Memorial

More information

Sgt Harold H. Hendrickson joined the Air Corps of the US Army Reserve in Detroit, Michigan on 5 May 1943.

The mission was aborded due to bad weather. On the way back, apparently, while the crew was over Belgium, the control cables snapped, and Pale Ale went into a spin. Everyone was getting out, when Gordon saw that two men were still in the nose. He went back to try to stabilize the plane long enough for them to get out, but the plane crashed before all three made it. 6 survived, 3 were KIA.
Years ago, while browsing through the Eighth Air Force archives, Sam Kessler, one of the surviving crew members, discovered a declassified summary of what happened as the Pale Ale began to careen into oblivion. He was incredulous.

The report states that, upon learning the B-24 was going down, Gordon and his co-pilot, 2nd Lt. Jack Campbell “made their way to the bomb bay to make the jump.” However, it added, when Gordon learned that Kjar and Hendrickson were still stuck in the front of the plane, he motioned for Campbell to jump “and went back to the controls in a futile but gallant effort to save the men.”
“No way,” declares Kessler, who had been seated directly behind the pilots. “If Bob Gordon had left his seat, none of us would’ve gotten out. That’s inaccurate ... I was pounding out SOS’s on my radio, of course, and then he ordered me out. He was desperately trying to keep the plane level. I headed for the bomb bay doors and I waved for him to follow me. Because I was the last one who saw him alive.”

At 10:30 on the foggy morning of 20 February 1945, several miles south of Ronse, 12-year-old Liliane Turck was on the playground at the primary school of the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul convent. On that day, the war returned to the little village of Dergneau in a big way.
“We heard a terrible noise above us, and all the children fell to the ground,” Turck would tell Belgian historians years later. “We barely noticed the aircraft flying very low above us. The noise increased. After a few moments, a loud explosion occurred in the direction of Renaix.”
Turck was a key witness to the final moments of the Pale Ale and its trapped crew of Gordon, navigator 2nd Lt. Ferdinand Kjar, and nose gunner Sgt. Harold Hendrickson. Loaded with 500-pound incendiary cluster bombs, the Pale Ale may have, according to a French reconstruction, made a last-gasp maneuver to avoid crashing into a populated area.
Turck said her future father-in-law was steering a horse-pulled wagon when the Pale Ale stuck nearby. The horses bolted and flung him “15-20 meters into a dunghill in the farmyard.” The explosion tore the roofs off his house and barn, and wounded his daughter, who was storing clothes in the attic. Human remains were discovered in trees and along the walls of a shed.
Authorities converged immediately to recover the dead. According to Belgian researcher Philippe Save, the wreckage was buried on the farmland, but excavators would revisit the site in 1995, when they recovered machine guns and engine parts. After the dig was refilled, one of those historians, Jean Claude Parez, erected a simple stone memorial to “the crew of a B24.”

At the site were the plane crashed, a memorial is erected.