Scroll of Honor – Clarence Rhody
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, 2nd Battalion, 2nd 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 6th Bomb Squadron of the 29th 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 6th 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 6th 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 6th 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.