B-25 RESTORATION SPANS 40 YEARS

On 06 June 1944, a date that ought mean a great deal to all the world's free-ish people some 150,000 US, British and Canadian troops stormed the beaches of Normandy as Operation Overlord roared into action and the great Allied campaign to retake Western Europe from the Nazi aggressor got underway.

As allied men and machines fought, inch-by-inch, up the beaches of Northern France, a North American B-25 Mitchell medium-bomber mounted an impromptu and ill-advised offensive of its own against the waters of South Carolina's Lake Greenwood, a man-made body of water along the Palmetto State's Saluda River and some 3,600-nautical-miles west of Normandy.

The long, narrow lake was calm and idyllic on D-Day as US Army Air Corps pilot Colonel Dan Rossman swooped the B-25 low for what aviation legend contends was a look at the bathing beauties ornamenting its shores. Distracted, Rossman persisted in the descent until the propellers of the 20,300-pound bomber's twin engines struck the placid water's surface. Startled from his contemplations, Rossman hauled the yoke rearward, sending the B-25 into a deep accelerated stall and a subsequent lowspeed plunge into the lake's murky waters.

Though Rossman and his crew members escaped with their lives, the bomber sank ignominiously to Lake Greenwood's muddy bottom, where it sat for forty long years, passing into legend as the centrepiece of one of the strangest stateside events of the Second World War.