My mother worked in the Empire State Building during World War II. Fortunately she wasn’t there on 28 July 1945.

It was a Saturday. Normally 15,000 people worked in the building. That morning there were fewer than 1,500 — and that fact is the only reason this isn’t remembered as one of the worst disasters in the city’s history.

A B-25 bomber was flying from Hanscom Field in Massachusetts to Newark to pick up the Sioux Falls base commander. The pilot was Lieutenant Colonel William Smith, a veteran of over 100 combat missions, recently back from a Europe where the war was already over. With him was Staff Sergeant Domitrovich, a flight engineer who’d been shot down over Market-Garden, taken prisoner, and escaped. They picked up a hitchhiker at the last minute — Navy Aviation Machinist’s Mate Perna, heading home to his parents. His brother had been killed that May, when the destroyer *Luce* went down off Okinawa.

Three men with that much war behind them, on a routine hop.

The city was under heavy fog. LaGuardia tower advised Smith to land there. He insisted on Newark. With some communication errors compounding it, Smith believed he was over the Hudson when he was actually over the East River — so when he turned southwest, he turned into Manhattan.

He was immediately in the man-made canyons. He missed the Chrysler Building narrowly, tried to climb, banked as he did it, and hit the Empire State between the 78th and 80th floors on the north side.

The left wing sheared off and landed on Madison Avenue, a block away. One engine went completely through the building and landed on a 12-story roof across the street, destroying an artist’s studio and his life’s work. The other engine tore through walls into an elevator shaft and fell a thousand feet to the sub-basement, taking an empty car down with it.

The hole was 20 by 18 feet. Fuel poured in, mostly into the offices of the Catholic War Relief Services. Several women there were immolated. Nine died instantly.

Final toll, including the three men on the plane: fourteen.

This is one of the entries in New York City’s Little Black Book 1: Secrets, History, and Trivia of the World’s Greatest City.

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