Letter from John A. Hellstrom, P.C of Carlin, Hellstrom & Bittner, Davenport, Iowa
dated 4^th October 1991, to Michael John Claringbould

The pilot of the B24 which crashed on August 21, 1944 was Capt. Calvin Flogstad. He was Squadron Operation Officer of the 2nd Bomb Squadron. I also knew the navigator well. He was Lt. Nieme, who had been a friend for some time. After all these years I am not entirely positive of the spelling of the name but I remember him vividly. I don't believe the other members of the crew were as familiar to me. I don't, now, remember their names. The evening prior to the flight, Capt. Flogstad stopped at my tent and asked if I would fly as his co­pilot to Townsville, Australia the following day. I accepted with delight, since it might provide a chance for a meal with fresh food instead of the dehydrated food we existed on. We were stationed, at that time, on Owi Island (just off Biak Island), having moved from Nadzab a week or two earlier. We had flown a few missions from Owi ‑ one that I recall to a Japanese strip in the Halmaheras. Later that evening the Squadron Mess Officer gave me a double handful of Australian money and requested that I buy fresh meat or milk or anything of that nature and bring it back for him. Shortly thereafter the Group Mess Officer came to me with a similar request ‑ he provided me with Dutch guilders. I remember I buttoned each wad of money in the pockets of my shirt to keep them separate. I believe the purpose of the flight was to pick up spare parts and items of that kind at the air depot in Townsville. Since it didn't make any difference to me I don't have a specific recollection at this time.

In any event, we took off in the morning of the 21st of August, 1944 and crossed the Owen Stanley Mountains and the Torres Straits and somewhere over the Coral Sea or in that area we ran into bad weather. We undoubtedly should have turned around, but in those days, if we aborted every flight when we ran into bad weather, we would probably have never accomplished anything. In any event, we tried to fly through the weather and it kept getting worse. We finally made landfall in the vicinity of Cairns, Australia, and were able to contact the tower at the strip there. We assumed that the weather was bad all along the Australian coast and made no effort to proceed down the coast to Townsville. I later learned that the weather at Townsville was not nearly as bad. With our radio compass we homed in on the tower and located the strip. It was raining extremely hard. We made several passes at the field and with the assistance of the tower operator we did touch down on the strip.

As co‑pilot, I immediately commenced my duties with respect to the mixture control, wing flaps, cowl flaps, prop pitch, and all of the other assorted chores. As a result I had my head in the cockpit and did not know our situation. I realized that Capt. Flogstad was standing on the brakes very hard but did not become aware of the seriousness of the situation until he said "Hellstrom, this looks like our first crack‑up". I looked up and saw the end of the runway in front of us. We were probably still doing 90 miles an hour. We had obviously touched down in the middle of the strip. At the end of the runway was a large ditch, apparently a drainage ditch. On the right hand side of the cockpit was located a long row of toggle switches which controlled all of the electrical systems. Above it was a bar on a pivot which I immediately depressed and turned off all of the electrical systems. I then threw my right arm in front of my face and remember nothing else until I woke up in the ambulance, with the rain pounding on the roof.

The next recollection I have is waking up in a hospital surrounded by nurses in red and white habits. There were also several doctors in attendance and a priest who was administering the last rights to me. I later learned that the nose wheel of the B24 went into the ditch and the nose crashed into the opposite side of the ditch crumpling it back past the top turret. Capt. Flogstad continued to fly the plane until it crashed. His skull was fractured and he was killed on impact. The top turret broke loose and crashed down killing the radio man and the engineer. I don't know where Lt. Nieme was riding but I apparently was the only one that survived for any appreciable amount of time. I saw photographs of the plane while I was in the hospital and it was largely a mass of crumbled metal. The crash crew at the Cairns strip chopped me out of the wreckage. My injuries consisted of a badly broken right arm, which took the impact instead of my skull, and a broken pelvis as a result of flying forward into the seat belt. I had innumerable cuts and laceration and bruises over the rest of my body. I specifically remember the nurses attempting to remove my clothes and discovering the rather large amount of money buttoned in my shirt pockets. They were astonished. I remained only a day or two in this hospital which was a civilian hospital located not too far from the Cairns airstrip. As soon as my condition was stabilized I was moved from there to a small naval station hospital in Cairns. It was composed of a small compound of Quonset huts and apparently furnished routine medical care for the naval vessels in the area which could not be handled in sick bay. They performed a lot of appendectomies and treated illnesses too severe to be handled on board ship. I remained in that hospital for approximately six weeks until my pelvis had healed to the extent that I could limp around and then I was moved to an army field hospital somewhere outside of Townsville. This hospital was a very small unit with probably only a dozen doctors and an equivalent number of nurses and some medical corps men. Just exactly who they served I don't believe I ever knew. I think it was largely a surgical unit. Sometime in November my arm, which had suffered a compound comminuted fracture of the right ulna, appeared to be healed and I was about to be discharged, given a weeks sick leave in Sydney, and then sent back to duty, when the doctors discovered that the bone had not joined in a proper manner and a false union had resulted.

I was immediately sent to the 42nd General Hospital in Brisbane where I was thoroughly examined and it was determined that an operation and bone graft would be necessary. Since I would be incapacitated for a lengthy period of time it was determined that I should be sent back to the States. It was also in the hospital in Brisbane that my mail caught up with me and I learned that my younger brother, who was the pilot of a B-26 Bomber in the 9th Air Force in England, had been shot down and killed north of Paris, France, on August 10, 1944.

I was sent home on the S.S Lurline which was a ship belonging to the Matson Line under contract to the United States Armed Forces as a hospital ship. Approximately two weeks after leaving I landed in early 1945 at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco and was then sent by hospital train to Winter General Hospital in Topeka, Kansas, where a bore graft was performed and my arm repaired. The war ended while I was still in the hospital and I was given my disability discharge in October of 1945. My disability is rather minimum and the use of my right arm has not been affected to the extent that it has changed my life greatly, other than that it prevented me from remaining in the air force and making it my career as I had planned. It might interest you to know that a gentlemen named Kenneth W. Hopper, a Townsville, Australia, bush pilot, contacted me a few years ago inquiring with respect to the crash at Cairns. In the course of our correspondence I asked him what had happened to the wreckage. He located a couple of people who had participated in salvaging the wreckage after the war. The wrecked plane had apparently been pushed off into the brush at the time and abandoned. He obtained for me, as a souvenir, one of the hydraulic cylinders from a wing flap on the B-24. I have it as a memento.

The above information contained may have little significance but it is as I remember it.