Lost in the Storm:

The Crash of the Montana Air National Guard A-26 Invader, September 1947

The Birth of a Squadron

In the summer of 1947, Great Falls, Montana was returning, slowly and not without effort, to the rhythms of peacetime. For five years the city had been the unlikely center of one of the most consequential logistics operations of the Second World War. When the 7th Ferrying Group of the Air Transport Command arrived at Gore Field in June 1942, the old municipal airport on Gore Hill was transformed into a hub through which nearly eight thousand American-built aircraft — P-39 Airacobras, C-47 Skytrains, B-25 Mitchells, and scores of others — passed on their way north to Fairbanks, Alaska, where Soviet pilots took possession of them and flew them west to fight on the Eastern Front. The arrangement was classified; the people of Great Falls understood it anyway. For three years the city had lived inside a secret that was also a source of considerable civic pride.

The war ended in August 1945. By 1947 the 7th Ferrying Group had long since departed, and Gore Field was given back to the city the following year. But the military did not disappear from the north central Montana landscape. On June 27, 1947, the 186th Fighter Squadron was activated at Great Falls International Airport, adding an air component to the Montana National Guard, which had been organized as a territorial militia as far back as March 1885. The new squadron was placed under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Willard Staples Sperry, a United States Army Air Force advisor assigned to organize and lead the unit. Sperry was well chosen for the task. A graduate of the Boeing School of Aeronautics and a veteran of eighty combat missions over Italy, he had been decorated with the Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, and nine Air Medals. When the war ended, he was posted to East Base at Great Falls, the installation that would eventually become Malmstrom Air Force Base, where he set about building the Air National Guard squadron from the ground up.

By September 16, 1947, the squadron’s eighty-ninth day of existence, it was still far below authorized strength. A recruiting drive launched that very morning in the pages of the Great Falls Tribune sought 270 additional men for a unit that eventually would carry a full complement of 303 enlisted personnel and fifty officers, equipped with twenty-eight P-51 Mustangs, four A-26 attack bombers, four trainers, two liaison aircraft, and two C-47 transports. The 186th was a fledgling institution, and everything depended on the quality of the men building it. Among those men, one of the steadiest was Sergeant Charles L. Glover.

Glover had come to Great Falls in 1943, assigned as an engineer to the 25th Squadron of the 7th Ferrying Group. After the war he had returned to the city to make his home at 117 Twentieth Street South with his wife Jean and their two children, Bradley and Judith Ann. He was, by every account in the record, a reliable and skilled aircraft mechanic. When the new Air Guard squadron formed, Glover signed on. He was thirty-six years old.

A Simple and Pleasant Flight

On the morning of September 16, 1947, Lieutenant Colonel Sperry and Sergeant Glover boarded a Douglas A-26 Invader at Great Falls International Airport. The mission was straightforward: fly south to Helena, collect Brigadier General S. H. Mitchell, the Adjutant General of the Montana National Guard, and proceed to Columbus, Ohio, for a military conference. The flying time from Great Falls to Helena in the A-26 was well under thirty minutes. The route would trace the Missouri River valley south along the western face of the Big Belt Mountains, which rise east of Helena in a sixty-mile spine of dense timber, steep canyons, and naked cliff faces.

The A-26 Invader was a formidable aircraft, among the most capable light bombers of the war. Designed by Ed Heinemann at Douglas Aircraft in 1940 in response to a United States Army Air Corps requirement for a fast, versatile attack platform, the Invader was twin-engined, powered by two Pratt and Whitney R-2800 Double Wasp radials producing approximately two thousand horsepower each. It was 51 feet 3 inches in length, stood 18 feet 3 inches high, and carried a wingspan of 70 feet. Empty, it weighed 22,850 pounds. In level flight it cruised at 284 miles per hour and could reach 425 miles per hour in a permissible dive — the fastest bomber in the American arsenal during the war years. The A-26 had made its combat debut in the Pacific in July 1944 and entered European service that November, eventually flying more than eleven thousand missions across both theaters. After 1945 it remained in service with the regular Air Force, the Navy, the Coast Guard, and National Guard units across the country. The aircraft Sperry flew that morning was, by any measure, proven and capable.

The weather, however, was not.

The Storm

Great Falls is noted, with some civic pride, for its 300 clear flying days per year — a characteristic that had figured significantly in the Army’s decision to base the 7th Ferrying Group there in 1942. September is typically among the more agreeable months: the Big Sky vivid and blue, the mountain slopes turning gold with autumn aspen, the air still and cold and predictable. But September 16, 1947 was none of those things.

An early winter storm of unusual intensity was moving into the state that morning. Snow fell in Helena, Butte, Great Falls, and across much of the rest of Montana. Over the following days it would spread into a 150-mile-wide belt from Canada south along the Continental Divide to Wyoming. Hundreds of tourists found themselves stranded in north central Montana. A bus driver and his passengers spent seventeen hours marooned in snowdrifts south of Browning. Children at the Greenfields School on the Fairfield Bench spent a night in the schoolhouse because the roads were impassable. Sheepmen struggled to hold their flocks together on the open range. By September 19, every weather bureau reporting station in Montana had received measurable snow or rain. It was an early and punishing arrival of winter, in a state accustomed to early winters but rarely one of this extent.

It was into this storm that Sperry and Glover flew the A-26.

Approximately twenty minutes after takeoff from Great Falls, Lieutenant Colonel Sperry contacted the Helena Civil Aeronautics Administration radio tower and was told that visibility at the Helena airport was poor and instrument landing conditions were unfavorable. Sperry reported icing conditions. He told the tower he was beginning his descent and would check in at each thousand-foot level. At 8:32 in the morning, he radioed that the aircraft was at 12,000 feet over the Helena range station and that he was turning to proceed on the southeast leg of the Helena radio range. The tower eventually cleared him for an instrument approach.

After that transmission, the radio fell silent.

The Search

What followed was the largest coordinated air and ground search operation ever mounted in Montana to that point. Brigadier General Mitchell — the very man whom Sperry had been flying to collect — assumed command of the rescue effort and ordered every available National Guard aircraft to stand ready at Helena. The weather initially made aerial search almost impossible. Helena and Townsend pilots managed a few brief sorties during breaks in the overcast, scanning valley floors and mountainsides. On the day after the disappearance, National Guardsmen drove jeeps through snow on mountain roads south and east of Helena while others moved on foot along mountain trails. Reports had come in that witnesses on the ground had heard a low-flying aircraft in that area on Tuesday morning, which narrowed the search corridor somewhat.

By September 19, the storm had finally broken. An extensive air search got underway, with headquarters established at the Helena airport, where an Army Air Force Search and Rescue unit coordinated radio contact with aircraft and ground parties. Captain D’Jack Klingler of the Army Air Force Search and Rescue Unit at Great Falls directed the military aircraft; Harland Herrin of Helena coordinated the civilian volunteers. Frank Wiley, director of the Montana Aeronautics Commission, helped manage the combined effort. Ground search headquarters was set up at the Montana City schoolhouse. In all, forty-two aircraft participated — one C-47, three L-5s, two AT-6 trainers, one additional L-5, five P-51 Mustangs from the Air Guard, and thirty light civilian aircraft. More than one hundred military personnel, civilian pilots, and United States Forest Service employees combed an area of more than two thousand square miles bounded by Garrison, Butte, White Sulphur Springs, and Wolf Creek.

They found nothing.

The A-26 Invader was not a small aircraft. At over fifty-one feet in length and with a seventy-foot wingspan, it should not have been easy to hide. But the Big Belt Mountains are formidable country. Situated east of Helena, they run northwest for about sixty miles, and the range’s highest point, Mount Baldy, rises to 9,472 feet above a landscape of dense stands of lodgepole pine and Douglas fir, steep east-facing canyons, and terrain that even on a clear day is difficult to penetrate from the air when timber stands close. The snowfall that had begun in mid-September was unusually heavy and persistent: precipitation at Great Falls ran 39 percent above normal through the spring of 1948. The high-elevation snowpack covered whatever wreckage lay beneath it and kept it covered through a hunting season during which thousands of sportsmen entered the mountains and found nothing.

Ten months passed.

The Discovery

On Saturday, July 10, 1948, Air Guard Squadron pilot Captain Warren M. Lee was flying over the Big Belt range when he spotted the wreckage of the missing A-26 and positively identified it. Lee had been Sperry’s close friend and had never stopped searching during his available flying hours. Squadron Commander Captain Robert L. Dardis, Major Clifford Owens, Lieutenant Donald Schrammeck, and Lieutenant D. Trudeau flew over the site to confirm the identification. The following morning, Adjutant General Mitchell directed the recovery operation. United States Forest Service Ranger Verne Edwards led a small ground party by jeep to Duck Creek Pass and then south on foot up a ridge toward Mount Baldy. The crash site was on the east face of the ridge, deep in heavy timber, at approximately 8,370 feet elevation — roughly 1,100 feet below the summit of Baldy and about 2.2 miles north of it.

The aircraft had struck the mountain at a steep angle in the timber. It was demolished and had partially burned. Nothing of the plane could be salvaged. The bodies of Lieutenant Colonel Willard Sperry and Sergeant Charles Glover were positively identified and transported to Croxford’s mortuary in Great Falls. Sperry’s remains were returned to California for burial; Glover was interred at the Floral Hills Cemetery in Hoopeston, Illinois.

The investigative record is incomplete — in 1947 aircraft accident investigation was still a rudimentary science, and no crash locator beacons existed. The Civil Aeronautics Administration could establish the aircraft’s last known position from the 8:32 radio contact, but beyond that, inference must fill the gap. The account prepared by Troy Helmick for the Broadwater County Historical Society in 2000, relying on personal interviews with surviving family members and colleagues as well as contemporary newspaper records, concludes simply that the difference between striking the mountain and flying free into the Townsend Valley was a very small difference in time and distance. Sperry was an experienced instrument pilot — eighty combat missions over Italy had ensured that — but icing conditions at altitude, poor visibility, and a mountainous approach corridor presented hazards that even a skilled aviator could not always overcome without modern navigational technology.

A Name on a Street

What had been accomplished, in the nine months of uncertainty, and in the recovery that followed, was not easily measured. The 186th Fighter Squadron — the institution that Sperry had organized and led — was federalized in 1951 and deployed outside Montana for the first time during the Korean War. It went on to grow into a unit of more than one thousand, ultimately converting to the C-130 Hercules in 2014 under its redesignated name, the 186th Airlift Squadron. The men who built it in those first months of 1947 were, like most men of their generation, practical rather than demonstrative about what they had given. Sperry’s son, G. Brooks Sperry, a Vietnam-era helicopter pilot himself, returned to Great Falls in September 1997 — fifty years after his father’s disappearance — and was flown over the crash site on Mount Baldy by Colonel Rex Tanberg of the Montana Air National Guard. What he saw below him, if the accounts are to be trusted, was a slope of dense timber interrupted only by a few broken trees, the detritus of the crash long absorbed back into the mountainside.

On January 8, 2000, a street on the Air Guard base at Great Falls was dedicated in the name of Sergeant Charles L. Glover — the first Montana Air Guardsman killed in the line of duty. Glover Street runs along the east side of building 64. It is not a prominent landmark. Most people who drive past it do not know its history. But it marks, quietly and permanently, the place where the institution of the Montana Air National Guard chose to remember the mechanic from Hoopeston, Illinois who had come to Great Falls during a war, stayed because it was home, and died in service of the state on a September morning when the mountains closed in and the radio went silent.

Works Cited

Helmick, Troy. In Memory of: Died in the Crash of a Douglas A-26 Invader Aircraft in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana, September 16, 1947. Townsend Area Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Committee / Broadwater County Historical Society, 2000. https://cms2.revize.com/revize/broadwatercounty/Documents/Community/County%20Museum/Digitized%20Newspapers/air_guard_tribute_sept._16_1947_-_click_here.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2026.

Great Falls Tribune. “Air Hunt Begins Today for Sperry, Glover.” 17 Sept. 1947. Cited in Helmick, Troy. In Memory of: Died in the Crash of a Douglas A-26 Invader Aircraft in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana, September 16, 1947. Townsend Area Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Committee / Broadwater County Historical Society, 2000.

Great Falls Tribune. “Find Bodies of Sperry and Glover.” 12 July 1948. Cited in Helmick, Troy. In Memory of: Died in the Crash of a Douglas A-26 Invader Aircraft in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana, September 16, 1947. Townsend Area Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Committee / Broadwater County Historical Society, 2000.

Helena Independent Record. “Storm Preventing Aerial Search for Colonel Sperry.” 17 Sept. 1947. Cited in Helmick, Troy. In Memory of: Died in the Crash of a Douglas A-26 Invader Aircraft in the Big Belt Mountains of Montana, September 16, 1947. Townsend Area Chamber of Commerce Military Affairs Committee / Broadwater County Historical Society, 2000.

Hallsell, Troy A. “B-17 Training and the 7th Ferrying Group at Great Falls Army Air Base.” Malmstrom Air Force Base Historical Publications, 341st Missile Wing, United States Air Force, Mar. 2022. https://www.malmstrom.af.mil/Portals/43/20220300%20(U)%20Hist%20TAH%20B17%20Training%20and%207FG%20at%20GFAAB.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2026.

“Tail Winds — Seventh Ferrying Group.” Montana History Portal, Cascade County Historical Society. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/103840. Accessed 22 June 2026.

Johnsen, Frederick A. Douglas A-26 Invader. Specialty Press, 1999.

“186th Airlift Squadron.” Military Wiki, Fandom. https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/186th_Airlift_Squadron. Accessed 22 June 2026.