MASSABESIC MYSTERY

Below is a story originally published Saturday, July 11, 2026 in Union Leader / N.H. Sunday News. The Aviation Museum of N.H. supports this effort and, if the ball turret is recovered, hopes to display it to visitors to help tell the story of Manchester’s Grenier Air Base and the important role it played during World War II.

UNH crews search Lake Massabesic for missing WWII B-17 ball turret

By PAUL FEELY, Union Leader Staff

Living near Lake Massabesic, Alex Saidel grew up hearing stories of the history lying somewhere below the surface.

“I always heard there was either a World War II plane or parts here or something like that, but that was always the end of it,” said Saidel, an aviation buff and president of Merrimack Street Volvo. “But what if we can find it?”

Over the past few weeks, teams from the Center for Coastal & Ocean Mapping/Joint Hydrographic Center, based at the University of New Hampshire’s Chase Ocean Engineering Lab were at Lake Massabesic, working with Saidel while searching for a ball gun turret from a B-17 Flying Fortress.

The turret was jettisoned from the bomber following an aborted landing attempt during a training flight out of Grenier Air Base — known today as Manchester-Boston Regional Airport — in January 1945.

Crews hope to find and raise the turret to the surface using cables and flotation devices, tow it to shore and restore it for display in the Aviation Museum of N.H.

“Today, almost no physical trace remains of Grenier Air Base, which once housed thousands of troops from all over the nation as they trained for missions in Europe and all over the world,” said Jeff Rapsis, the museum’s executive director.

“Displaying the ball turret would provide Aviation Museum visitors a tangible connection to Grenier Air Base and Manchester’s role during World War II.”

A history buff walks into a car dealership …

The story of this search begins not 60 feet below the surface of Manchester’s drinking water source, but in a car dealership.

When Dennis Sasseville — a local historian and aviation history enthusiast — showed up at Saidel’s Volvo dealership, as luck would have it, the salesmen were busy with other customers, and Saidel assisted him with finding a car for him and his wife.

Sasseville himself was familiar with the story of a B-17 ball turret in Lake Massabesic after reading a mention of it in author Ed Brouder’s book, “Manchester’s Airport: Flying Through Time.”

“I said, in the era of internet let’s do some more research. So, I found that there was an accident report,” Sasseville said.

“At that time you could send away to a database for $25 or $30 and get the actual photocopies of the Army accident report. I did that and did a little bit more research, and over the years I would tell fellow amateur historians about it, and most of them kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘Well, that’s nice.’”

When it came time to put pen to paper on his car purchase, Sasseville noticed a lot of World War II memorabilia in Saidel’s office.

“We get talking about World War II and he’s actually flown a restored B-17,” Sasseville said. “I said, ‘Well you know there’s this ball turret in Massabesic Lake’ and his eyes just lit up.”

“I said, ‘We’re gonna go find it,’” Saidel said.

He reached out to the University of New Hampshire, and the hunt was on.

Offshore mapping brought inland

Since about mid-June, engineers and experts from UNH have been focused on locating the ball turret from the B‑17 aircraft (serial number 44-6694).

The plane, which belonged to the 99th Bombardment Group, was reportedly en route to Tortorella Air Base in Foggia, Italy, when the gun turret was intentionally dropped into the lake after a failed landing attempt at Grenier Field.

The tailwheel broke off, making a second landing attempt dangerous. The B-17 ball turret is affixed to the underside of the fuselage in a way that could break the back of the fuselage when touching down without landing gear (dubbed a belly landing). According to the accident report, the pilot was told to “Drop the turret into the lake.”

Working with staff from Manchester Water Works, UNH crews set up a mobile control van along the shore of the lake.

From there, they operated a battery-powered, robotic uncrewed surface vessel (USV) outfitted with a M3 Multibeam Echosounder — on loan from KONGSBERG, one of the university’s industry partners — to assist with the exploration efforts.

A small Garmin side-scan sonar provided acoustic “imagery” of the lakebed. The advanced high-resolution multibeam sonar allowed the team to collect data for 3D topographic maps, while the Garmin side-scan provided acoustic shadows of objects that could be the turret.

Inside the trailer, graduate students in UNH’s summer hydrographic field course took part in the search, giving them a unique opportunity to explore a local body of water for a historical artifact. The class is composed of graduate students from the United States and around the world enrolled at the center, recognized as the nation’s premier Category A Hydrographic mapping training program.

Val Schmidt, principal research project manager and UNH team lead, said work like this on an inland lake is new for him.

“My office has been this picnic table for the last two weeks. It’s been terrific,” Schmidt said. “We do a lot of stuff off the coast as part of the class and for different things. So it’s not uncommon offshore, but I don’t know of another project that we’ve done in a lake.”

Professor Semme Dijkstra, a UNH research scientist at the School of Marine Sciences and Ocean Engineering, said the school is training graduate students from across the U.S. and the world to survey the ocean floor. This year’s class has 10 students.

Mowing the lawn

Schmidt said each weekday morning students and staff have been coming out to the trailer near the Water Works Treatment Plant off Lake Shore Road, setting up, having a morning meeting and mapping the lake bed while looking for anything that might be the turret.

“They come with a plan about what they want to do for the day and we help them execute it,” Schmidt said.

That plan typically involves deploying the boat around 9:30 a.m., launching what Schmidt calls a lawnmower survey because it travels back and forth along equally spaced lines across the lake.

“They’ve laid out a strategy of where they think the turret is most likely to be, so they’re prioritizing those spots and trying to get full coverage,” Schmidt said.

“They program the boat by drawing these lines out on a map and then they can push a button and the boat will just go and run them. Then they monitor the data collection effort as it’s coming in and try to pick out targets or things that we want to go investigate later.”

At the end of a wooden dock, research project manager Andy McLeod and UNH student Tion Uriam did a final check on the yellow USV before the day’s run began.

“This is a fairly new machine for us, and generally speaking we can do about six to eight hours of ops,” McLeod said.

Have their efforts raised any eyebrows among neighbors or folks out on the water?

“Maybe the loons, but I haven’t seen anybody come over and get all upset about us,” he said.

Back in the trailer, Roland Arsenault — the vehicle’s chief software engineer, monitored a mosaic of camera images tiled across two large monitors.

“That’s our side-scan sonar on the left,” Arsenault said. “This is water column, like your fish-finder-type sonar on the right. Here is the map that we use to navigate the boat to plan our missions and to see where we are. And these are the cameras — the boat has four cameras, forward, sides and rear.”

Lake Massabesic has a storage capacity of approximately 15 billion gallons of water and covers 2,400 acres, or about four square miles. The lake averages only about 17 feet in depth across its entirety, with the deepest area checking in at approximately 60 feet near Front Park by the Massabesic Yacht Club.

Schmidt said the team worked with Alex and Dennis to come up with areas of the lake to focus on.

“Just thinking about what you would do if you were a pilot — you probably didn’t want to get near the trees, you don’t want to hit houses or the shoreline. The accident report from the Air Force — there’s very little detail in there about where they were exactly, and where they dropped it and what their strategy was when they dropped it,” Schmidt said.

“We just go and try and see what we can find.”

Incident report

According to the Army Air Force’s accident report, at the time of the accident, “the runways were covered with patches of ice and braking action was fair.”

“Due to this condition the pilot of this aircraft made his approach so as to land as short as possible,” the report says. “In doing so his main gear made contact with a snow bank. Seeing what had happened the pilot pulled back on the stick in order to go around again and this caused the tail to be forced down, hitting the snow bank with sufficient force to shear off the tail wheel.”

In his statement on the accident, 2nd Lt. Douglas E. Sherman (the pilot) wrote that the tower instructed him and other crew members to “fly over to a lake 4 or 5 miles to jettison the ball turret.”

“We went over to the lake and circled while the crew loosened it up,” Sherman wrote. “As soon as the tower instructed us to let it go, we were flying at 1,000 (feet) around two lakes, so we wouldn’t go over any houses. When it left, we were over the lake and I went in. We called the tower and told them the turret was gone and we proceeded back to the field for a wheel landing.”

Distinguished service record

Alex Saidel’s research shows B-17 #44-6694 was originally delivered to Nashville, Tennessee, on Oct. 15, 1944. From there she went to Hunter Army Air Base in Savannah, Georgia, arriving Dec. 8, 1944, before flying to Grenier Field on Jan. 4, 1945, where she was assigned to the 416th Bomb Squadron of the 99th Bombing Group.

After dropping the ball turret, the B‑17 aircraft was repaired and sent to Tortorella Air Base in Foggia, Italy, on Feb. 11, 1945, before ultimately taking part in 36 missions between Feb. 22, 1945, and April 26, 1945.

The aircraft survived the war and was retired to Bradley Field in Connecticut on July 15, 1945. She was then sent to Independence Airfield in Kansas on July 17, 1945, before being sent to a scrap yard at Kingman, Arizona, on Dec. 21, 1945.

The tale of the turret isn’t the only well-worn New Hampshire-based yarn involving a World War II aircraft. Hikers can view the scattered wreckage of a Douglas B-18 Bolo Bomber at Mount Waternomee in Woodstock. The aircraft crashed into the mountain on Jan. 14, 1942, during a blizzard. Five of the seven crew members survived after being rescued by residents of Woodstock and Lincoln.

As of this writing, the missing ball turret hasn’t turned up, though Rapsis said the search itself is just as important as finding the relic.

“History has so much to teach us, and not just in books,” Rapsis said. “It can be found all around us — sometimes under water. Even if the effort to retrieve the ball turret is ultimately unsuccessful, the search for it is a reminder that all those who answered the call to serve their country in World War II should not be forgotten.”

Reprinted with permission by the Union Leader Corp. All rights reserved; For more info about the Union Leader, visit www.unionleader.com.