She Died Three Days After a War Bond Rally. He Enlisted Within Months.

The facts, briefly

On 15 January 1942, five weeks after Pearl Harbor, Carole Lombard appeared at a war bond rally in her home state of Indiana. The Treasury Department had asked for a celebrity to front the first big drive of the war; she volunteered, and the Indianapolis event she headlined raised over two million dollars in a single day. She was thirty-three, married to the biggest male star in American film, and in a hurry to get home.

The train back to California would have taken three days. She took an aircraft instead. TWA Flight 3 left Las Vegas on the evening of 16 January, climbed on a wrong heading and struck Potosi Mountain, thirty-two miles south-west of the airfield. All twenty-two people aboard were killed, including Lombard, her mother Elizabeth Peters, and fifteen US Army Air Corps personnel.

Verified timeline

1. 1932–1938

   Lombard is married to the actor William Powell (1931–1933) and becomes the highest-paid star in Hollywood on the strength of screwball comedies including My Man Godfrey and Nothing Sacred.

2. 29 March 1939

   Gable and Lombard marry in Kingman, Arizona, during a break in the shooting of Gone with the Wind. They drive there and back.

3. 15 December 1939

   Gone with the Wind premieres in Atlanta; it becomes the highest-grossing film of its era.

4. 15 January 1942

   Lombard headlines a war bond rally in Indianapolis, raising more than two million dollars in one day.

5. 16 January 1942

   TWA Flight 3 crashes into Potosi Mountain, Nevada, shortly after departing Las Vegas. All 22 aboard are killed, including Lombard, her mother, and 15 military personnel.

6. January 1942

   President Roosevelt sends Gable a telegram of condolence. Lombard is subsequently recognised as the first American woman to die in the line of duty in the Second World War.

7. 12 August 1942

   Gable enlists in the United States Army Air Forces at the age of 41.

8. 1943

   Gable flies operational missions over Europe with the 351st Bomb Group as an observer-gunner and makes a gunnery training film.

9. 15 January 1944

   The Liberty ship SS Carole Lombard is christened; Irene Dunne performs the ceremony.

10. 16 November 1960

    Clark Gable dies in Los Angeles, aged 59, shortly after completing The Misfits. He is buried beside Lombard at Forest Lawn, Glendale.

On the record

• PUBLIC RECORD: Gable and Lombard married on 29 March 1939 in Kingman, Arizona.
• PUBLIC RECORD: TWA Flight 3 crashed on 16 January 1942 with the loss of all 22 people aboard, including Lombard and her mother.
• PUBLIC RECORD: fifteen of the dead were US Army Air Corps personnel travelling on the same aircraft.
• PUBLIC RECORD: Gable enlisted in the US Army Air Forces in August 1942 and served in Europe.
• PUBLIC RECORD: a Liberty ship was named for Lombard and christened in January 1944; Gable was buried beside her in 1960.

Why the crash still gets misreported

Two details circulate wrongly. The first is that Lombard died 'flying to a bond rally'. She died flying home from one; the rally had already happened and had already succeeded. The second is that she took the plane after a coin toss with her mother, who feared flying — an anecdote that appears in several biographies, is attributed to members of the party who died in the crash, and has no documentary source. Forgotten Frame records it as REPORTED.

The accident investigation itself is a matter of public record: the aircraft was found to have been on an incorrect heading after departure, in darkness, in mountainous terrain, with navigation beacons dimmed as a wartime measure. No single cause was ever established to universal satisfaction, which is a more honest sentence than the ones the fan magazines printed at the time.

Their own accounts

“Before I die I want to see a country where every man and woman has a chance to do the work they are best fitted for.”

Continue reading · What happened next?She Was Nineteen, He Was Forty-Four and Married — and It Lasted Until He DiedLauren Bacall had never made a film when she was cast opposite Humphrey Bogart in 1944. What followed is one of the few Old Hollywood romances that the record does not complicate.

Gable said almost nothing publicly, then or later. He gave no interview about her death, and the enlistment eight months afterwards was reported by the studio rather than announced by him. That silence has been filled by seventy years of speculation about his motives, none of it documented by anything he wrote or said.

How it ended

Gable returned from service in 1944 and worked steadily for another sixteen years, though he never regained his pre-war standing at the box office. He married twice more. His last film, The Misfits, was released after his death in 1960; Marilyn Monroe, his co-star, died two years later.

Lombard's films were rediscovered by later generations of critics who rate her among the finest comic actors of the sound era. She is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale under her married name, with Gable's crypt beside hers and her mother's nearby — all three deaths traceable to the same Nevada mountainside or to the man who was waiting at the airport.

What she was before she was his widow

Lombard's own career is the part the plane crash erased from popular memory. By 1937 she was the highest-paid performer in Hollywood, reportedly earning around half a million dollars a year at a point when the country was still in depression — and she made a point of the fact that most of it went in tax, which she said publicly and cheerfully. My Man Godfrey (1936) brought her an Academy Award nomination; Nothing Sacred, Twentieth Century and To Be or Not to Be established a comic register that almost nobody has matched since.

She was also, by the accounts of crews who worked with her, the most popular star on any lot she worked on: she learned the names of the technicians, she swore expansively enough to alarm publicists, and she negotiated her own contracts. To Be or Not to Be, an Ernst Lubitsch comedy about actors in occupied Warsaw, was completed weeks before her death and released two months after it. It is now regarded as one of the best films either of them made.

The bond drive, and what it raised

The Treasury's Defense Savings Staff wanted stars to front the first war loan campaign after Pearl Harbor, and Lombard, an Indiana native, agreed to headline the Indianapolis event herself rather than send a message. The single-day total reported for the drive she led was over two million dollars in bond sales — a figure that made her the most successful individual fundraiser of the campaign's opening weeks.

The rally ended in the evening of 15 January. The aircraft left Indianapolis the next morning and made scheduled stops before Las Vegas. It crashed at around 7.20pm on 16 January into the near-vertical rock of Potosi Mountain at roughly 8,000 feet. Recovery teams needed days to reach the site on foot. In 1944 the Treasury Department named a Liberty ship for her; the citation recorded her as the first American woman to die in the line of duty in the war.