The mystery of the Spanish aviator Celso Mosteiro and his B-25 Mitchell bomber in WWII

@DefAviation ES 8·12·2024 · 20:40 0

Although Spain was a neutral country, many Spanish citizens fought in various armies during World War II.

An excellent report on Manuel Otero, the Spaniard who fell in the Normandy landings
A film about Andrés Pereiro, a Spaniard who fought in the US Army in World War II

The excellent YouTube channel Tropa Guripa (I highly recommend subscribing to it if you like content on military history), directed by the Galician Óscar Galansky, has been doing magnificent research work for years on Spanish combatants in the US Armed Forces during that war. The result of this research is the fabulous videos published by Tropa Guripa on Manuel Otero, the only Spaniard to fall in the Normandy Landings, and on Andrés Pereiro, who fell on September 1, 1944 in Brittany (France). Both were emigrants from Galicia.

Yesterday, Tropa Guripa published a new video about Celso Mosteiro Correa, another Galician, in this case born on September 21, 1916 in the city of La Coruña, who emigrated to the United States, specifically to New York, after the start of the Spanish Civil War. Once there, he began the process of acquiring American nationality. Finally, after the approval of mandatory military service in that country (for both US citizens and foreign residents), Celso was called up in February 1941, months before the US entered World War II.

Curiously, this Galician emigrant ended up serving as a bomber crewman (in charge of dropping bombs) on a North American B-25 Mitchell twin-engine medium bomber of the US Army Air Forces (USAAF). His unit was initially sent to the European theatre of operations, where Celso flew missions over Yugoslavia and Italy. On a mission over the latter country, this Galician aviator was wounded in combat by anti-aircraft fire. Celso's unit was later sent to India. There, Celso's B-25 disappeared on a mission on 20 June 1944. You can find all the details of his story in the excellent video by Tropa Guripa (the video is in Spanish but has English subtitles, you can activate them in the bottom bar of the player):

Once again, I congratulate Óscar Galansky and the collaborators of Tropa Guripa for the great work they do. You only have to watch the video to realise the amount of time they must have dedicated to collecting the documents that have allowed us to reconstruct the story of this Spanish aviator and his mysterious end. I hope that one day the remains of his plane will be found and we will be able to know with certainty what happened to Celso and the other crew members of this bomber.

---

Main photo: Lance Cheung / DVIDShub.net. A B-25 Mitchell bomber at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, on April 17, 2010.