But there were no broken bones. It was painful, but not disabling. A few days later, they were to go out on anti-submarine patrol again and Eddie was excused from the flight. But he refused to let anyone take his place. He insisted that he could manage.
At 10:07 a.m. on February 7, 1945, seventeen days before his twentieth birthday, while on patrol 12 miles from Majuro Atoll near the Philippines, Eddie Barron sent a Mayday back to the ship. The plane had engine trouble and radio problems and was going to ditch in the ocean. That was the last signal from the stricken plane.
A destroyer, USS Kidd, along with two other aircraft from the anti-sub patrol were diverted to search for the lost TBM. Other planes joined in the search, but no trace of the plane was found. No wreckage. No survivors. They were all lost. Goranson, Bailey, and Barron.
The names were all familiar to Andrea. When a TBM was lost, all the members of the crew died together—a small family. Goranson, Bailey, and Barron were on the list of twenty-one Natoma Bay dead.
She learned a little about the others from Hodge’s memoir and some records from the ship. Ensign Ruben Goranson also came from Minnesota. His father, Adolph, was a crystal cutter and glassblower. His mother, Alma, was a housewife. They were also immigrants, from Sweden. There were two older brothers, Henry and Harold. All three would serve in World War II.
Ruben, the youngest, was a premed student when the war came along. He took a lot of interest in flying and joined the Navy’s officer candidate program in college. His father’s crystal factory was at the end of a local golf course, and Ruben would often “flat-hat” the factory, making low passes in his trainer. His father, who usually held his temper, would sometimes come running out of the factory yelling Swedish epithets at the sky.
It didn’t bother Ruben, who kept making the low passes over the factory. Ruben was short and took a lot of ribbing over it. But he was athletic; he worked as a lifeguard in high school. He was single when he died. He was twenty-one years old.
After hearing that her son was missing in action, Alma cut evergreen branches and placed them under his bed; it was a Swedish custom. The belief was that the evergreen boughs would provide a safe passage home.
These things Andrea learned from Roger, a nephew who was born in 1948—he never met his uncle.
Eldon Ray “Bill” Bailey was from Kentucky. His parents, Hubert and Elgie Bailey, were farmers. The family moved to Kansas in the thirties and ran into the Dust Bowl. They lived a hardscrabble life.
They were tough people—they had to be tough to come through the Depression. Eldon was also twenty-one when he died.
There was one younger brother, Floyd, who worshipped Eldon, who supported Floyd’s education. After the death of his brother, Floyd joined the Navy.
Andrea and Bruce got the information from a cousin, J. D. Bailey, who had lived with Hubert and Elgie after J. D.’s parents died in the great flu pandemic in 1919.
The stories were unnerving but in some way reassuring. The men who died were boys. Just boys—not too much older than Andrea’s own little boy.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BRUCE HAD UNCOVERED all of the military details about the twenty-one men who were killed while serving on Natoma Bay. He had the action reports, the war diaries, the air-crew accounts, official citations of all types. He knew how and why they died. He just didn’t know anything about them. There was that eternal reason—that the sailors aboard the carrier kept an emotional distance from the combat crews. Experience had taught them that there was a price to pay for getting close to doomed men.
And so if he and Andrea wanted to complete the picture—to find out the whole story—they would have to go back to the families of the dead servicemen. They would have to conduct the research back over time, awaken the families to a grief more than half a century old.
On the other hand, those families might welcome the other side: learning how their loved ones died. They seldom knew.
The dark-haired action figure on James’s pillow was a facsimile of Ensign Billie Peeler, a pilot on Natoma Bay who died on November 17, 1944. Bruce and Andrea were certain of that. But Billie Peeler was not on the master list of the Natoma Bay war dead.
And after some research, Bruce learned why: Billie Peeler wasn’t killed in combat. He died while joyriding with another crew member, Lloyd Holton, on R & R. His plane lost power and spun out of control and plunged into the sea off the island of Pityliu after the Battle of Leyte Gulf.
Billie was a combat pilot—he won the Air Medal at Samar in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944—but because he died while on R & R, he was not included on the official Natoma Bay plaque of war dead at the U.S.S. Yorktown Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.
Bruce had combed through the records and reports that he had assembled—reports from eyewitnesses from other ships and crews that even men from Natoma Bay had not seen—and discovered Billie Peeler’s ironic fate.
And so, in their gritty, determined fashion, the Leiningers set out to establish a proper place for Billie Peeler on the master list of Natoma Bay dead, and—perhaps less significantly—put him to proper rest on their son’s pillow.
Andrea found him on the nara.gov Web site: Billie Rufus Peeler. He came from Granite Quarry, North Carolina. Next of kin were Carl Banks Peeler and Pearl. The 1930 census records listed four children born to the Peelers: Erdine “Virginia,” the eldest, Billie, Carl Banks Jr., and Wallace.
Carl Jr. died in 1997.
There were three W. Peelers in North Carolina, and Andrea called them all, but none of them were related to Billie.
I went back to whitepages.com and typed in Wallace Peeler but didn’t specify a state. I only got one result for the entire country, which is unbelievable. Wallace L. and Stella Peeler. They were living in Alexandria, Louisiana—that’s an hour from us. I didn’t think I could get that lucky. I picked up the phone, and a pleasant-sounding gentleman answered. I went through the routine, then asked if he was the brother of Billie Rufus Peeler.
He was friendly, talkative and the right guy. The younger brother of Billie Peeler.
It took a grand total of thirty minutes on the Internet and four phone calls to find him.
It was clear that Wallace had been very close to his big brother, Billie. His picture in his dress white uniform still hung on the wall in Wallace’s den. And the man in the picture had a very close resemblance to the action figure that James had named Billy.
Wallace was eager to talk. Their father, Carl Banks Peeler, was a semiprofessional baseball player, a pitcher. But in those days, before World War II, a semiprofessional ball player still had to have a job to feed his family. So he became a car salesman. During the war, when car sales were suspended, he repaired steam locomotives. After the war, he went back to selling cars again. Carl and Wallace’s mother, Pearl, was a housewife. She thought about getting a sewing job when she was eighty, just to see what it felt like to get a paycheck, but she never followed through.
Billie graduated from high school in 1940 and immediately entered the Navy’s V-5 pilot training program. He also got engaged, but the name of the girl has been lost and forgotten.
In July 1944, Billie, who was twenty-one, became an FM-2 Wildcat pilot in VC-81 aboard Natoma Bay. During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Billie flew his Wildcat through a hail of anti-aircraft fire to attack a Japanese battleship and destroyer.
It was a heroic action and it won him a medal, but those were heroic moments in naval history, and the men in the fight were less interested in winning medals than in getting a breather from the fire.
The men of Natoma Bay were taken to Pityliu Island, which was part of the Admiralty chain. There was a big aircraft repair yard on Pityliu, and a pilot itching to fly could take a ride in any idle plane that was declared fit and was not assigned for a mission. Sometimes the planes were not completely airworthy, having been shot up, but that didn’t bother a young, hot pilot who had already been through some hard combat of his own. As long as they didn’
t have to fly it through a torrent of flak, he was happy.
Billie and Lloyd Holton, the VC-81 engineering officer who didn’t get much chance to fly, went up in a war-weary Dauntless dive-bomber and never returned. The crash and the deaths were witnessed and confirmed immediately, but it wasn’t until after the war that the Navy revealed the details to his mother:
My Dear Mrs. Peeler,
… I did not know that you had not received all of the facts about Billie. There is no chance that he could have gotten out of the crash. A pilot from another base saw the accident and circled the scene.
At the time we were temporarily living on Pityliu Island on the north side of Seeadler Harbor at Manus in the Admiralty Islands. Several squadrons were brought there after the invasion of Leyte and the Battle for Leyte Gulf for a rest. We had a rough two weeks of operations and all needed some relaxation.
We were doing very little flying. Our days were spent in swimming, playing a little baseball and general loafing.
One afternoon Bill and a good friend of his, Lloyd Holton, decided they would like to go flying. They went to another squadron and borrowed a SBD [Ship Borne Dive-Bomber]. They took off for a flight in the local area. Just before dark we got a message by radio saying that a report of a crash had come in. This report turned out to be Bill’s plane.
We sent a crash boat to the scene, about five miles north of Pityliu. The boat reached the spot after dark. There was nothing there but some floating wreckage.
The next day I talked to the pilot who saw the accident. He said that he was flying along fairly high and looked down to see the SBD spinning at an altitude of about 2,000 feet. He saw the plane recover from this spin and then go into another spin. The recovery from this spin was just starting when the plane struck the water and sank almost immediately. No one came to the surface. The pilot made the radio report and then remained to circle the spot and direct the crash boat.
There is no sure explanation for the cause.… All of us felt Bill’s loss very keenly….
It was signed by Lt. Commander Bill Morton of Billie’s squadron.
Wallace had the letter. His mother had saved it until she died in 2000. She never fully accepted or recovered from Billie’s death. She kept his clothes in a trunk because she thought he would need them when he came home.
There was a sense of an incomplete story that haunted the entire family. It was not just the cruel accidental death, although that was a factor.
“You know, I was in the Navy, too,” Wallace told Bruce and Andrea when they came to visit him. “I was nineteen years old and a seaman first class on USS Chester, a cruiser, part of the same fleet as Natoma Bay; we were preparing to support the invasion of the Philippines. This was in October. Billie was an officer and had access to all the ships in the fleet. He made arrangements to take a launch over to the Chester to see me on October twelfth. I was very excited because I hadn’t seen him in almost three years.”
But in the middle of the night, before they could meet, USS Chester sortied with the other ships of its task force and pulled out of Seeadler Harbor. They were headed to a raid on Formosa.
The two brothers kept missing each other as the fleet battled across the Pacific. Finally, USS Chester was near Natoma Bay at Iwo Jima, where many great fleets had assembled for the invasion. But by then Billie was dead, and the letters from his parents in North Carolina telling Wallace about it were still crisscrossing the ocean.
Wallace remembered standing on the deck of Chester during the battle of Iwo Jima, looking out over the horizon, seeing hundreds of warships, thinking that his big brother was out there on Natoma Bay and would come and visit him as soon as things calmed down.
James had named his GI Joe “Billy” after Billie Peeler. Bruce and Andrea finally had no doubt.
The final action figure had auburn, almost red hair. His name in real life had been Walter “Big Red” John Devlin. That was what the Leiningers believed, although it was very hard to pin down.
Walter Devlin was born in 1921 in New York City, Ozone Park, Queens, an outer borough, suggesting a blue-collar background.
Unfortunately, his father was not listed in the 1930 census and remained unidentified. Walter’s mother, Mary, who was forty-six in 1930, lived with her brother-in-law, Patrick Devlin, then forty-seven, a widowed plumber. There was another boarder, another widower, sixty-seven-year-old Thomas F. Leese. He was listed in the same census as Mary’s father. Mary had three children: James, born in 1920, Walter, born in 1921, and Gerard, born in 1923.
Walter was a big kid who grew up to be a big man—just about six feet four.
All of Andrea’s computer magic couldn’t locate a living member of the family. She found a James J. Devlin, who died in 1995. Through the census records she found out that Gerard had enlisted in 1942 and served in the Army Air Corps. Although she had his social security number, there was no way to tell if he was still alive or dead. There were seventy-four Gerard Devlins in New York—fifty in Brooklyn and Queens alone—and Andrea called every single one, but to no avail.
The only way that they pieced Walter Devlin’s story together again was through the eyes of the veterans of Natoma Bay. Ken Wavell, a former Avenger pilot, had powerful memories of “Big Red,” who, in the squadron photographs, looked like Gary Cooper.
He was lean and lanky and far too tall to be a pilot, really. I couldn’t imagine how he even fit into the cockpit of the FM-2 fighter. Irish, with all that big red hair. Every time they pulled a physical, he’d crouch down a little. Typical Yankee. Big Brooklyn Dodger fan. And he liked to play bridge. Rumor has it that he had even been a race car driver, so he didn’t have a lot of fear. But there was one thing that worried Red: water. He couldn’t swim, and he was afraid of the time he might have to land in the ocean. A water landing terrified him.
On October 26, 1944, two sorties were sent after the Japanese ships that fled from the Battle of Samar into the Visayan Sea. Thirteen planes made a run on a destroyer and sank it. Among the attack aircraft was one flown by Red Devlin. The group leader was Ken Wavell.
On the return flight back to the carrier, Ken Wavell got a call from Red Devlin. He said his fuel was low; he was flying on fumes. Wavell called the carrier on his command set and asked them to let Devlin land first because his fuel was critical. The ship didn’t acknowledge his call, so when Red came in, the ship was still turning into the wind. The landing signal officer, unaware of how critical the situation was, waved him off.
Red Devlin took the wave-off, pulled up his wheels, and ran out of fuel. He crash-landed in the ocean a few hundred yards away from Natoma Bay. The men on deck watched him get out of the cockpit, stagger out onto the wing, and then fall into the water. Ken Wavell, flying overhead, dropped a life raft.
“He was floating facedown in the water,” said Wavell.
The men of Natoma Bay were a little baffled by it. They saw Red Devlin walk out onto the wing, a life raft within easy reach. Why didn’t he just dog-paddle his way to safety? Even a poor swimmer could manage that.
The only explanation was that he was dazed by the crash landing. He may have been stumbling out onto the wing, but he was probably only going through the motions—a sort of muscle memory of walking away.
They had good reason for their speculation. Everyone knew that the cockpit on a Wildcat had a tendency to jam shut on a hard deck landing or ditching in the ocean. Devlin, fearing that he would be trapped inside the cockpit, probably unstrapped his harness before hitting the water, so that he would be free to get a running start on evacuating the sinking plane.
When his plane actually hit the water, without the harness to hold him back, Devlin’s head slammed into the airframe and he got knocked silly.
When the men on deck saw him stagger out onto the wing, Red Devlin was probably suffering the effects of a head injury. And his greatest fear was realized: he drowned after a water landing.
And that’s how Walter “Red” Devlin, the last action hero, died.
> CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
You just have to know what to ask for and how to ask. I love computer research.
IT ALL CAME together in February.
Now Andrea was a dancer, weaving through the information hub, the links and Web sites and blind alleys. She had found eleven families of the twenty-one dead servicemen in one month. But more than that, her worries about the character of James Huston Jr. had gone. The casualties of Natoma Bay all turned out to be decent, honorable boys. In the face of all the heroic sagas, the notion that James Huston Jr. might turn out to be an exception seemed ridiculous.
In the end, the dead servicemen represented an elegant cross-section of American life, ranging from the children of dirt-poor farmers to the scions of powerful industrialists.
And as each story unfolded, it revealed its own heartbreaking poignancy. For instance, there was Richard Quack, who grew up on a farm in Sault Saint Marie, Michigan. An early enthusiast of flying, he had his room filled with model airplanes, and his head full of real ones. He joined a civilian flight training club in high school, and when the war came along, Richard Quack joined the Navy and volunteered for flight training. Just before he was shipped off to the Pacific, he married his high school sweetheart, Dorothy. She was pregnant when he sailed.
His daughter, Karen, never saw her father. Richard was killed in a midair collision on a predawn takeoff on April 9, 1945. He was twenty-two years old. There was a touching familiarity to the story.
Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot Page 17