British Man Fulfills Dream to Meet Member of Courageous WW II Crew : Journey: After witnessing a horrific midair collision of B-17s in 1944, he visits an American survivor of the Heavenly Body.

For 49 years, Tony Bryce has wanted to meet the crew of the Heavenly Body, the burning B-17G Flying Fortress that somehow managed to turn its nose eastward and crash on the beach instead of plowing into the center of his small English town.

He got the crew members’ addresses from U.S. Air Force files. He has gone to reunions of the air crew--the 525th squadron, 379th bomb group--in England and asked for details about the men he saw leaping from the burning plane, their parachutes’ white puffs blossoming in the oily smoke trailing the doomed bomber.

Finally, on Wednesday, Bryce fulfilled a dream he has nurtured since he saw the crash at age six. He got to meet a survivor of the midair collision: Bill Farmer, a Pasadena resident and retired Los Angeles Unified elementary school principal who was a 19-year-old ball-turret gunner on the Heavenly Body when it went down on June 19, 1944.

“The last time I saw you, you were dangling from a parachute,” the 56-year-old Bryce told Farmer, now 69, with a laugh as they shook hands. Bryce wore a bomb group T-shirt and carried a book about U.S. Air Force history.

The meeting occurred because of a coincidence. Bryce and his wife, Gill, were visiting an Orange County couple who are friends of a distant relative. The couple, Kenneth and Pauline Gallette of Fullerton, have a daughter who was once engaged to a Mike Farmer from Pasadena. The broken engagement happened to come up in casual conversation.

Farmer’s name clicked for Bryce, who asked if Mike Farmer could be related to the Bill Farmer from Pasadena who was a gunner on the Heavenly Body.

“I called, and they were,” Pauline Gallette said. To Bryce’s delight, the meeting at Farmer’s house in Pasadena was arranged a few days later.

Though the image of the exploding plane was branded in Bryce’s mind, Farmer had trouble recalling the names of his fellow crew members. But stirred by Bryce’s accounts, the two men ended up swapping war stories for three hours like old friends.

“We used to watch you go out and back every day,” Bryce told Farmer in his gentle English accent. “But that day we heard an almighty crash, a terrific bang, loud enough to bring people out into the streets.”

On their way back to their base in England after bombing German rocket bases in France, the B-17 flying off the wing of Farmer’s plane went out of control and careened into the Heavenly Body. Though the bomber that hit Farmer’s plane exploded seconds after impact, the Heavenly Body stayed airborne on three engines, half a wing and no tail, and aimed for the North Sea. Of the 19 crew members on both planes, 12 perished.

“Me and my friends ran for three miles to where your plane went down off Canvey Point. I tried to run out to the plane through the mud, but a fisherman stopped me,” Bryce said. “He said there was still somebody in there, the pilot or something.

“Somebody had steered the plane away from the populated area and gave his life. . . . What kind of guy can stay behind the wheel of a burning plane? It still gives me goose bumps,” he said.

Bryce, a truck driver, still lives in the same town, Leigh-on-Sea. He admits he has an obsession with models of B-17s--he has a whole garage full of them and is working on a scale model of an American air base. Bryce also tried his hand at painting and has a mural of B-17s from the 379th on the wall of his house.

“What you went through was just awesome. I think every one of you is a hero,” he said.

Farmer, embarrassed, looked down at the floor before launching into his side of the story. He splashed down miles out to sea and broke a cardinal rule of parachuting by not getting out of his harness before he hit the water--the chute can fall down around you and drown you, he said.

But that mistake saved his life. The wind caught the chute like a sail and bounced him for seven miles across the swells and past a Norwegian fishing boat trying to rescue him. He landed breathless on shore, miles from any town.

“I was purple because of the cold . . . The Norwegians sent a little rowboat out to get me. I was just frozen--as we got to their big boat, they had to hit my arm with an oar to stop me from losing my fingers when the boats bumped together,” Farmer said.

The fishing boat dropped him off at a nearby Royal Air Force rescue base.

Farmer suffered no serious injuries from the crash and finished the war with 30 missions, five of them over Berlin.

After he finished his story, Farmer dug out his Distinguished Flying Cross and a box of old pictures of B-17s and buddies from the war. Bryce pored over them asking questions until Pauline Gallette gently reminded him that it was a long ride back to Fullerton.

The two men shook hands again, and Bryce promised to send over a picture of the graves of the three crew members who didn’t make it out of the Heavenly Body.

“This whole thing is fantastic to me,” Bryce said as he left. “There are so many people in California, but I manage to walk into this house.”