1946 plane crash in Monroe County resulted in death of Chicago man

North American T-6 Texan

Mr. Larry Robbins paid The Journal a nice visit the other day, and he shared many interesting tales from his boyhood days growing up in Beatrice. Mr. Robbins graduated from Marion Military Institute in 1955, enlisted in the Army in 1956 and then went on to live for many decades in Kansas City, Missouri. He is now retired in Baldwin County.

Robbins, who is now 88 years old, said that one of his most vivid memories from his boyhood days involves a military plane crash that occurred in the late 1940s. He said that his father heard the plane’s engine struggling and knew that a crash was imminent. His memory is that the crash happened near Nadawah.

Robbins couldn’t remember the exact date that the plane crash occurred, but he was pretty sure that it happened after the end of World War II, probably in either 1947 or 1948. I told him I’d do some digging to see what I could find out. A few days later, I dove into the back issues of The Journal, between 1944 and 1949, and found only one story about a plane crash in Monroe County.

According to the Nov. 21, 1946 edition of The Journal, an Army BT-6 single-motor plane enroute from Biloxi to Craig Field in Selma on Nov. 17 crashed 3-1/2 miles northeast of Franklin. The crash killed a ground operations officer from Craig Field named Lt. A. Kramarinko, who was from Chicago.

The pilot, an unnamed captain from Craig Field, survived after parachuting out of the plane from a height of 300 feet. Once on the ground, the pilot made his way to the home of Lee Davidson, who lived about 1-1/2 miles from the crash site. The pilot said that the plane’s motor went dead about 1-1/2 hours from Biloxi and that he instructed Kramarinko to bail out of the plane. For some reason, Kramarinko remained inside, dying in the crash.

The following day, men from Craig Field searched the area with the help of “numerous people living in the vicinity.” They found the wreck and carried Kramarinko’s remains to “a high place in the woods.” Around 3 p.m. that day, the Army men from Craig Field returned to Selma, leaving the body in the woods. Before leaving, Leslie J. Rutherford and John Rutherford secured permission to recruit men to bring the body out of the woods, so that it wouldn’t have to lay there overnight.

The Journal noted that the place where the plane crashed was in a “densely wooded area and the ridges and hollows are steep and hard to get over.” It required around an hour to traverse the 1-1/2 miles from the nearest point on the road to the scene of the crash.

In the end, I am not 100-percent sure that this is the same plane crash that Robbins remembers from his boyhood, but it’s the only one from that period of time that I could find in old newspapers. If anyone in the reading audience knows of any other planes crashes in northern Monroe County during that time period, please let me know.