At 6:05 A.M. on Friday, April 20, 1945, twenty-five Army Air Corps officers and enlisted men left Midland Army Air Field in a C-47 transport plane en route to Berry Army Air Field in Nashville, Tennessee. The flight crew consisted of the pilot, First Lieutenant James A. Bailey; the co-pilot, Captain John R. Rawls; and the flight engineer, Sergeant William H. Edwards, whose 36th birthday it was. Among the passengers were eight officers and fourteen enlisted men. Two Sweetwater cab drivers saw the plane on fire in mid-air and notified their dispatcher, who alerted authorities at nearby Avenger Field. A crash landing message came from the plane at 6:30 A.M. Another C-47 flying only a few minutes behind it encountered no problem. After the crash, parts of the plane were found in a straight line almost two miles from the crash site. By 10:00 A.M., most of the bodies had been recovered from the smoldering wreckage and taken to funeral homes in Abilene and Sweetwater. The soldiers, who ranged in age from 20 to 37, were buried in Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington, D.C. Ten days later, the Army Air Corps Aircraft Accident Classification Board met to determine the cause. The regional safety officer believed the aircraft had encountered a thunderstorm with only one of its two engines running, putting it into a roll, and that its 4,000 hours of flight time, mainly spent towing gliders, had probably weakened the tail and contributed to its disintegration in severe turbulence.