Holocaust victim

The plane was literally full of babies in cardboard boxes. And then the door exploded.

April 1975, Saigon was falling. North Vietnamese tanks were 10 miles away. US President Gerald Ford ordered Operation Babylift - fly 3,300 Vietnamese orphans to America.

The first flight was a giant C-5A Galaxy, the biggest plane in the world. On board were 314 people - 243 babies and children, many under 1 year old, sick, malnourished. They had no cribs. Nurses put them in cardboard boxes from the base exchange and strapped the boxes to the floor with cargo nets. Each box had 2-3 babies.

12 minutes after takeoff from Tan Son Nhut, at 23,000 feet, the rear cargo door blew off. Explosive decompression. The plane filled with fog. 2 flight attendants and 78 babies in the back were sucked out and died instantly.

The pilot, Captain Bud Traynor, wrestled the crippled plane. He couldn't go back to Saigon - too dangerous. He crash-landed in a rice paddy. The plane broke into 4 pieces. 138 died total. 176 survived, including 149 babies found alive in the wreckage, still strapped in their boxes.

The photo you see is from a SECOND successful Babylift flight a day later. Those boxes are real. Those nurses volunteered to fly into a war zone knowing the last plane crashed. Many of those babies grew up in America and only 30 years later learned they survived a plane crash that killed their friends.

One survivor, Aryn Lockhart, was 2 months old in a box on that crash. Today she is a mother in Ohio.

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