B-24 Gunner

Written by: Kelly Durham

The B-17 Flying Fortress was the more famous of the American heavy bombers attacking German-occupied Europe, but its sister ship, the B-24 Liberator, carried heavier bomb loads, flew faster, and had a greater range.  It was produced in greater numbers than any other American military aircraft.  Robert LaVerne Anderson of Lake City was a crew member on a Liberator flying from a 15^th Air Force base in Italy.

Anderson, an engineering major, attended Clemson for the 1941-42 academic year and then entered the service, volunteering for the Army Air Force.  He trained as an aerial gunner and was assigned to the 758^th Bomb Squadron of the 459^th Bomb Group which deployed to Italy in early 1944.

B-24s of the 758th Bomb Squadron in formation.

Anderson and his comrades went to work in an “office” bristling with guns.  The B-24 was armed with ten .50 caliber machine guns for self-defense: two in the nose, two in the top turret just aft of the flight deck, one on each side of the waist, two in the belly turret, and two more in the tail.  The gunners, all given the rank of sergeant after

the Americans learned that captured non-commissioned officers got better treatment from the Germans than lower-ranking enlisted men, worked in an atmosphere that could be described as inhospitable.  Temperatures at mission altitudes of 20,000 feet and higher plunged as low as forty degrees below zero, forcing the crew, traveling in an unheated and unpressurized aircraft, to wear electrically heated overalls beneath their heavy flying gear.  Any exposed skin was susceptible to frostbite.  Thinner air at these altitudes also required the crew to wear oxygen masks.

And then there were the Germans.  Even in tight formations in which B-24s sought to protect themselves and each other from German fighter aircraft, losses were frequent.  And though the gunners, like Anderson, could shoot back at the fighters, German anti-aircraft fire was a threat against which Anderson and the rest of the crew could offer little defense.

The job of the gunner was to protect his aircraft so that it could deliver a bomb load of up to 8,000 pounds on enemy targets like transportation hubs, airfields, aircraft factories, fuel facilities and other enemy installations deemed of value.  On June 9, 1944, Anderson and the crew of Hogan’s Hellcats, a B-24 piloted by 2^nd Lieutenant Walter Michaels, were assigned to bomb a target at Munich, Germany, about 500 miles north-northwest of their base at Giulia airfield outside of Cerignola, Italy.

For protection against enemy fighters, the B-24s routinely flew in well-ordered formations, with each aircraft in a position from which it could help defend not only itself, but the other planes in its flight as well.  On this Friday morning, Hogan’s Hellcats was flying in the number 5 position of its formation, the third airplane on the right side of a vee-formation.  Ahead about fifty yards and level with Anderson’s aircraft was another B-24.  Staff Sergeant Michael Meindl was the tail gunner in this ship.  Facing to the rear and scanning the skies for enemy fighters, Meindl had an excellent view of what happened as the formation released its bombs over Munich.

“After making a successful bomb run,” Meindl reported, “five bursts of flak exploded directly under Lieutenant Michaels’ ship.  The tip of the left wing curled up and the ship went into about a 60% bank to the left.”  Michaels brought the airplane out of its dive, but the flak had damaged the bomber and the stress on the wing caused the number 3 engine to fall off.  “The last I saw of the ship,” Meindl continued, “it was spinning earthward, into the flak barrage below us.”

Only the airplane’s navigator, 2^nd Lieutenant Leonard Brosky, escaped Hogan’s Hellcats, blown clear when the ship exploded.  The other nine crew members were killed.  They were buried near Munich.  After the war, their remains were returned to the United States where they were interred at the Zachary Taylor National Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky.

For more information on Sergeant Robert LaVerne Anderson see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/robert-laverne-anderson/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Corpsman

Written by: Kelly Durham

Wilbur Harmon Creighton, Jr.’s World War II experience stands out for his having participated in the two largest amphibious operations in history.  Creighton was a Navy hospital apprentice first class and he served in both Europe and the Pacific.

Creighton was an agriculture major from North Augusts.  He was at Clemson only during the 1942-43 academic year.  Then, the War and Navy Departments ordered most college-age men to active duty.

While still only 18, Creighton opted for the Navy and became a corpsman, that service’s title for a medic.  Navy corpsmen served not only aboard ships and submarines, they also were assigned to Marine Corps units fighting ashore.

According to a newspaper account, Creighton, participated in the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion of Normandy, likely serving aboard one of the hundreds of Navy vessels in the massive fleet supporting the ground forces.  Fast forward to the spring of 1945 and Creighton was in the Pacific Theater accompanying the 1^st Marine Division as it battled on Okinawa.

Okinawa is considered by many historians to be the most brutal fighting of the war.  The Japanese defenders most often fought to the death in an attempt to make conquest of the island so costly that the United States would seek a negotiated peace rather than continue to insist on unconditional surrender.  The battle saw the heavy use of kamikaze attacks, particularly against the naval ships of the invasion fleet.  Estimates put Japanese and Okinawan deaths during the battle at more than 140,000.

From the Navy’s perspective, Okinawa was the costliest battle of World War II with more than 3,800 sailors killed, over 10% of the Navy’s total deaths during the war.  Those included sailors serving aboard ships as well as those ashore with the Marines.

Eugene Sledge, who served with the 1^st Marines on Okinawa, wrote that the Navy corpsmen “were probably more highly respected by Marines—as a group, and as individuals—than any other group of people we were involved with.” They served alongside the Marines, enduring the same miserable conditions and braving the same dangers.  The Japanese would specifically target corpsmen in order to keep wounded men from receiving the care that might eventually return them to battle.

On May 12, 1945, Creighton was killed in action as the 1^st Marine Division fought to capture “Sugar Loaf Hill” on the western side of the Japanese defensive live near Shuri.

Hospital Apprentice First Class Wilbur Harmon Creighton, Jr. was survived by his parents.  He is buried in North Augusta’s Sunset Hill Cemetery.

For more information on Wilbur Harmon Creighton, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/wilbur-harmon-creighton-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Engine Failure

Written by: Kelly Durham

The Rhody family of Starr was one of Anderson County’s  “patriotic families doing their utmost in the war effort.” According to the local newspaper, all three of the Rhody sons were in the service and the family’s two daughters were building B-26 Marauder bombers at the Glenn Martin Aircraft factory in Baltimore. The youngest son was Clarence Rhody, a member of Clemson’s Class of 1945.

Rhody arrived on campus with the last class to enroll before the United States was pulled into World War II.  An agriculture major, he was assigned to Company F, 2^nd Battalion, 2^nd Regiment of the Cadet Corps.

In March 1943, Rhody volunteered for the Army Air Force.  He was one of four, out of a group of twenty, passing an entrance exam to qualify for the air corps. Rhody was channeled into training to become an aerial bombardier.  He attended basic training at the University of Alabama and completed subsequent advanced training assignments at Laredo, Texas; Biloxi, Mississippi; San Antonio, Texas; Nebraska; and Kansas.

After completing his training, Rhody was assigned to the 6^th Bomb Squadron of the 29^th Bomb Group.  The squadron was destined to receive the new B-29 Superfortress very heavy bomber, but these were not yet available, so initially the aircrews trained on smaller, slower, older B-17s. Once it received its new B-29s, the 6^th continued to train, because the new bomber was not simply an improved version of older designs.  According to B-29 pilot Chuck Sweeney, the Superfortress was “a technological marvel, an example of the supremacy of American science and engineering.  The B-29 was not just a collection of incremental improvements to existing aircraft design, a simple step in the evolutionary progress of any technology.  Incorporating scores of revolutionary advances, it was a quantum leap into the future.”  The new bomber featured a pressurized cabin, ten-ton payload, 300 mile per hour cruising speed at 30,000 feet, a centrally-controlled gunnery system, and “four giant, thirty-six cylinder Wright R-3550 engines.”  Those engines were among the reasons why, according to Sweeney, the B-29 “developed a reputation among some pilots as being unreliable and dangerous.”

The 6^th spent two months learning to fly the complex new bombers before deploying to North Field on the Pacific island of Guam in January 1945.  North Field was a sprawling air base with four main runways and revetments for more than two hundred B-29s.  From Guam, the Japanese islands were within the combat radius of the B-29s.

29th Bomb Group B-29s at North Field, Guam, 1945

The 6^th conducted its first combat mission, an attack on Tokyo, on February 25, 1945.  Its high altitude, daytime bombing missions against strategic industries were not effective and the following month, the squadron switched to nighttime, low altitude incendiary attacks on area targets—Japanese cities.

On the night of May 13, 1945, Mothers’ Day, Second Lieutenant Rhody was the bombardier on First Lieutenant Frederick Bedford’s B-29, City of Baltimore. Their mission was an incendiary bombing raid on the city of Nagoya, a manufacturing and shipping hub in central Honshu.  About fifteen minutes after takeoff, one of the aircraft’s giant Wright engines failed.  By itself, the failure of a single engine did not constitute a major emergency, still it was sufficient to abort the mission and return to North Field. By the time City of Baltimore made it back into North Field’s traffic pattern, the weather had become “very bad and visibility very limited,” according to the aircraft’s radar officer, Second Lieutenant Dale Spencer. The bad weather and the dead engine made maneuvering the aircraft difficult.  The ship lost airspeed, drifted to the left of the runway, and crashed.  Eight of the eleven on board, including Rhody, were killed.  Spencer and two of the gunners from the aft section of the plane survived.

Second Lieutenant Clarence Henry Rhody was survived by his parents; his two brothers, both of whom were Army captains, one serving in Washington and one in England; and his two sisters working at the aircraft plant in, ironically, Baltimore.  Rhody was awarded the Purple Heart and after the war was reburied in the Silverbrook Cemetery in Anderson.

For more information on Clarence Henry Rhody see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/clarence-henry-rhody/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also War’s End: An Eyewitness Account of America’s Last Atomic Mission by Charles W. Sweeney, Avon Books, 1997.

In the Navy

Written by: Kelly Durham

It is no surprise given Clemson’s long history of Army ROTC that the vast majority, nearly 80%, of the men on the University’s Scroll of Honor served in the Army and the Army Air Force.  Despite the fact that Clemson has administered an Air Force ROTC program since the late 1940s, it is the Navy rather than the Air Force which lays claim to the next largest group of Scroll of Honor heroes.  Joshua Ward Motte Simmons of Newberry is one member of the Navy contingent, which comprises six percent of the Scroll of Honor.

Agriculture Hall from Bowman Field https://digitalcollections.clemson.edu/

Simmons attended Clemson from 1904 to 1906 as an engineering major.  The young campus included few academic buildings. During Simmons’s time at Clemson, Agriculture Hall (now Sikes) was built, joining the Main Building (later Tillman Hall), Chemistry Building (Hardin Hall), Textile Building (Godfrey Hall) and Mechanical Hall. Enrollment was less than 600 cadets, all male, all white, and the majority from South Carolina.

Simmons left Clemson after two years and eventually made his way to Charleston.  When the United States entered World War I, Simmons joined the Navy.  Ensign Simmons served on two vessels, the USS Osceola and the USS Teal.

USS Teal

Osceola was a seagoing tug that steamed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba and remained there as a station ship.  Teal was a minesweeper.  Launched in May 1918, Teal patrolled off the shores of New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania.  It is likely that Simmons’s service on Teal, operating in and out of northern ports, put him in contact with soldiers returning from the war.  In addition to their gear, many of these soldiers carried the influenza virus that in 1918 swept across much of the United States and the world and was known as the Spanish Flu.

The flu was particularly deadly among young adults whose lungs it would damage and who would then often develop pneumonia.  That may well be what happened to Simmons.  He was admitted to the Portsmouth Naval Hospital in Virginia where he succumbed to pneumonia on March 14, 1919, at the age of 32.

Ensign Joshua Ward Motte Simmons was buried at Rosemont Cemetery in Newberry.  He was survived by his mother.  He was posthumously awarded the World War I Victory Medal.

For more information on Joshua Ward Motte Simmons see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/joshua-ward-motte-simmons/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Dead Man’s Curve

Written by: Kelly Durham

Richard King Thackston of Greenville grew up on his family’s dairy farm off of Buncombe Road and graduated from Parker High School.  He enrolled at Clemson College as a member of the Class of 1933 but would not graduate with his class.  A dairy major, King Thackston joined the Dairy Club and was assigned to Company B of Clemson’s Cadet Brigade.  He was also a member of Kappa Phi Fraternity.  Thackston attended summer school at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University, during the summer of 1932.  After graduating from Clemson in just three years, he continued his studies with post-graduate work at New York’s Cornell University.

Returning to Greenville, he managed Thackston Dairy which produced more than nine thousand bottles of milk daily.  He also immersed himself in community service.  He chaired Greenville County’s Live-at-Home program for farmers, served on the board of directors of Franklin Savings and Loan, and was a trustee of the Greenville County Library.  He was a member of the Rotary Club and served on the executive board of the Blue Ridge Council of the Boy Scouts.

As the United States reluctantly prepared for war, Thackston registered for the draft in October 1940.  Although Thackston’s cadet curriculum at Clemson had focused on infantry training, he would end up in the Navy.

In June 1942, Thackston applied for the Navy’s Aviation Cadet program.  Based on his education, business background, and glowing references, King was appointed a lieutenant, junior grade in the United States Naval Reserve on August 11, 1942.  He reported for instruction to the Naval Training School at the Quonset Point Naval Air Station in Rhode Island on October 20.

Upon completion of his course of instruction at Quonset Point in mid-February 1943, Thackston received orders to proceed to the Twelfth Naval District in San Francisco for the first available transportation to the Pacific Theater where he was to report to the Commander, Air Force, Pacific Fleet for aviation intelligence duties.  Thackston’s orders authorized five days of leave prior to his departure.

On February 20, Thackston, his colleague Lieutenant (jg) James Joseph Britt, and Britt’s wife Margaret set out from Quonset Point for New York City where they planned to dine with Britt’s father.  Traveling in Thackston’s Chevrolet Coupe, the trio headed west on US Route 1.  In the vicinity of Madison, Connecticut, they reached Jannas curve, a hazardous bend in the road.

As Thackston guided his vehicle through the curve, the left front of his car clipped a tractor-trailer rig headed in the opposite direction. The collision caused Thackston to lose control of the car which crashed, seriously injuring all three occupants.  In those days before seat belts, Lieutenant (jg) Britt suffered cuts, bruises, and broken ribs.  Mrs. Britt’s pelvis and collar bone were broken.  Thackston’s injuries were the most serious:  two broken legs, several broken ribs, and a fractured skull.  All were taken to New Haven Hospital were Thackston was listed in critical condition.  The Britts survived their injuries, but Thackston died six days later.

The Navy’s official investigation into the accident noted that Jannas curve was “deceptive and dangerous.”  “The curve is not apparent to the driver of a car approaching” from the west, as Thackston was.  “There are no adequate signs to warn an approaching driver of the serious nature of the curve.”   The report said that there had been so many serious accidents there that the curve was “popularly known in the vicinity as ‘Dead Man’s Curve.’”  The Navy determined that Thackston’s and Britt’s injuries had occurred “not as the result of their own misconduct.”

Thackston’s story is a reminder of an often overlooked tragedy of American involvement in World War II: non-battle deaths made up approximately one-quarter of US military deaths.  Among Clemson men, the percentage was slightly higher, 26%.

Sixty-five Clemson men died during the war in non-battle aircraft accidents, most of them training accidents Stateside, but some in operational theaters while on non-combat missions.  Illness claimed at least thirteen and drownings, both during training exercises and leisure, accounted for seven more.  Two men were lost to friendly fire accidents and eight, including Thackston, to vehicle accidents.  One Clemson soldier was struck and killed by a train.  None of the more mundane ways people died took a hiatus during the war years.  The sacrifice of non-battle death was just as tragic, just as grievous, as death in combat.

Lieutenant (jg) Richard King Thackston was survived by his mother and two brothers, both then serving as officers in the United States Army.  He is buried in Greenville’s Christ Church Cemetery.

For more information about Richard King Thackston see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/richard-king-thackston/

For more information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Thanks to Dr. Debbie Jackson for research assistance.

The Heavy Debt

Written by: Kelly Durham

Clemson students of a later generation are familiar with the name of Otis Morgan who was killed in the last year of World War II.  They remember him not because of how he died, but because of how he lived.

Otis Foster Morgan arrived on campus during the Great Depression.  A civil engineering major from Laurens, Morgan was a member of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the Laurens County Club which he served as secretary.  He was associate editor of The Tiger and served as president of the Central Dance Association.  Morgan, a member of Alpha Chi Psi fraternity, was listed in Who’s Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges.  As a senior, he served as a cadet first lieutenant and company executive officer after completing ROTC summer training at Fort McClellan, Alabama.  After graduating on the final day of May 1938, Morgan lived briefly in Aiken before entering the Army.

Morgan was soon on his way to the Philippines.  Described by his friend Manny Lawton as a “neat, square-shouldered, aggressive lieutenant,” Morgan was assigned to a Philippine Scout unit.  He later moved to the 71^st Engineer Battalion of the Philippine Army’s 71^st Infantry Division.  The Philippine Army had been established only in 1935 as the Philippines formally became an American commonwealth on a pathway toward eventual independence.  The commander of the Philippine Army—as well as American forces in the archipelago—was former US Army chief of staff Douglas MacArthur.

The Japanese attack on the Philippines began on December 8, 1941.  American and Filipino forces were eventually pushed back onto the Bataan Peninsula.  Morgan’s 71^st Infantry Division fell back to Corregidor, the rock island fortress in Manila Bay.  Outnumbered, with limited food and ammunition, and with no hope for resupply, Corregidor finally surrendered to the Japanese on May 6, 1942.

Morgan, along with other American and Filipino survivors of Corregidor’s siege were marched north to the prisoner of war camp at Cabanatuan.  There Morgan was reunited with his Clemson classmate Ben Skardon.  Henry Leitner of the Class of 1937 was also present in the camp.

At its peak, 8,000 POWs occupied Cabanatuan, making it the largest such camp in the Philippines.  The compound covered about 100 acres divided by a road that ran through its center.  One side of the camp housed the Japanese guards and camp administration.  The other side held the prisoners and included a hospital nicknamed the “Zero Ward” because zero was the probability of coming out of it alive.

Ben Skardon’s health had deteriorated at Cabanatuan.  He had contracted beri beri and malaria and was suffering from diarrhea.  He had grown so weak that he could barely eat and was about to be committed to the “Zero Ward.”  Skardon’s story has been oft retold during the ceremony in which Clemson students receive their class rings.  Otis Morgan is at the center of the story.

“I was in very, very bad health in the prison camp,” Skardon recalled, “and there was no medicine and no way of improving your health.”  Leitner and Morgan kept Skardon alive by massaging his swollen feet and carrying him back and forth to the latrine.  Skardon had secreted his Clemson class ring by rolling it up in the sleeve of his uniform.  Morgan had learned a little Japanese and worked on a local farm as an “in charge,” a prisoner who could pass along instructions from the Japanese guards to their English-speaking prisoners.  To save his friend’s life, Morgan bartered Skardon’s ring for food.  “One evening Otis came in from the farm with a small can of potted ham and a live pullet-sized chicken.  Henry borrowed a tin pail, built a fire, and boiled the chicken.”  Skardon recalled that Morgan and Leitner took turns feeding him.  They even broke open the chicken’s bones and pulled out the marrow.  “My diarrhea dried up…my appetite was restored.”  Skardon regained his health and would survive his captivity.  Otis Morgan would not.

Oryoku Maru burning at Subic Bay after being attacked by planes from the carrier Hornet, December 15, 1944.

Morgan spent two years and seven months at Cabanatuan.  After American and Filipino forces returned to the Philippines in October 1944, the Japanese began to evacuate POWs, transporting them by merchant ship to become slave laborers in Japan.  Morgan, Leitner, and Skardon were among 1,619 prisoners aboard the Oryoku Maru at Subic Bay, Luzon when it was attacked by aircraft from the USS Hornet on December 15.  They survived the ship’s sinking but on Christmas Day were transported by train to San Fernando on Lingayen Gulf.  Two days later, the Clemson colleagues were loaded onto the Brazil Maru bound for Takao Harbor, Formosa.  Upon arrival there, Morgan and his fellow prisoners were transferred to yet another ship, the Enoura Maru.  On January 8, 1945, while still at Takao, this ship, which carried no markings identifying it as a POW transport, was attacked by aircraft from the Hornet.  Otis Morgan was killed when a bomb struck the port side hold.  He was buried in a mass grave along with 294 other POWs killed in the attack.  His remains were never repatriated.

First Lieutenant Otis Foster Morgan was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his mother, a brother, and a sister.  He is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing, Manila American Cemetery, the Philippines and on the Memorial Wall at the Aiken County Veterans Park.

In the telling of Ben Skardon’s story, his Clemson ring often gets star billing.  “It saved my life,” Skardon said.  But Skardon always acknowledged the role of his Clemson comrades, Henry Leitner and Otis Morgan.  Their actions converted the ring into the nourishment that rescued him from the “Zero Ward” and offered him a chance for survival.  During their long, dark days of imprisonment, Leitner and Morgan ministered to their weakened friend, purchasing with their efforts a second chance for his life.  Speaking sixty years after the end of the war, Skardon summed up his feelings: “My debt to Henry Leitner and Otis Morgan is heavy—it cannot be repaid.”

For more information on Otis Foster Morgan see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/otis-foster-morgan/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Accidental Discharge

Written by: Kelly Durham

Teddy Gaines was looking forward to returning home.  He had been in France for a year and a half, had seen the Great War through to its end, and was anticipating a reunion with his wife and their toddler daughter.  During a visit with his friend and comrade, Major H. C. Tillman, Teddy seemed “jolly” and “happy,” but within an hour, Gaines was dead.

Theodore Williams Gaines was an agriculture major and a member of Clemson’s Class of 1909.  After leaving Clemson, Gaines returned to his hometown of Greenwood and took employment as a cotton buyer for the Greenwood Cotton Mill.  The mill’s president, J. C. Self, described Gaines as “true blue, loyal, faithful, upright, and a friend.”

In June 1916, Gaines married Miss Wilhelmina Foell of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania who was then the superintendent of the Greenwood Hospital.  Their daughter was born the following summer.

When a coastal artillery company was organized in Greenwood, Gaines was elected its captain.  He later resigned to devote his energies to business, but when the company was activated for federal service upon America’s entry into the World War, Gaines rejoined the outfit.  The Greenwood battery was assigned to the 61^st Coastal Artillery Corps at Fort Moultrie before shipping out to France.

On December 17, 1918, Gaines was killed in his quarters by the accidental discharge of his pistol.  Major Tillman had visited with him only an hour earlier and noted that Teddy was looking forward to the prospect of returning home to his loved ones in Greenwood.  In a letter to Teddy’s father, Tillman described the shock of Gaines’s death and its impact on the unit.  “The entire regiment was if the wound had pierced each and every man. And so it had, for no man was so beloved or deserved it more.  And in death as in life, I say that he was the best of us all.”  Upon hearing the devastating news, Major Tillman at once sought to console Gaines’s brother, Milton, who was serving in the same battery.

A letter to Teddy’s family from Gerald Smart described the military funeral conducted in France.  Gaines’s body was covered with the American flag and rested on a bier in the town square where two thousand villagers paid their respects.  Smart added that “There was not a better liked man in the regiment…no one ever heard any man say evil of [Captain Gaines] who was loved by everyone.”

Teddy Gaines was survived by his wife and daughter, his parents, four sisters, and three brothers, two of whom, Milton and Newt, were then serving in France.  He is memorialized at the Edgewood Cemetery in Greenwood.

For more information on Captain Theodore Williams Gaines see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/theodore-w-gaines/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Over “The Hump”

Written by: Kelly Durham

The spring of 1942 was the low point of the Allies’ World War II experience in the Pacific.  Japanese forces had been victorious at Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, the Gilbert Islands, Guam, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Malaya.  The Japanese violated Thailand’s neutrality and used it to stage an attack on Burma in a successful attempt to severe the Burma Road. This had been the only overland supply route serving Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese regime in its war against the Japanese, a war which had been underway since 1937.  That spring of 1942, as Bataan and Corregidor fell, the Japanese captured Lashio, the southern terminus of the Burma supply route.  To keep their Chinese ally in the fight, the Allies made the consequential decision to resupply Chiang by air.  Half the world away, Henry Grady Stone, Jr. was making his own consequential choice.

“Gee” Stone was a junior general science major from Florence and a member of the Class of 1943.  He was also a member of the Flying Cadets, an organization of junior and senior cadets who already possessed their private pilot’s licenses.  In that dark spring of 1942, Stone elected to depart Clemson and volunteered for the Army Air Force.  Stone advanced through flight training and was designated for multi-engine flying.  After earning his pilot’s wings, he completed Stateside assignments before deploying overseas in September 1944.  Stone was sent to the Air Transport Command’s India-China Division to help fly supplies over “The Hump” of the Himalaya Mountains and deliver them to the Chinese.

Flying the Hump was risky business.  On a clear day, “all” a pilot had to do was climb from just above sea level to as high as 15,000 feet to scale the jagged peaks.  Weather was often a factor as warm, humid air from the Indian Ocean collided with cold, dry air sweeping down from Siberia.  These air masses then collided with the world’s tallest mountain range resulting in violent up and down drafts that could flip airplanes over and send them streaking toward the ground.  And there were also the Japanese, who fully realized the benefits of the aerial resupply effort to their Chinese enemy.  Japanese fighters contributed to the startlingly high losses of the unarmed transport planes flying the India to China route. Initially, the Hump had been flown by DC-3 commercial aircraft commandeered from Pan American World Airways, but by the time of Stone’s arrival, the Air Force was flying military aircraft like the familiar C-47 Dakota and the larger C-54 Skymaster.  One other aerial hauler in use, the C-87, was described as “an evil bastard contraption.” It was nothing, wrote aviation author Ernest Gann, like the B-24 bomber on which it was based.  The C-87’s electrical and hydraulic systems frequently failed at the extreme cold of the high altitudes required by the Hump.  Cockpit illumination was often lost during takeoffs, and the heating system on the flight deck produced either stifling heat or none at all.  These flaws aggravated the C-87’s accident rate which was 500% higher than that of the C-54.  Nonetheless, the exigency of the supply mission required that all available aircraft remain in service.

On November 13, 1944, First Lieutenant Stone was assigned as the copilot of a C-87 loaded with supplies and bound for Chengtu, China.  The airplane lifted off from Jorhat Air Base at 2017 hours.  Takeoff appeared to be normal with the engines running smoothly, but thirty seconds into the flight, between one and two miles from the end of the runway, the C-87 crashed, exploded, and burned, killing Stone and the two others aboard.  An investigation concluded that the airplane took off with its flaps extended, increasing its drag and making it impossible to quickly climb.  In addition, the investigators determined that the landing gear and the flaps could not both be retracted at the same time, so the extended gear added to the already increased drag further amplifying the difficulty of remaining aloft.  It was Stone’s thirteenth mission.

First Lieutenant Henry Grady Stone, Jr. was survived by his parents and a sister.  In 1948, his body was removed from the American Military Cemetery at Jorhat, India and returned to Florence where he was buried in the Mount Hope Cemetery.

For more information on Henry Grady Stone, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/henry-grady-stone-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Remain in School

Written by: Kelly Durham

College seniors generally find themselves looking ahead to the next phase of their lives—where they will live and what kind of job they will have.  As Clemson’s Class of 1943 began its final semester, most of the young men knew that the next phase of their lives would be spent in military uniforms.  What they were unsure of was just how quickly that next phase would begin.

As Americans were fighting the Germans and Italians in North Africa and the Japanese in New Guinea and at Guadalcanal, the headline in The Tiger on January 7, 1943, reported that Juniors and Seniors would remain in school until the end of the semester and would then be called to active duty.  That meant that George Harmon Fairey of Kingstree and his classmates would be allowed to finish their degrees and graduate before swapping cadet gray for Army khaki.

Harmon Fairey was a dairy major and an honors student.  He was a member of Alpha Zeta, the national agriculture honor fraternity.  He flew with the Flying Cadets, marched with both the Junior and Senior Platoons, and socialized with the Williamsburg County Club.  In the Cadet Brigade, Fairey served as a first lieutenant.  He graduated on May 24, 1943, and then awaited his orders to report for active duty.

Fairey entered active duty on August 4.  He was ordered to Officers’ Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia.  Next, he was assigned to Fort Blanding, Florida where he trained Japanese-American soldiers.  In August 1944, Fairey shipped overseas.  He was assigned to a tank battalion in France at a time when American and Allied forces were advancing rapidly toward the east and the German frontier.  On the final day of September, Second Lieutenant Fairey was killed in action.

Second Lieutenant George Harmon Fairey was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his wife, the former Bernice Tucker, his parents, two brothers, and three sisters.  After the war, Fairey’s remains were returned to Kingstree and buried in the Williamsburg Presbyterian Cemetery.

For more information on George Harmon Fairey see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/george-harmon-fairey/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

After the Fighting Stopped

Written by: Kelly Durham

Hostilities in the Pacific theater had been suspended pending the formal surrender of the Japanese.  That ceremony was still a week away, but Captain Claude Sims Lawson, Jr. and his B-29 crew continued to fly missions—only now their focus was on dropping supplies, not bombs.

Lawson, an engineering major from Birmingham, Alabama, was a member of Clemson’s Class of 1944.  After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Lawson left Clemson and joined the Army Air Force.  He applied for flight training and was accepted.  As he progressed through basic, primary, and advanced flight schools, he was channeled into multi-engine bombers.

Lawson was assigned as a pilot to the 502^nd Bomb Group (Very Heavy) which was organized in early 1944.  The group was destined to receive the Army Air Force’s newest—and most expensive—bomber, the B-29 Superfortress.  There were problems with the new bombers which had slowed production, so initially the 502^nd trained with B-17 and B-24 heavy bombers.

In the fall of 1944, the 502^nd began to receive B-29B bombers manufactured in Marietta, Georgia.  The B version of the B-29 was stripped of its high-tech electrically-fired gun system and other components in an effort to reduce weight and lessen the strain on the aircraft’s temperamental engines and airframe.  Lighter and more streamlined with the elimination of gun turrets, the B-29B’s top speed increased to 364 miles per hour.  The B variant was also equipped with the new AN/APQ-7 radar which provided a clearer ground image for bombing in poor visibility.

The 502^nd deployed to the Northern Mariana Islands in late 1944, but rather than attacking the enemy, the group was put to work building Quonset huts to house barracks, mess halls, shops, and other facilities required for the operations of the unit.  During the long interval between arriving in theater and the group’s first combat mission, Lawson likely learned of the death of his brother Bob.  Bob had followed Claude to Clemson in 1941 and had been killed in action fighting the Germans in Europe.  Claude’s group finally began combat missions on the last day of June 1945.  Throughout July and the first half of August, the 502^nd flew very long range strategic bombardment missions over Japan.  Combat missions ended in mid-August when Japan capitulated.  By late August, Lawson had been promoted to Captain and awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.

The end of hostilities did not mean the end of flight operations.  B-29s, with their ability to carry heavy loads over long distances, were pressed into service to fly supplies to Allied POWs in Japanese captivity.  Supplies were dropped by parachute into POW camps in Japan.

On Sunday, August 26, Captain Lawson and his crew picked up a load of cargo parachutes at Florida Blanca Airfield in the Philippines and departed for the long return flight to the Marianas.  Their intended final destination was Isley Field on Saipan.

Lawson’s B-29, Temper Eleven, flew eastward into the night.  According to the official accident report, the aircraft landed first at Northwest Field on Guam.  It then departed Guam at 2247 hours for the short 100 mile hop to Saipan.

Poor visibility, stormy weather and night instrument problems combined to make Lawson’s first approach to Isley Field unsuccessful.  A second attempt ended at 0037 hours on Monday morning when Temper Eleven crashed into the side of Mount Tapochau about five miles north of the airfield.  Lawson and his nine crewmen were killed. The Japanese signed the surrender documents six days later.

Lawson’s remains were recovered from the crash site.  He was buried at the National Memorial of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. Lawson was survived by his parents and their third son, William, then serving in the Marines.  He and Bob are among the five sets of brothers listed on Clemson’s Scroll of Honor.

For more information on Captain Claude Sims Lawson, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/claude-sims-lawson-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Twice Wounded

Written by: Kelly Durham

His was the first American regiment to land in French Morocco during the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942.  Allan Jackson Snead of Greenwood continued to serve in the 47^th Infantry Regiment from Morocco to Sicily to Normandy.  Along the way, he would be wounded  twice.

Snead was a civil engineering major and a member of Clemson’s Class of 1941.  He was a member of the Greenwood County Club, the YMCA Council, and the American Society of Civil Engineers.  Snead qualified as a sharpshooter at ROTC summer training at Fort McClellan, Alabama and served as a cadet Second Lieutenant in Clemson’s Cadet Brigade his senior year.

Following graduation on June 2, 1941, Snead reported for active duty as the United States raced to build up its Army in response to the threat of the expanding war in Europe.  Snead was assigned to the 47^th Infantry Regiment of the 9^th Infantry Division.  After Stateside training, the regiment shipped out in October 1942.  Its destination was French Morocco where it landed in November as part of Operation Torch.  Snead’s outfit was among the first American ground units to be committed to combat against the Axis forces in the European war.

In April 1943, as the Germans and Italians were squeezed between General Eisenhower’s forces in the west and General Montgomery’s Eighth Army advancing from the east, Snead was wounded.  He rejoined the 47^th in time to participate in Operation Husky, the July invasion of Sicily.

The regiment remained in Sicily after Axis forces escaped from the island to the Italian mainland.  Rather than joining the invasion of Italy, the 47^th along with the rest of the 9^th Infantry Division, was ordered to England for reorganization, replacements, and retraining in preparation for the war’s penultimate mission, the invasion of France.

Snead and the 47^th crossed the English Channel, landing on Utah Beach four days after D-Day.  As part of General “Lightning Joe” Collins’ VII Corps, the regiment helped liberate the Cotentin Peninsula by sealing off its base to prevent German reinforcements from breaking through to relieve the port of Cherbourg.

After taking part in the capture of Cherbourg, the regiment was ordered south to join in the effort to liberate Saint-Lô and the junction of key roads General Omar Bradley’s US First Army needed to affect a breakout from the Normandy beachhead.  On July 25, First Army executed Operation Cobra which punched a hole in the German lines and allowed American forces to move south into better country for the maneuver of armored forces.  The 47^th moved south to the area around Gathemo.  On August 2, First Lieutenant Snead was leading a machine gun platoon along a road when he was seriously wounded.  He was evacuated to the 42^nd Field Hospital and then transferred to a hospital in England where he died on August 16.

Allan Jackson Snead was survived by his parents.  After the war, his remains were returned to Greenwood where he was buried in Magnolia Cemetery.

For more information on First Lieutenant Allan Jackson Snead see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/allan-jackson-snead/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

From D-Day to Saint-Lô

Written by: Kelly Durham

First Lieutenant Irvin William West sailed for Europe in May 1944, just in time for the largest amphibious operation in history, the D-Day landings in Normandy.  West was assigned to the 116^th Infantry Regiment of the 29^th Infantry Division.  The 116^th, which traced its lineage to the Virginia Militia of the colonial period, was drawn from Virginia National Guard units, a fitting assignment for West who hailed from Richmond.

Although his hometown was Richmond, West was no stranger to South Carolina where he spent much of his childhood and where his father was in the lumber business.  West was a member of the Class of 1942, the first to leave campus after the United States entered World War II.  A general science major, West was an honor student.  He served as a cadet First Lieutenant assigned to I Company, 3^rd Battalion, 1^st Regiment in the Cadet Brigade.  He completed ROTC camp at Clemson in the summer of 1941, qualifying as a marksman on the firing range.  Immediately following graduation and his commissioning as a second lieutenant in the infantry, West reported for active duty.

West served at Army posts in Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, and Missouri.  He also found the time to marry the former Alice Monroe of Marion before heading overseas in the critical spring of the European war.

On D-Day, the 116^th Infantry was in the first wave, landing on the DOG sectors of Omaha Beach.  No American regiment suffered more grievously.  Fifty-six percent of A Company, most of whose men were from the town of Bedford, Virginia, were killed within the first minutes of landing on DOG-Green beach.  By the end of D-Day, the 116^th had suffered casualties of more than thirty-five percent.  But the end of the day didn’t mean the end of the fighting.  The regiment moved to Pointe du Hoc to reinforce the Rangers who had earlier scaled its sheer cliffs and who faced a long night of German counterattacks.  The 116^th was finally withdrawn to a rest area on June 11.  There it reorganized and received replacement officers and soldiers.

Over the following days, as the Allied buildup of troops, vehicles, and supplies streamed across the beaches and crammed into the beachhead, commanders struggled with how to breakout of the restrictive hedgerow country with its thick hedge barriers at the edge of every field.  General Omar Bradley, commander of the US First Army, focused his attention on seizing the road network converging at the town of Saint-Lô, about forty kilometers south of the invasion beaches.

On June 13, the 116^th moved forward crossing the Ellé River and advancing toward Saint-Lô.  By June 17, the regiment was still three miles from its objective as the Germans made effective use of Normandy’s hedgerows to bog down the American advance. Saint-Lô was finally captured on July 19, two days after First Lieutenant West’s twenty-fifth birthday and one day after he was killed.

The capture of Saint-Lô came at a high price.  From D-Day through July 19, the 116^th suffered eighty-one percent killed, wounded, or missing.  But the seizure of the town and its network of roads readied Bradley’s forces for Operation Cobra, the combined arms operation that would commence July 25 and result in the long anticipated breakout from the Normandy beachhead.  “I have a hunch,” wrote correspondent Ernie Pyle, “that July 25 of the year 1944 will be one of the great historic pinnacles of this war.  It was the day we began a mighty surge out of our confined Normandy spaces, the day we stopped calling our area the beachhead and knew we were fighting across the whole expanse of France.” After Cobra, the Germans would be forced to begin their long retreat to the borders of the Third Reich.

Irvin William West was survived by his mother and his wife.  After the war, his body was returned to South Carolina where he was buried in Marion’s Rose Hill Cemetery.

For more information on First Lieutenant Irvin William West see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/irvin-william-west/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also The Battle of the Generals: The Untold Story of the Falaise Pocket—The Campaign that Should Have Ended World War II, by Martin Blumenson, 1993, and The First Wave: The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II, by Alex Kershaw, 2019.

Staggering Statistics; Staggering Sacrifices

Written by: Kelly Durham

The figure is staggering: the Army Air Forces averaged 1,170 aircraft accidents per month during World War II—not including losses from combat.

 At its peak strength, the Army Air Forces consisted of 2.6 million people and nearly 80,000 aircraft, ranging from simple, single engine trainers to the complex, state-of-the-art, four-engine B-29 Superfortress.  The urgent need for airplanes, fuel, ammunition and above all pilots and crews meant that training regimens were kept to a minimum.  Capable flyers were needed to fight the enemy—not punch holes in the skies over the United States.  As a result, accident rates were high, very high compared to modern tolerances.  The workhorse heavy bombers, the B-17 Flying Fortress and the B-24 Liberator, averaged 30 and 35 accidents per 100,000 flight hours compared to modern Air Force accident rates of less than 2.

Clemson classmates Clifford Gormley and Daniel Pope were two victims of one such accident.

Gormley, left, and Pope

Gormley and Pope were members of Clemson’s Class of 1939 and were both islanders:  Gormley was a Rhode Island Yankee; Pope hailed from Edisto. “CJ” Gormley was a textile chemistry major and a member of Phi Psi honorary society.  He was a cadet second lieutenant as a senior and was a member of the rifle team.  Pope was a cadet captain and company commander.  He majored in agricultural engineering and served as president of ASAE and business manager of the Agrarian, the student publication of the School of Agriculture.  He was a member of the Freshman, Sophomore, Junior and Senior Platoons and Tiger Brotherhood.

Following graduation, Gormley returned to Rhode Island, where he enlisted as an Aviation Cadet in the Army Air Corps.  He trained to become a pilot and received his wings at Maxwell Field, Alabama in June 1940.  He was released from the service but recalled to active duty in July 1941 as the Army embarked on its rapid, pre-war expansion.  Gormley was assigned to the Air Corps Advanced Flying School.  Following service in the states and overseas he was assigned to the Smyrna Air Army Airfield, where he became a pilot instructor.

Pope enlisted as an Aviation Cadet in December 1940, and was accepted by the Air Force for pilot training.  Army Air Forces pilot training was evolving by this time as the service’s leaders developed equipment, airfields, training doctrine and cadre to prepare an ever-growing number of pilots and air crewmen for the looming conflict.  Flight training was divided into stages, the first being pre-flight, which was a six-week “boot camp” focused on physical fitness and basic military training. Cadets were taught the mechanics and physics of flight and required to pass refresher courses in mathematics and physics. They were evaluated for 10 hours in a flight simulator and then performed a one-hour dual flight with a pilot-instructor. Those who passed were given Cadet Wings and promoted to Primary Pilot Training.  Here, cadets were taught basic flight using two-seat training aircraft.  Successful cadets would finish this stage with 60-65 hours of training and would be sent to Basic Pilot Training.  Formation, cross-country, and night flying were taught in this phase using single-engine training aircraft.  Seventy more flight hours would be accumulated before the cadet moved up to Advanced Pilot Training.  Here, cadets would receive an additional 75-80 flight hours in advanced single-engine aircraft or, for those going into bombers or transports, in twin-engine trainers.  In the final phase, Transition Pilot Training, pilots would get two months of flying in either operational fighters or bombers based on their anticipated combat assignments.

Two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Army authorized the construction of a bomber training base at Smyrna, 25 miles southeast of Nashville, Tennessee. By the middle of 1943, the Army Air Forces’ 660^th School Squadron (Special) was conducting transition training for pilots who would soon fly the B-24 Liberator heavy bomber in combat theaters.

On the morning of Wednesday June 16, a B-24 training flight was scheduled with Captain CJ Gormley as the pilot instructor and his classmate Captain Daniel Pope as student pilot.  By this point in his training, Pope would have earned his pilot’s wings.  His mission that late spring morning was to continue his familiarization with the B-24D, the type of aircraft he was projected to soon be flying into combat.

As the aircraft clawed its way into the air, something went wrong.  Gormley, Pope and the other three members of the flight crew were killed in the crash and the airplane was destroyed.  This accident was one event among more than 2,000 aircraft accidents recorded by the Army Air Forces that single month.  That staggering figure includes no combat accidents and is restricted to mishaps occurring in the United States.

Gormley’s remains were returned to Cranston, Rhode Island where he was buried on June 23 with full military honors in the family plot in the Cranston Cemetery.  He earned the American Defense Service Medal and the World War II Victory Medal.  He was survived by his wife, Maxine, formerly of Fitchburg, Massachusetts and his brother, John H. Gormley, Jr. of Cranston.

Popeʼs body was returned to his parents, and he was buried in the Presbyterian Church Cemetery on Edisto Island.  He received the World War II Victory Medal and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his wife, Dorothy, who returned to her home in Alabama following his death.

According to the Army Air Forces, more than 14,900 personnel and 13,873 airplanes were lost inside the continental United States during World War II.  Among them were classmates CJ Gormley and Daniel Pope whose sacrifice is no less tragic for having occurred in training.

For additional information on Clifford James Gormley see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/clifford-james-gormley/

For more on Daniel Townsend Pope visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/daniel-townsend-pope/

For information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

On Okinawa

Written by: Kelly Durham

Okinawa was the last great land campaign of the Pacific war—and by many accounts the most vicious.  The Japanese considered Okinawa the last barrier between the Allies and the home islands.  The Allies viewed the island, some 600 miles from Tokyo, as a vital staging area for the inevitable invasion of Japan.  The 77^th Infantry Division, which had been reorganized and trained at Fort Jackson, was among the American divisions fighting on Okinawa.  First Lieutenant Arthur Raymond Sellers, Jr. of Florence was a member of A Company in the division’s 306^th Infantry Regiment.

Sellers was a member of the last pre-war class, the Class of 1941.  An industrial education major, he was a member of Iota Lambda Sigma, the national industrial education honor fraternity.  He served as a member of the Wesley Foundation Council and the YMCA Council.  He was also a member of the Pee Deeans, a social group formed by the boys from the counties along the Pee Dee River.  Sellers completed ROTC training at Fort McClellan, Alabama during the summer of 1940 and served as cadet First Lieutenant and executive officer of Company D, First Battalion, Second Regiment in the Cadet Brigade.

Sellers married the former Patricia Noble of Central.  Like most of his classmates, he reported for active duty shortly after graduation.

Assigned to the 77^th Infantry Division at Fort Jackson, the 306^th Infantry participated in the Louisiana Maneuvers of 1943.  In March 1944, it shipped out from San Francisco, arriving in Hawaii on April 1.  After amphibious training in Hawaii, the regiment saw its first combat during the liberation of Guam in July.  It then helped liberate the Philippines in November.  At some point, Sellers became ill and was evacuated to a hospital in New Guinea.  He recuperated there for six weeks.  Upon his release for duty, he was granted five days leave.

Sellers used his leave to track down and visit his brother, an aviation machinist mate in the Navy, who was then stationed in the Philippines.  From there, in early May 1945, Sellers made his way back to the 306^th Infantry on Okinawa.

The invasion of Okinawa had commenced with amphibious landings on April 1^st.  The Japanese, repeating the tactics employed so effectively on Iwo Jima, conceded the landings but retreated to well-fortified positions in the jagged coral cliffs of central Okinawa.  With interlocking fields of fire, pre-sighted artillery targets, higher ground, and firing positions dug into the ridges and connected by tunnels and caves, the Japanese high command intended to hold out to the last man.  In the process, the Japanese planned to inflict such severe losses that the Americans would be willing to negotiate peace terms rather than continue to demand unconditional surrender.

Shortly after his arrival at A Company, Sellers was ordered to take over new duties leading the company whose commanding officer, a friend of Sellers, had been wounded.  By May 22, American Army and Marine divisions had penetrated to the inner ring of the Shuri line of Japanese defenses.  Now the enemy line held against all attacks with little or no advances to report.  On this day, under rainy skies that turned the battlefields into mud and restricted the use of Allied airpower and armored vehicles, First Lieutenant Sellers was fatally wounded while leading his company against the enemy.

Sellers was awarded the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his mother, his father, his wife and their ten-month-old daughter whom he had never seen, a sister, and his brother in the Navy.  He was buried at the Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

For more information on Arthur Raymond Sellers, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/arthur-raymond-sellers-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Kamikaze Over Japan

Written by: Kelly Durham

Robert Eugene Adams, Jr. of Atlanta began his collegiate career at North Georgia College in Dahlonega, which like Clemson, was a military school.  Unlike Clemson, North Georgia was a two-year institution so Adams crossed the state line to complete a degree in civil engineering.  A member of the Class of 1943, Adams was an honor student and was selected for membership in the American Society of Civil Engineers.

After graduation, Adams volunteered for the Army Air Force and was trained as a flight engineer on America’s newest, most technologically complex, and most expensive weapon, the very heavy B-29 Superfortress bomber.  The B-29 had been hurriedly developed to meet the demands of the Pacific War, particularly the extremely long range that Air Force planners determined would be needed to bomb Japan’s home islands.  Compared with the venerable B-17, the Air Force’s workhorse heavy bomber in Europe with its range of 2,000 miles and 4,500 pound bomb load, the B-29 could travel 3,250 miles and carry 12,000 pounds of bombs—and at higher altitudes and cruising speeds.  The B-29’s superlative specifications came with a cost: the aircraft was accident prone and its engines were subject to catastrophic failures.  As flight engineer, Adams’s duties included inflight management of the aircraft’s four temperamental 2200-horsepower Wright 3350 engines.

The importance of realizing a quick return on the three billion dollars invested in the B-29 prompted General Hap Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Force, to insist that control of the new bombers be retained at the strategic level.  Rather than operating as an air arm of Admiral Chester Nimitz’s central Pacific forces, the B-29s were assigned to the newly created Twentieth Air Force commanded by Arnold and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, completely independent of other commands and dedicated exclusively to the attack of strategic targets in Japan.

The Marianna Islands, just 1,300 miles from Japan, were the objectives of Nimitz’s summer offensive in 1944.  Once captured, air bases were quickly established on the islands, including Isley Field on Saipan.  Robert Adams and his 497^th Bomb Group deployed to the Pacific in September, but before they could begin flying missions, the group had to participate in constructing the Quonset hut facilities needed to sustain their operations.  The 497^th’s initial combat missions were October attacks against Iwo Jima and the Truk Islands.  It’s first attack on Japan came on November 24.

Weather conditions frustrated the B-29s in their efforts to accurately bomb aircraft production factories and other key facilities.  Winter clouds and the high winds of what came to be known as the Jet Stream prevented the B-29s from causing the damage Air Force leaders expected from their expensive new weapon.

The arrival of a new commanding officer, Major General Curtis LeMay, ushered in a change of tactics.  LeMay ditched the high altitude, daylight pinpoint bombing tactics in favor of low altitude, nighttime area bombing.  Rather than blowing up aircraft production plants, the B-29s switched to burning down Japan’s cities.

Gonna Mak’er takes off from Saipan 1944.

On April 18, 1945, Adams was the flight engineer on Gonna Mak’er, a B-29 piloted by First Lieutenant Robert Anderson.  Gonna Mak’er departed Isley Field as part of a one hundred twelve bomber formation ordered to attack Japanese air bases on Honshu and Kyushu.  The battle on Okinawa was raging, and kamikaze aircraft had been causing severe damage and high casualties among the Navy fleet supporting the ground operations there.  The B-29s were about to learn that kamikaze attacks were not reserved for naval ships.

Lieutenant Mosaburo Yamamoto was the commander of a group of Japanese aircraft sent aloft to intercept the B-29s.  Rather than engage the fast-flying, well-armed bombers in dogfights, Yamamoto’s airplanes were ordered to ram the larger aircraft.  Yamamoto singled out Gonna Mak’er and approached from two o’clock, making a high pass at the bomber.  The B-29’s right gunner fired a long burst into the fighter, striking it as it began a turn.  On its second pass, the fighter rammed into Gonna Mak’er, snapping off the bomber’s right wing and tail.  Without aerodynamic control, the bomber began spinning and tumbling, trapping its crew inside.  No parachutes were observed and the bomber crashed at Ogori in Fukuoka Prefecture killing all aboard.

After the war, Adams’s remains were returned to Georgia and buried in the Decatur Cemetery.

For more information on Robert Eugene Adams, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/robert-eugene-adams-jr/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Icing

Written by: Kelly Durham

Boyd Preston Lawhon, Jr. wasted no time.  He enlisted in the Army Air Force just six days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor yanked the United States into World War II.  Lawhon had attended Clemson College the previous two years to study civil engineering, but had then left school and was working as a machinist at Sonoco Products in his hometown of Hartsville. When war came, Lawhon responded.

Building on his civil engineering studies, Lawhon was sent to Keesler Field at Biloxi, Mississippi for technical training to become a flight engineer.  As such, his duties were to assist the pilot and copilot of multi-engine aircraft with the inflight monitoring of powerplants and fuel supplies.

On March 13, 1943, Lawhon was detailed as part of the crew to ferry a Lockheed Ventura RB-34 reconnaissance aircraft from Red Bluff Army Airfield in Northern California to Medford, Oregon.  The RB-34 was a twin-engine, medium bomber which the British Royal Air Force had employed with limited success in Europe during the early days of the war.  The RAF discovered that the bomber’s lack of speed and armament left it to vulnerable on long missions over enemy territory where the range of escorting fighters could not reach.  By early 1943, the Venturas were relegated to patrol and reconnaissance missions, particularly along coastal areas.

The Ventura was normally crewed by six men, but on this flight, with no operational mission en route, Staff Sergeant Lawhon and the two pilots, Second Lieutenant Joe Hanna and First Lieutenant Robert Smith, were the only official crew members.  Three other service men were listed on the flight manifest as passengers.  The aircraft departed Red Bluff at 1300 hours on a flight plan to Medford.  With pilot Hanna at the controls, the Ventura penetrated a light overcast soon after departure and continued to climb through layers of clouds.  In the vicinity of Redding, California, the weather closed in and Hanna switched to instrument flying.  At this point, extreme icing conditions were encountered.

Icing occurs when rain or other moisture freezes along the wings or control surfaces of an aircraft.  The ice distorts the flow of air over the wing, reducing its lift, increasing drag and weight.  The ice adversely affects the handling of the aircraft and can lead to aerodynamic stall, the loss of the wing’s lift that keeps the airplane aloft.

According to Lieutenant Smith, the copilot, the Ventura quickly lost its “stable flying characteristics.”  Hanna attempted a 180 degree turn to escape the icing conditions, but it was of no avail.  Smith instructed the passengers to don their parachutes.  At approximately 1315, Hanna ordered his crew and passengers to bail out.  Only Smith was able to do so successfully.

The Ventura, in an out-of-control descent, struck the southwest slope of Hirz Mountain.  The aircraft was completely demolished and the bodies of the remaining crew and passengers were found near the wreckage.

Sergeant Lawhon was survived by his parents and two brothers, one of whom was serving in the Navy.  He was buried in Hartsville’s Magnolia Cemetery.

For more information on Staff Sergeant Boyd Preston Lawhon, Jr. see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/boyd-preston-lawhon-jr/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

The Purple Heart Battalion

Written by: Kelly Durham

Following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, General Delos Emmons, the military governor of the Hawaii Territory, supported placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps and classifying them as enemy aliens.  But Emmons recognized that many among Hawaii’s Nisei, the American-born children of Japanese immigrants, wanted a chance to prove their loyalty to the United States through military service.  An effort was mounted to organize some 2,000 Japanese-American soldiers into a fighting force to be sent to Africa or Europe to fight the Germans and Italians, but the War Department initially turned down the request.  Then in June 1942, more than 1,400 Nisei serving in the Hawaii National Guard had their weapons confiscated and were ordered aboard a US Army transport ship bound for Oakland, California.  Upon arrival, the men were designated the 100^th Infantry Battalion.  Given the social attitudes of the day, the Nisei of the 100^th felt they had something to prove.

Cloudy Gray Conner, Jr. of Lamar was another soldier with something to prove.  Conner was a 1937 graduate of Clemson College who had posted an unremarkable record as a general science major.  According to one account, Conner had elected to forgo participation in ROTC as an upper classman because he was judged too short to qualify for an Army commission.  Following graduation, Conner married Anza Willeford of Florence.  He took a job teaching school and also worked as a railroad telegraph operator.  Despite his alleged lack of stature and his not pursuing a commission, Conner was called to active duty in October 1941.

The Benedictine Abbey atop Monte Cassino in February 1944.

Conner trained at Fort Jackson in Columbia, then at Camp Wheeler, Georgia and Camp Clay, Louisiana before being ordered overseas in September of 1943.  He was assigned to D Company of the 100^th Infantry Battalion which was committed to action in Italy as part of the 34^th Infantry Division.  The 34^th was a veteran of the bitter fighting in North Africa.  By the winter of 1944, it was slugging away as part of General Mark Clark’s Fifth Army attempting to break through the heavily fortified Bernhardt Line of German positions in central Italy.  In harsh winter conditions, Clark’s forces were battling to capture Highway 6, the main route through the Liri Valley leading to Rome.  But Clark couldn’t control the valley or the highway without first wresting from the Germans key high ground: Monte Cassio. Dominating the heights was a Benedictine monastery with structures dating back to the Sixth Century.  To knock the Germans off of Monte Cassino, Clark called on the 34^th Infantry Division, including the 100^th Infantry Battalion.

On January 30, the 34^th managed to cross the north-south running Rapido River and seize ground north of Cassino. prompting Clark to predict that Cassio would fall “very soon.”  But the uphill fighting, in snow and freezing weather, crept forward.  During the first two weeks in February, the division made repeated attempts to dislodge the Germans from Monte Cassino.  Historian Rick Atkinson writes that “Hills were won then lost, then won and lost again,” as the fighting raged back and forth.  “Each yard, whether won or lost pared away American strength.”

Despite coming within “100 meters of success,” the 34^th eventually spent its strength.  On February 12,  Lieutenant Conner was killed by a sniper’s bullet to the head.  The 34^th was relieved by a British Indian division the following day.  Casualties among the men of the 100^th were so high—one forty-man platoon was down to just five soldiers—that reporters dubbed the 100^th the “Purple Heart Battalion.”  The Nisei had indeed proved something: their commitment to the United States and to the freedom even then being denied to many of their family members in stateside internment camps.  And Cloudy Grey Conner had proved his ability as a combat officer leading loyal Americans in battle.

Lieutenant Conner, like so many others in his battalion, was awarded the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his wife, his mother, a sister, and a brother.  After the war, his body was returned to Lamar and buried in the Baptist Church Cemetery.

For more information on Cloudy Grey Conner, Jr. see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/cloudy-gray-conner-jr/

For additional information on Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

See also Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944 by Rick Atkinson, 2007.

Navy Doctor

Written by: Kelly Durham

Guy Benjamin Taylor of Lexington entered Clemson in 1912.  Upon completion of his junior year in the spring of 1915, Taylor enrolled at the Medical College of South Carolina.  His graduation with a medical degree coincided with the United States’ declaration of war on Germany in April 1917.  Taylor immediately reported for active duty as a Navy lieutenant (junior grade).

The new Navy doctor was soon sent to France and England where he tended to wounded and sick soldiers.  With the end of the war in November 1918, the Army began to send its troops home.  The tight confines aboard troop ships ensured that the soldiers weren’t the only passengers.  Along for the voyage was the Spanish Influenza.  The first wave of the deadly flu had appeared in early 1918.  Now, assisted by the return of soldiers to points all across the United States, a more deadly second wave was poised to break.

Corpsmen await patients at a Navy influenza ward in December 1918.

Lieutenant Taylor reached the United States at the beginning of December and was assigned to the Long Island Naval Hospital in Brooklyn, New York.  Soon, the hospital was filling with flu patients.  The first wave of the pandemic had resembled typical flu epidemics of the past, with the sick and elderly at the greatest risk.  This second wave broke from the usual pattern.  Now, twenty to forty-year-olds—which included most of the returning soldiers—experienced high mortality rates even among otherwise healthy people.

Like 2020’s Covid-19, the Spanish Flu was highly contagious, spreading easily from person to person through coughs and sneezing.  Even mild cases of the flu could severely weaken the body’s immune system.  The flu constricted and inflamed the body’s airways, slowing down the movement of air and reducing the body’s ability to clear mucus.  With more mucus in the body, bacteria was more likely to form.  The combination of a weakened immune system and the buildup of virus and bacteria often led to pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs leading to high fever and difficulty breathing.

With no vaccines available, officials attempted to limit the spread of the flu through non-pharmaceutical interventions like isolation, quarantine, good personal hygiene, and reduced public gatherings, but these interventions were unevenly applied.  Lieutenant Taylor, surrounded by sick patients, contracted the flu himself.  Falling into one of the more susceptible demographic groups and without antibiotics with which to treat his infection, Taylor’s flu soon advanced to pneumonia, from which he died on January 23, 1919.

Dr. Taylor was described as “a young man of strong character, striking personality, and unusual ability with a bright future before him.”  Instead of that “bright future,” Taylor became one of the estimated 300,000 Americans who died from the Spanish Flu between September 1918 and January 1919.

Dr. Taylor was survived by his father and was buried at the Shiloh Methodist Church in Lexington.

For more information on Lieutenant Guy Benjamin Taylor see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/guy-benjamin-taylor/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

Take the High Ground

Written by: Kelly Durham

Richards Daniel Van Allen reported for active duty with the United States Army in March 1942.  He attended basic training at Camp Claiborne, Louisiana and then was ordered to officer candidate school at Fort Benning, Georgia where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant on October 16, 1942.  The newly minted lieutenant was assigned to the newly activated 100^th Infantry Division then organizing at Fort Jackson.  This wasn’t the first occasion for Van Allen to wear a uniform in the Palmetto State.

Van Allen, from Savannah, Georgia, had attended Clemson College during the 1933-34 school year.  A textile chemistry major, he was assigned to the 2^nd Platoon of Company M, 3^rd Battalion of the Cadet Regiment.  After leaving Clemson, Van Allen returned to Savannah and took a job with Turpentine and Rosin Factors, Inc.  He married the former Dorothy Austin and they established their home in Savannah.

As American military mobilization accelerated in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Van Allen became the executive officer of K Company, 3^rd Battalion, 399^th Infantry Regiment of the 100^th Infantry Division.  The division trained stateside for its planned deployment overseas, participating in maneuvers in the Tennessee mountains before traveling to Fort Bragg, North Carolina for further training.

The 100^th sailed for Europe on October 6, 1944, completing its two week voyage at the southern France port of Marseille.  Attached to Seventh Army, the 100^th moved into the front line on November 2 with Van Allen’s 399^th Infantry Regiment relieving elements of the 45^th Infantry Division.  3^rd Battalion occupied positions about two miles southeast of St. Remy, France.

German troops on high ground overlooking St. Remy fired heavy machine guns and mortars at American forces impeding their forward movement.  A spell of rainy weather further hindered the American advance.  Any American troop movements were inevitably answered by German mortar fire.  The regiment was pulled off the line on November 9, but the rest period lasted only a couple of days.  On November 12, the 399^th was back on the offensive, seeking to seize high ground from the Germans to allow for greater freedom of movement.

On November 19, the weather cleared and a warm sun shone down on the soldiers of the 399^th.  The following day, Van Allen’s K Company attacked Hill 467 supported by a platoon of tanks. While advancing against fierce resistance to destroy enemy heavy machine gun emplacements, the tank platoon leader was killed and the tanks began to withdraw.  Lieutenant Van Allen reorganized the tankers and sent them back into action to support his company’s infantrymen.  With the foot soldiers and tanks working together, Hill 467 was secured, but Van Allen was mortally wounded by enemy mortar fire.  He died the following day in an Army hospital at Neuf Maisons, France.

First Lieutenant Richards Daniel Van Allen was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.  He was survived by his mother, his wife Dorothy, and a daughter, Richards Dorothy Van Allen who was born after his untimely death.  Van Allen is buried at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.

For more information about First Lieutenant Richards Daniel Van Allen see:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/richards-daniel-van-allen/

For additional information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:

https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/

The Global Pandemic

Written by: Kelly Durham

From early 1918 to mid-1920, the Spanish Flu epidemic raged across the world, infecting 500 million people and causing an estimated 50 million deaths.  The pandemic coincided with the final months of the First World War.  The close living conditions of soldiers, both at the front and in training garrisons, fueled the spread of the disease.

Henry Alexander “Hal” Coleman came to Clemson from the Fairfield County rail stop of Shelton when the campus was still in its infancy.  He likely arrived in the late summer of 1910 and was a member of the Class of 1914.

When the United States went to war in the spring of 1917, Coleman went too.  He was an Army private first class assigned to Company C of the 306^th Field Signal Battalion of the 81^st Infantry Division.

The 81^st Infantry Division, the “Wildcats,” was organized at Camp Jackson outside of Columbia in August 1917.  The division took its nickname—and its unit patch—from Wildcat Creek which ran through its training area.  The division’s soldiers were mostly draftees from the southeastern states and they became the first division in the United States Army to wear a distinctive unit shoulder patch on their uniforms.

The division sailed for France in August 1918 and by early October, was defending a sector around St. Dié.  Coleman, remembered as someone with a happy, optimistic disposition, was assigned as a switchboard operator, connecting calls between field phones linked by wires running through the trenches and dugouts scarring the battlefront.  His switchboard was located in a muddy, dank, subterranean dugout.  These conditions, combined with physical fatigue, probably contributed to a weakening of Coleman’s physical strength resulting in the contraction of an illness.  Even so, Coleman remained at his post, continuing to facilitate the critical command and control functions between the various units of the division.

Eventually, Coleman’s illness reached the point where he could no longer effectively discharge his duties and he was evacuated to a hospital near Baccarat, France.  His condition developed into pneumonia and he died on October 20, 1918, less than a month before the armistice that would end the war.

The end of the war did not mean the end of the dying.  Soldiers returning from overseas were packed into close quarters aboard troop ships.  As they were mustered out of the service, the soldiers returned home to all corners of the country, carrying the flu virus with them.  More than 675,000 Americans would die from the Spanish Flu, a ratio that would equate to about 2.15 million in terms of today’s population.  Clemson’s Scroll of Honor includes thirty-four heroes who died during the First World War.  Of these, thirteen succumbed to pneumonia.

Henry Alexander Coleman was buried at the Meuse-Argonne American Military Cemetery in France.  There is also a marker placed in his memory at Antioch Cemetery in Fairfield County.

For additional information about Henry Alexander Coleman see:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/scroll/henry-alexander-coleman/

For more information about Clemson University’s Scroll of Honor visit:
https://soh.alumni.clemson.edu/