Saturday morning, 28 July 1945. New York is wrapped in fog so thick that the top third of the Empire State Building has simply vanished. At 9:40 a.m., office workers on the 79th floor hear a sound no office worker should ever hear: aircraft engines, close, and getting louder. Seconds later a ten-ton B-25 Mitchell bomber, lost in the murk at more than 200 miles per hour, slams into the north face of the tallest building on Earth.

Fourteen people die. A fireball rolls through the offices of a wartime Catholic relief agency. An engine punches clean through the building and falls out the other side. And a 20-year-old elevator operator named Betty Lou Oliver is about to survive something no human being has survived before or since.

Lost Over Manhattan

William Smith had flown through the worst flak in Europe and come home with medals. That morning his mission was mundane: a personnel run from Bedford, Massachusetts, to New York, then on to Newark to collect a passenger. Descending into the fog, cleared toward Newark but warned about visibility — the tower noting it could not see the top of the Empire State Building — Smith became disoriented among the towers of midtown. He skirted the Chrysler Building over 42nd Street, banked the wrong way, and ran out of sky.

Catherine O’Connor was at her desk in the War Relief Services office on the 79th floor when the north wall exploded:

Eleven people in the relief office died, many of them young women doing wartime charity work. The three men aboard the bomber — Smith, Staff Sergeant Christopher Domitrovich, and a Navy machinist’s mate hitching a ride home — were killed instantly.

The Longest Fall Anyone Ever Survived

The bomber’s two engines became wrecking balls. One crossed the full width of the tower, exited the south wall, and crashed through the roof of a penthouse art studio a block away. The other sheared into an elevator shaft — and severed the cables above a car.

Betty Lou Oliver, badly burned at her 80th-floor post, had just been helped into an elevator to be taken down for treatment. The weakened cables snapped. Her car fell seventy-five storeys — roughly a thousand feet — into the sub-basement. A cushion of compressed air in the sealed shaft and a spring of coiled cable beneath the car slowed the impact just enough. Rescuers cut through the wreckage and found her alive: broken pelvis, broken back, broken neck — and a Guinness World Record that has never been approached since. She went back to work as an elevator operator five months later.

The Building That Shrugged

The New York Fire Department fought the blaze 935 feet above the street — the highest structural fire ever brought under control at that time — and had it out in forty minutes. The Empire State Building’s steel frame swallowed the ten-ton impact without a groan; engineers found no structural damage beyond the gash. Many floors reopened for business on Monday morning, less than 48 hours later.

The disaster’s longest shadow fell on the law books: because the government initially could not be sued, Congress passed the Federal Tort Claims Act in 1946 — with retroactive provisions shaped by this very crash — finally letting citizens seek damages from the United States. And sixteen years before anyone drew plans for the World Trade Center, New York had learned that its greatest skyscraper could take a direct hit from a bomber and stand.

The History Guy’s telling of the crash is the best short documentary on it:

And the original 1945 newsreel — the fog, the hole, the crowds on 34th Street:

Sources: NYC Municipal Archives; Guinness World Records; NPR; History.com; Warfare History Network; Britannica; TIME