard crash noises and saw flames from the direction in which the plane had disappeared. A wing of the aircraft had struck the ground and the airplane cartwheeled through the government operated trailer park, crashing at the intersection of Westbrook Street and MacArthur Circle West in South Portland. Sixteen trailers were destroyed by fire and a dozen more damaged by pieces of the airplane. Seventeen trailer park residents died and twenty more were injured. The bodies of Russell and his navigator, Staff Sergeant Wallace Mifflin, were found in the trailer park wreckage, two of the nineteen people killed by the accident. More than 66 years later, Vina Sawyer recalled she did not actually hear the crash but was knocked unconscious as the world around her became an inferno. Regaining consciousness, she saw 4 year old Jimmy Little needed help. “He was standing on a couch, screeching and hollering,” Sawyer said. “It may have been him who woke me up.” She grabbed Jimmy and ran outside to find his 2 year old sister, Nancy. “Her dress was on fire, so I just grabbed her,” Sawyer said. She and the children fled across a gully. Jimmy and Nancy died of their injuries. Sawyer was burned on her arms, legs, neck and face and spent five weeks recovering in the hospital. After World War II, she returned to northern Maine. She raised a family, survived two husbands and worked for Visiting Nurses of Aroostook until she was 77 and died at age 85 in 2012. 66 years later, the Long Creek Air Tragedy Memorial was erected to commemorate the crash and honor the victims. A similar memorial on Deer Mountain Maine, 100 miles to the north, marks the site of Maines second worst plane crash. Through coincidence, both crashes occurred on the same day. The site of the A-26 crash is today part of the Olde English apartment complex.
Posted on: Mon, 27 Oct 2014 21:05:42 +0000
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