First Lieutenant Sell Wade South was born in Birmingham, Alabama on December 27th, 1919. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps on December 16th, 1941, and became an Aviation Cadet, just like Joe Noyes. He also served in the 95th Bomb Group (H), at Horham, and flew his first combat mission over Europe on May 29th 1943, to Rennes, France.
His second mission was to Kiel, which will always be remembered by the 95th Bomb Group cadre in a similar way that the Second Schweinfurt raid is known as “Black Thursday.” The group lost 102 flight crew members on that mission. The disaster was primarily due to the wing commander, Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest III, from Memphis, Tennessee, who decided to change things up.
Colonel Curtis LeMay had already created the “box formation” in which the three squadrons of a bomb group were staggered at different altitudes within the group to present a boxlike defense configuration against enemy fighters.
As noted in the book B-17s Over Berlin, General Forrest was convinced that we would gain better firepower if we flattened the formation and flew wing-tip to wing-tip so that we would be able to concentrate our firepower ahead, below, above, and to the rear. After a great deal of discussion, it was finally decided that we would fly that new type of flat formation on 13 June.
On that day, General Forrest flew in the lead plane, with Lieutenant South and Captain Miller flying as wingmen to his left, and his right. Unfortunately, General Forrest’s plane was hit, and his remains were not recovered until September 1943, when his body washed ashore in Germany. He was the first American general to be killed in action during the war in Europe.
The 95th Bomb Group (H) never flew Forrest’s flat formation again, and everyone who survived would have Kiel on their minds.
Sell W. South completed 8 missions with the 95th Bomb Group (H). What’s intriguing to me is that he was listed as a pilot on the Kiel (Warnemunde) mission on July 25th 1943, but then he doesn’t fly at all in August.
The next time he takes off from Horham is on September 16th, as a co-pilot with Flight Officer Max L. Crowder in command. M.L. Crowder would later become a Prisoner of War and was originally housed at Stalag Luft 3, and then was moved to Stalag XIII-D Nürnberg Langwasser. It appears he was liberated by the allies in May 1945.
Sell W. South survived the Second World War. On the 10th of October, 1945, he married, Betsy Jane McGowan in Carter County, Oklahoma. They made a home together in Ardmore, Oklahoma. Sell passed away in 2008.