A very small memorial in a very small town World War II Memorial
Pine St at Falls Rd
Badin, Stanly County
Badin is a beautiful little village that sits at the edge of a very large man made lake. Several small hamlets surround the lake, and just to the north is Palmerville. World War II came crashing into Badin just two days after the invasion at Normandy, June 8, 1944. Marine Corp 1st Lieutenant Charls McDaniel, a resident of Palmerville, and his co-pilot were on a ferry mission from Ohio to Cherry Point, NC, in a Navy PBJ. The large, twin engine, aircraft was a Navy adaptation of the B-25 bomber.
Click on photos to read
accident account
McDaniel elected to alter his authorized flight route to include a leg over Yadkin Reservoir (Badin Lake). Presumeably he
wanted to send a message of some sort to his new bride and his family and who lived at the edge of the lake.
McDaniel and his co-pilot, Ensign John Withrow, circled the Palmerville area twice and began a third approach over the
village, low over the big lake, with his bride and family watching. In one of those inexplicable moments of tragedy
something went wrong with the aircraft, or maybe it was a second of inattention from the pilots, the result was a
bomber cartwheeling wingtip to wingtip into the deep waters of the lake.
Not much debris was found at the time, just enough to know that the pilots were certainly dead. A Navy dive team recovered some wreckage, but not the crew. Decades later a civil recovery team located the wreckage at the bottom of the lake, but it was not feasible to recover anything significant. The World War II memorial holds the names of nine other local men, and each story is as tragic for the survivors as the McDaniel crash. Just a few years ago a group formed to place the crash memorial not far from the World War II tablet. Click on the photographs of McDaniel and Withrow to read an expanded account of that accident.
