ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, January 10, 1997 TAG: 9701100069
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WICHITA, KAN.
SOURCE: STAN FINGER KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
ROY NEWTON, A GUNNER in ``Gib'' Hadley's crew, says he owes his life to Hadley's courage. So he made a project out of finding the famous flyer's plane - and remains.
He looked like Clark Gable, could talk his way into or out of virtually anything, and loved to wear his cowboy boots and pearl-handled revolvers into battle.
Gilbert Hadley was going to come home a legend, his crew members and buddies knew.
They were right, but not in the way they hoped.
1st Lt. ``Gib'' Hadley returned to his hometown of Arkansas City, Kan., a war hero this week more than 50 years after he died on one of the most storied bombing missions of World War II.
Hadley, 22, was the pilot of a B-24 bomber that was severely damaged during a massive American attack on German oil refineries in Ploesti, Romania, on Aug. 1, 1943. Its nose blown off, its bombardier killed, its fuselage buckled and its engines shot up or failing, Hadley's Harem crash-landed in the Mediterranean Sea only a few hundred feet from the coast of Turkey.
Seven of the plane's 10-member crew made it to shore safely, but Hadley and his co-pilot, Lt. Rex Lindsay, drowned in the sinking wreckage.
``The seven of us really owed our lives to him,'' said Roy Newton, a gunner on Hadley's crew and the man whose search led to the plane's recovery 52 years later. ``It's miraculous they could fly this thing that far.''
Newton and Pete Frizzell, a musician and historian from Gainesville, Fla., who was instrumental in the recovery of Hadley and Lindsay's remains, were there when a memorial was held for Hadley at 2 p.m. Thursday in Arkansas City, including a full military service at Riverview Cemetery, where Gib's remains were buried beneath the tombstone that bears his name.
``To me, it'll be a relief that Gib has finally come home,'' said Bill Hadley of Bartlesville, Okla., Gib's brother and only surviving family member. He said the service would be "a celebration of Gib's life.''
On Tuesday, the medals that Gib Hadley earned were presented to his brother at a ceremony in Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating's Tulsa office. The medals include the Distinguished Flying Cross.
``My parents never knew that he got any medals at all,'' Hadley said. ``That's another thing that's sort of gratifying: Finally, he will get the medals he so richly deserved.''
Gib was impossible not to like, Newton said. His military leaves became the stuff of legend. Too drunk one night to get out of bed to turn out the light in a hotel room, he pulled out one of his pearl-handled revolvers and shot it out.
``He chewed us out for saluting him,'' Newton said. ``He let us fly the airplane when it was in the air and nothing was happening. He had no fear of anything he was just a budding legend happening right under our feet.
``There wasn't a thing we wouldn't have done for him.''
Newton said he came home and forgot about Hadley's Harem until he learned of the 50th anniversary reunion for those who had participated in the Ploesti mission, the first low-level raid of its kind in the war. He decided to go, and saw a photograph someone had taken of the seven surviving crew members on the beach, surrounded by Turks.
Thinking ``I've got a couple of coins and nothing else to do,'' Newton decided to find Hadley's Harem and ``write a short story just to correct history.''
``I never realized how this thing would unfold in front of me and broaden out in nature,'' he said.
He took a trip to Europe in 1994, combing miles of beaches in search of where Hadley's Harem went down. The last day he was there, a Turkish newspaper learned of his quest and interviewed him about it. Newton returned to America empty-handed, but a Turkish diver who read the story wrote to him and said he had found the plane while diving more than 20 years before.
Skeptical but curious, Newton returned to Turkey later that year, and the diver took him right to the plane, which was resting in 90 feet of water.
Newton returned the next year with Frizzell, who had been fascinated with the Ploesti raid since he was a child.
``To be able to do this with Roy was just unbelievable,'' Frizzell said. ``It still doesn't feel real to me.''
The two men stumbled across the man who had carried Newton from the beach as a teen-ager more than 50 years before.
``He knew him instantly,'' Frizzell said of the Turk.
Their efforts were impeded by the Turkish government, but they finally managed to get the nose of the plane raised to the surface.
The plane and its contents were in remarkably good condition, Newton said, because they had settled in an area where two fresh-water rivers feed into the Mediterranean. When Newton came down with food poisoning and returned home, Frizzell stayed in Turkey and worked with the U.S. Embassy to have the remains collected and returned to America.
Several personal effects were also found, including a set of pearl-handled revolvers, a pair of cowboy boots and a wristwatch, all of which Newton recognized instantly as Gib's.
``He was wearing them at the time [of the flight],'' Newton said. ``All of these things definitely, 100 percent confirmed that it was the Hadley's Harem that went down.''
But the Air Force would not release the remains until the identities had been confirmed by DNA analysis. By then, Pat Allen, Gib's sister, had died of cancer, unable to achieve her dream of living long enough to see Gib return home.
The bones found in the nose of the plane were positively identified last summer, about a year after Allen's death, and are being returned to next of kin. A memorial service for Lindsay will be held in his hometown of Gilmer, Texas, on Saturday.
``My payoff for this whole thing is to have Hadley and Lindsay home where they belong,'' said Newton, who along with Page is the only crew member still alive from the final flight of Hadley's Harem. ``By their skill in flying an entirely unflyable airplane all the way from Romania to Turkey, they gave me a good 50 years on my life, and I feel this is a good payback.
``I just feel like I've given something back.''
LENGTH: Long : 111 linesby CNB