Bomber Mountain book release

The Wyoming Bomber Crash of 1943

NEW BOOK ALERT!
The Wyoming Bomber Crash of 1943 by Sylvia A. Bruner is now in print!
June 1943 saw forty-one heavy bombers lost within the continental United States, including a B-17 that went missing over Wyoming late during the night of June 28. That aircraft had ten young men on board destined for World War II. They had been ordered overseas to participate in the intense and constant bombing raids being conducted in Europe, but they never made it out of America. Two years later, area cowboys discovered the wreckage strewn across an otherwise picturesque landscape. U.S. Air Corps Captain Kenneth G. Hamm noted in his personal diary, “The plane was so completely demolished that we were almost on top of it before we saw it.” Author Sylvia A. Bruner shares the stories of the men who lost their lives deep in the Bighorn Mountains and recounts the events of the crash, search and U.S. Air Corps accident investigation.

Available for purchase via the Museum Store or by contacting the museum at 307-684-9331.

Published by The History Press, Arcadia Publishing. April 22, 2025. ISBN9781467158992. 6x9, 176 pages.

“I write mysteries for a living, but there’s one that haunts my home—the crash of 477th Bomber Group Scheherazade when it crashed into what became Bomber Mountain in the Bighorn Mountain Range a fateful night in 1943. We and the world at large have long awaited an authoritative treatment of the event that took the lives of the ten-man, B-17 crew hoping for a writer and a book that would give us not only the details of the crash, but an insight into the men who flew her—Sylvia A. Bruner is that author and The Wyoming Bomber Crash of 1943 is that book."

Craig Johnson

Author, Longmire Western Mystery series

The Jim Gatchell Memorial Museum has a permanent exhibit on the topic

When you visit the museum, be sure to check out the Julia Hart Buffalo History gallery, where there is a permanent exhibit about Bomber Mountain. Updated in 2025 to include photographs and bios of all ten crewmembers who perished in the accident, the exhibit also features pieces of the wreckage.