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King Nine will not return...Ummm


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I was flipping through the channels and saw King Nine will not return will air at 1:00 am PST tonight. When I was a boy my dad took me to the Cars of Stars, Planes of Fame when they were located in Buena Park Calif. What ever happened to the B-25 that was displayed? That display played a big part in why I spent so much time looking for crash sites. That episode of TZ was fantastic. I learned later it was based on the B-24 Lady Be Good. While looking for info I found this "The Twilight Zone excelled at telling stories which lay along the borderland of the supernatural and the psychological, as exemplified by Rod Serling's "King Nine Will Not Return." For the opening salvo of the second season Serling chose a subject matter with which he was intimately familiar, having served as a paratrooper in World War II, as well as inspiration from daily headlines, in this case the Lady Be Good, a B-24 bomber lost in April, 1943 and rediscovered in the Libyan Desert ". Did anyone know that Rod Serling was a paratrooper?

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Rod Serling




Rod Serling served as a U.S. Army paratrooper and demolition specialist with the 511th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 11th Airborne Division in the Pacific Theater in World War II from January 1943 to January 1945. He was seriously wounded in the wrist and knee during combat and was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star.


Serling's military service deeply affected the rest of his life and informed much of his writing. Due to his wartime experiences, Serling suffered from nightmares and flashbacks. During his service in World War II, he watched as his best friend was crushed to death by a heavy supply crate dropped by parachute onto the field. Serling was rather short (5'4") and slight. He was a noted boxer during his military days.



serling.jpg


Note: In the second picture from the top on the right side, Rod is wearing a "Swing Cap".

















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While taking a picture with a friend during a lull at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific, an Air Force plane dropped a box of extra ammunition that landed on Serling’s friend and flattened him fatally. This event would give him inspiration in many of his scripts and stories.


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Serling must have served in occupation forces with the 11th PIR, as he is seen standing with what appears to be a couple Japanese soldiers...Bodes

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Serling must have served in occupation forces with the 11th PIR, as he is seen standing with what appears to be a couple Japanese soldiers...Bodes

As a side note, my dad was stationed in Libya in the early 60's...My mom took a picture of myself and my sister sitting in front of a propeller off the 'Lady Be Good'....Wonder if it's still there, or if it was removed when Quadafi came into power?.....Bodes

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As a side note, my dad was stationed in Libya in the early 60's...My mom took a picture of myself and my sister sitting in front of a propeller off the 'Lady Be Good'....Wonder if it's still there, or if it was removed when Quadafi came into power?.....Bodes

No kidding? Find that pic if you can. Lady Be Good is still in Libya.

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So, I just watched the show. It's been some 35 years since I last saw that. In my mind I remember a show kind of like this, but the plane was broken up and the crew was still with the plane. As the body's were found they would disappear until there was only one guy left. His body was under the tail and not found. Does anyone remember this one?

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No kidding? Find that pic if you can. Lady Be Good is still in Libya.

Unfortunately I deleted the photo in a PM I sent to a guy on the WAF in 2006....Have to ask mom again about where the picture is at....

 

Meanwhile, here's a reply he sent regarding the memorial we had our picture taken in front of....He also had his taken but I don't recall what year.....

 

"Well, ditto. Here I am at the tender age of 18 in front of the same flagpole. Same prop. The prop is now at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. ( well, I don't know how to attach photos to PMs!)"....Bodes

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Unfortunately I deleted the photo in a PM I sent to a guy on the WAF in 2006....Have to ask mom again about where the picture is at....

 

Meanwhile, here's a reply he sent regarding the memorial we had our picture taken in front of....He also had his taken but I don't recall what year.....

 

"Well, ditto. Here I am at the tender age of 18 in front of the same flagpole. Same prop. The prop is now at the Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. ( well, I don't know how to attach photos to PMs!)"....Bodes

 

Parts and crew items[edit]

After the Lady Be Good was identified, some parts of the plane were returned to the United States for evaluation while the rest of the wreckage remained. In August 1994, the remains of the craft were recovered by a team led by Dr. Fadel Ali Mohamed and taken to a Libyan military base in Tobruk for safekeeping.[6] They are now stored at Jamal Abdelnasser Air Force Base, Libya.

Over the years pieces of the plane were stripped by souvenir hunters. Today, parts can be seen at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. A propeller can be seen in front of the village hall in Lake Linden, the home of Robert E. LaMotte. The U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum at Fort Lee, Virginia has a collection of personal items, such as watches, silk survival maps, and flight clothing from the crew members who were recovered. Several of these items are on display. An altimeter and manifold pressure gauge were salvaged from the plane in 1963 by Airman Second Class Ron Pike and are on display at the March Field Air Museum just south of Riverside, CA. A Royal Air Force team visited the site in 1968 and hauled away components including an engine (later donated to the US Air Force) for evaluation by the McDonnell Douglas company.

After some parts were salvaged from the Lady Be Good and technically evaluated, they were reused in other planes belonging to the American military. However, some planes that received these spares developed unexpected problems.[7] A C-54, which had several autosyn transmitters from the Lady Be Good installed, had to throw cargo overboard to land safely because of propeller difficulties. A C-47 that received a radio receiver crashed into the Mediterranean. A U.S. Army de Havilland Canada DHC-3 Otter with an armrest from the bomber crashed in the Gulf of Sidra. Only a few traces of the plane washed ashore and one of these was the armrest from the Lady Be Good.[7]

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The ill fates suffered by aircraft that used components from the Lady Be Good are the stuff of Twilight Zone itself.

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Serling was also Jewish:

"Serling was one of many Jewish artists of the 1950s and early ’60s who used popular culture to transform America for the better. Like his colleagues Reginald Rose (“Twelve Angry Men”) and Paddy Chayevsky (“Marty”), Serling elevated popular culture while helping American youth contemplate the racism, isolation and tragedy that existed beneath the shiny surface of post-World War II American life. Through The Twilight Zone (which premiered fifty years ago and ran for five years, until 1964), he made dramatic statements against prejudice, militarism, greed, conformity, and xenophobia — statements that were discussed during classroom recesses and workplace coffeebreaks throughout the country.

He was an American-heartland writer from Binghamton, New York. As his biographer Gordon F. Sander makes clear (Rod Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man, 1994), Binghamton was not only Serling’s home for his first eighteen years, but also a place of lifelong inspiration for him. He loved his childhood there and experienced Binghamton as a place of family protection and small-town kindness. The city’s five thousand Jews were close-knit, with their own baseball team and community center and a great deal of community pride.

Although he grew up in an era when anti-Jewish feeling and the Ku Klux Klan were on the rise, Serling’s awareness of bigotry did not stop him from making friends with all kinds of people. He was popular in high school. He was short and light yet a fine athlete, as well as an excellent student-journalist and a natural performer. Still, in Binghamton, writes Sander, Jewish children had to “put up with a certain amount of harassment at school, like having to take examinations that were deliberately scheduled for the Jewish High Holy Days.” This was perceived by Serling’s father, Sam, as “annoying, perhaps even worrisome,” but “not enough to put off a doughty Jewish emigrant like Sam Serling . . .” The dual nature of the city’s reality would later become a major Twilight Zone theme, as Rod Serling’s teleplays repeatedly revealed the potential cruelty masked even by friendly faces.

In addition to his father’s influence, Serling was strongly affected by “Isidore Friedlander, the director of the Binghamton Jewish Community Center and teacher of its Sunday school, where Serling was enrolled from the age of 8 to 12.” Friedlander, who became the model for some of Serling’s Twilight Zone characters, was fluent in Hebrew and Yiddish and was “a poet, musician, translator and playwright,” according to Sander. It was “the kindly, philosophical Friedlander,” he continues, “who helped inculcate Serling with his fierce moralism even while the Serling family was in some ways straying from the actual Jewish faith . . .”

In the 1930s, the radio plays of his hero, Norman Corwin (born May 3rd, 1910 and still alive today), sensitized young Rod to the meaning of Nazism’s rise not only for the Jewish people but also for the whole world — and to the tricks of dramatic storytelling. Eventually, Serling would be among the first writers to introduce Holocaust-related themes to television. One Twilight Zone episode, “He’s Alive,” traces the career of a young American Nazi (played by Dennis Hopper), whose only adult friend is a gentle Jewish scholar. Hitler’s ghost is seen coaching the Hopper character and demanding the old Jewish man’s death. In another episode, “Deaths-Head Revisited,” a Nazi commandant returns to Dachau to relive his days of sadism. He is placed on trial by the ghosts of the Jewish people he has brutalized and murdered, and sentenced to a life of mental anguish and torture in which he feels, at every moment, the pain of his victims.

Serling, speaking to the audience off camera, concludes: “There is an answer to the doctor’s question. All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes — all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God’s Earth.”

His ongoing work for Playhouse 90 (a dramatic series of ninety-minute dramas that broadcast from 1956 to 1961) included an episode dealing with the Warsaw Ghetto. The Nazis were never treated comically by Serling as they would be in Hogan’s Heroes, a program he detested. In Serling’s hands, Nazis were portrayed not only as men driven by mean and petty passions, but as the real or potential murderers they were and are. During a period when George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party were being dismissed as inconsequential by much of the American media, Serling understood the American Nazis and hate groups as a threat.

During World War II, Serling had been a paratrooper and experienced fierce combat in the Pacific, where he lost many of his friends and all sense of war as a romantic adventure. He understood the absolute necessity of the war, but was haunted by his combat experience (for which he was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart) for the rest of his life. “By the time Japan finally sued for peace,” writes Sander, “. . . only 30 percent of the original members of the regiment from Camp Toccia were still alive . . . Then, on the same day, came the telegram informing Serling of the death of his father, of a heart attack, at the age of 55...”


Source:
https://jewishcurrents.org/rod-serling-and-the-conscience-of-a-generation/

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RustyCanteen

A good episode, and if I recall correctly it was the premiere of season 2. Basically a recycled scenario from the series premiere 'Where is everybody?', about a man who wakes up in a town with no memory of who he is, and discovers that he is the only person there. Of course there is more to it, but I won't spoil the ending in case you haven't seen it. Instead of the plane as in King Nine, the 'town' features 'courthouse square' from the 'Back to the Future' movies, and other shows.

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This thread got me looking and there was an Italian version of the Lady be Good....same thing....same outcome, but with an SM-79 bomber coming back from an attack on British shipping

 

And course the English equivalent....the sad case of a British P-40 found in Egypt several years ago

 

http://warbirdsnews.com/aviation-museum-news/lost-sparrow.html

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2222406/Dennis-Copping-Body-war-pilot-crash-landed-plane-Sahara-found.html

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