Right Place, Right Time

How luck and fate allowed me to survive my missions.

- Charles O’Mahony

Christophe and Isabelle Laniece live in Grenoble, France, and they are both physicians. They also happen to be world-class sailors. In August 2006, they drove to Marseilles with their son, Cami, and daughters Elsa and Charlotte, and there they embarked on a 10-day cruise on the Mediterranean Sea that would cover 1,200 miles—on a catamaran! Jane, Charlotte’s pen pal from Philadelphia, was with them.

On the first leg of their odyssey, the twin hulls of their sleek vessel carried them east past Toulon to the tip of the island of Corsica and then south along the coast. Charlotte’s friend, Jane, is my granddaughter, and when Jane told me about her adventure, it occurred to me that they had sailed directly over some of our U.S. aircraft that had ditched in the Mediterranean during WW II. Thierry Willaey lives in Provence. He belongs to a SCUBA club and combines his love of diving with his interest in those underwater relics from WW II. One of his group’s discoveries was the remains of a Martin B-26 that had ditched 50 meters off the coast of Corsica in water just 13 meters deep. Initially, they had identified it as a plane from the 17th BG, and their findings, including the N number on the plane’s vertical stabilizer, were published on the Internet. Franz Reisdorf, historian for our 320th Bomb Group, saw the article. “The ‘N’ number was 43-34234,” Franz said, “and it stuck in my mind. I finally looked through my slides, and there it was: N 43-34234, on the tail of Lt. Robert Dinwiddie’s aircraft that got hit on August 22, 1944, over Vergato, Italy.” The French were pleased to get this positive identification. Franz was excited when he called to tell me about the find, and it got me thinking back to those incredible days more than 60 years ago, when I was a 20-year-old pilot flying on that mission.