Soul Survivor: The Reincarnation of a World War II Fighter Pilot

by Andrea Leininger

  Peter Hazard was one of Andrea’s more difficult searches. His family was from Rhode Island, but in the 1920 census records they were also listed as living in Santa Barbara, California. A clue to the multiple listing was contained in the description of the members of the household: Rowland Hazard, thirty-eight, head of household; Helen Hazard, thirty, wife; Caroline, six, daughter; Rowland Jr., two, son; Peter, one, son; Elizabeth Stevenson, thirty, nurse; Catherine McCaughey, twenty, nursemaid; Marie Ziegfeld, forty, chambermaid; Anna Tobin, forty-five, cook; William Ryan, nineteen, butler; Samuel Lopes, twenty-seven, chauffeur.

  The family of five had six servants. (Another son, Charles, would be born after the census.)

  Under the head of household’s occupation it said, “None.” The Hazards were rich.

  By the time Andrea began her search, they had all passed away except for Charles’s wife, Edith. Since Andrea could not find a death record, she typed in “ aabibliography.com/rowlandhazard.htm.” There was no help in the white pages, but during a purely random search, she found Edith Hazard listed as a board member of a Rhode Island museum.

  Andrea called the museum and spoke to an official, who refused to give out Edith’s telephone number, but Andrea finally convinced the reluctant curator to give Edith her number. Within half an hour, Andrea got the call back, and the Hazard saga unfolded.

  The Hazards were an old aristocratic family from England—the genealogy dated back to the eleventh century. Peter’s ancestors fought in the Crusades.

  In the beginning, they were woolen magnates who dabbled in oil and banking. They were also afflicted with that peculiar balance of tragedy that seemed to deliver a kind of rough justice to America’s aristocracy. Sons died in war, from World War II to Vietnam, and daughters died of peculiar diseases (pernicious anemia or an allergic reaction to penicillin). They were scattered and shattered by divorce and alcoholism.

  And yet, at times of crisis, they all answered the call to duty. That, too, was written in the family code of honor. Rowland, the oldest son, was killed in a training accident in Florida. Peter, who went to St. Paul’s in Vermont and then Harvard, where he captained the crew team, became a naval aviator. He died heroically on March 27, 1945, during the battle of Okinawa. He was twenty-six.

  Peter was flying an Avenger, ready to attack a land target, when a swarm of kamikazes crossed his front, about to begin an attack on the American fleet. Without hesitating, Peter Hazard broke from his own attack and attempted to intercept the Japanese suicide planes. He flew directly into American anti-aircraft fire to break the Japanese formation. It was suicidally reckless and brave and may have saved the fleet.

  They didn’t find wreckage or survivors, just a yellow dye marker where Hazard’s plane went down. Peter Hazard was lost, along with his crew, radioman Bill Bird and machinist’s mate Clarence Davis.

  Charles, the youngest son, was fighting in a tank battalion in Europe. He was brought home as the last surviving male heir.

  None of the details about Peter’s death were known to Edith Hazard; Richard Quack’s sister, Elizabeth, had lived with the mystery of her brother’s death for half a century.

  It was the policy of the Navy Department to keep the details “Top Secret,” fearing at the time that the enemy could benefit from learning tactics or even knowing who was missing. It was a security-minded time, when the slogan “Loose lips sink ships” was the byword.

  The families would send letters to commanders or shipmates asking for information, and, with a few exceptions, they were met with denials for security reasons. Even after the war, some form of bureaucratic inertia kept the government from disclosing the facts.

  Bruce thought it was time to break the silence, so after every contact the Leiningers would send a letter thanking the family, a copy of the Aircraft Action Report diagrams, and any other official document relating to the death. He would also include transcripts of any informal interviews with crewmates, giving a human narrative to the story. And last of all, he enclosed copies of pictures he had found at the reunion.

  It was always a relief. These families had spent sixty years clinging to the slim threads of doubt and hope. Closure was always welcome.

  Bruce also included a poem. It was something he wrote after the first reunion, on December 7, 2002. It was entitled “Knights of the Air and Water.”

  Knights who never saw the last sunrise.

  Who await you in the last call to GQ or TWO BLOCK FOX.

  It is truly all for one and one for all.

  God, give this day to the bread of fellowship of these men as a crew.

  To each loved one left behind, may Your Spirit of eternal love embrace them.

  This, too, was a comfort to the survivors.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE ELDER JAMES McCready Huston haunted Bruce Leininger. The thought of the father attending those old reunions back in the sixties, wandering among the veterans, asking about his son, trying to find out how he died, and coming away empty-handed, felt like an open sore. James McCready Huston died in 1973, but Bruce thought he still owed the old man an account of his son’s death.

  The past month’s work had built up Andrea’s computer confidence, and she had a larger pool of Web sites and links to work with. And she and Bruce had shed the fear of what they would find. It was time to tackle James M. Huston Jr. again.

  I started with the census record because that would show me if I was onto the right family. I looked up all the records in Pennsylvania that contained the name James M. Huston or James Huston. On the third or fourth try, I found the one I was looking for: James M. Huston, head of household; wife, Daryl; daughter Ruth; daughter Anne; and son, James Jr. I knew, of course, that James M. died in October 1973 and that Daryl died four months later. And I knew that they died in Los Gatos, California. But that’s where the trail stopped cold. By now I was determined to dig deeper and try harder. And that meant shifting back again to the Pennsylvania base.

  Andrea went to the social security death index and confirmed that James and Daryl had died in 1973 and 1974 in California; then she hunted around on ancestry.com, trying to find marriage records for Ruth or Anne. Back to the female dead end.

  The only thing to do was to switch tacks and go back further in history. She wanted to see if she could track down any cousins—any male relatives. The more details, the better.

  So she went back to the census records for James, 1910, then 1900. McCready Huston’s father was a dentist, Dr. Joseph Andrew Huston. He married a teacher, Elizabeth Fishburn. They had three sons: John Holmes Huston, James McCready Huston, and Smith Fishburn Huston. John Holmes Huston died when he was twenty-three, possibly a casualty of World War I. He was single and left no children. Smith Fishburn Huston, who died in 1960, married Christena Williams and had five children, four of them girls. The only boy was Robert M. Huston.

  There was no trace of him in the Pennsylvania white pages. There were 250 Robert Hustons in the United States—too many to start a cold-call campaign, even for someone as tireless as Andrea.

  Back to the basics. James McCready Huston’s occupation was listed as newspaper writer. A newspaper writer would, by definition, leave a paper trail. Trolling through the Internet, she found a couple of articles about him. One was in the Brownsville Time Capsule from Brownsville, Pennsylvania. It was a review of a novel he had written, which was being published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company. It was called The King of Spain’s Daughter and enjoyed a modest success. The book review mentioned that Huston had been the editor of the South Bend, Indiana, News-Times. There was another article mentioning a column he had written for the Brownsville Telegraph, called “And That Was Brownsville.”

  The McCready family had roots in Brownsville.

  The Pennsylvania connection seemed strongest, so Andrea called the Brownsville Telegraph and asked if anyone remembered James McCready Huston or the son, James M. Huston Jr.

  It was one of those random tries—a thin little line cast out into the da
rk without much hope of success. As luck would have it, the Brownsville Telegraph was one of those intimate little newspapers where everyone knows everyone else—or at least knows where to find out about them.

  Andrea was directed to a former secretary who had worked at the paper for many years. Yes, she remembered the Huston family. One of Huston’s cousins still lived in the area. It was one of Smith Huston’s daughters, Jean. The old secretary got out the phone book and looked up the number and wished Andrea luck.

  “Hello, my name is Andrea Leininger, and my husband, Bruce, and I are working on a book…”

  Jean was happy to hear from Andrea. She knew all about James M. Huston Jr. and his heroic service in World War II. His older sister, Ruth, had been a society editor for the Brownsville Telegraph. But she had died.

  By this time, Andrea had learned to cope with the flutters of hope and plunge of disappointment that come with the wind. People die or vanish or forget. However, Jean had a blockbuster bulletin: James’s other sister, Anne, was still alive. She was living in California. Jean didn’t have the contact information, didn’t know how to find her, but she was certain that her sister, June, did. So Andrea got June’s number and gave her a call.

  June was a talker. She spent an hour telling Andrea about, well, everything—her son’s flat feet, what she was making for dinner—and in the background Andrea could hear the pots rattling, the water splashing, the doors banging. June was living her life with the phone cradled on her shoulder and filling in her new friend about the background of the Huston clan. Finally, Andrea pried out Anne’s married name and number and got off the phone. The name was Anne Huston Barron, and she was eighty-four years old now.

  A soft, sweet voice answered the phone in Los Gatos, California. “Hello?”

  Andrea explained again who she was and why she was calling. And then that breathless, terrifying question: “Are you the sister of a pilot, James M. Huston, who was killed in World War II?”

  And the soft, sweet voice answered, “Yes.”

  Andrea’s heart was beating like a rabbit’s as she sat down at the kitchen table with a pad and pencil and the telephone. She explained the complicated journey of finding Anne, how she had tracked down Jean.

  “Jean could talk a bug off a vine,” said Andrea.

  “Oh, yes,” replied Anne. “Usually after half an hour on the phone with her I suddenly have to answer the door.”

  She talked about her parents. They had moved out to California after they retired. They died within a few months of each other.

  Andrea wanted to talk about James, her brother.

  “We called him Jimmy.”

  “Could you tell me about him?”

  “Oh, he was average height and build. Blond hair and blue eyes. A nice-looking boy. He loved flying. Ever since he was a young boy, he used to make balsa-wood models. When he got older he went flying in the old biplanes. Every chance he got. Oh, and he had a good singing voice. He even sang on the radio in a choir. He loved ‘Red Sails in the Sunset.’”

  “Do you remember anything about his death?”

  “On the day he was killed, I was fixing up my house in California. For his return. We were going to have a reunion. Our parents were coming from Bryn Mawr in Pennsylvania, where they were living at the time.

  “As I was cleaning, I had this very sudden feeling that Jimmy was in the room. His presence was so strong that I actually started talking to him. I remembered a few days later when Dad called to tell me the news. I remembered that it was on March third.

  “Mom and Dad never talked about Jimmy’s death, but Dad went to several reunions to see if he could get any details. He never could.”

  Jimmy had a friend, Jim Eastman. The day Jimmy was killed, Jim Eastman’s mother said she had a dream in which Jimmy came to her and said, “I just wanted to say good-bye.” It made her hair stand on end.

  I still had hope that all this talk of spirits was wrong. Huston was shot down in an FM-2 Wildcat fighter plane—not a Corsair. I had that to cling to. No one at the reunion had ever seen a Corsair taking off from Natoma Bay.

  Meanwhile, I had my consulting business, and that required a lot of attention. And then I got that very excited phone call on February seventeenth. Dre had found Huston’s sister. I really never thought that she’d do it. I mean, she gave it one full try before and ran into a blank wall. So I had only a halfhearted belief that she’d be any more successful this time. At least for James Huston. But Dre is persistent and talented when she gets in front of a computer, and in a couple of days she tracked Anne down.

  She was an eighty-four-year-old lady living in Los Gatos, California, and I called her—I called her a few times—and we became friends. She said that she would send me some photos of James taken during his military service. For research.

  When she asked me why I was so interested, I lied to her as I lied to Leo Pyatt. Again, I had no choice. I just said that I was curious and wanted to do a book. No one really knew why I was so intent on finding out. I told her the details about James’s death, how he’d gone down in Chichi-Jima. She asked about the spot, and I said it was in a harbor, very beautiful. She seemed pleased with that.

  I read her the after-action reports. I told her we would send her the military records, including a picture of the harbor at Chichi-Jima, and she was very grateful.

  Anne’s package arrived on February twenty-fourth. I was not prepared. I was totally unprepared.

  There was a letter:

  Thank you so very much for all the data you have sent me. I have been busy mulling it over. It is much more personal than anything I have. The picture of the Bay is beautiful and so peaceful. A lovely resting place. As most of us who live alone, I have my little routine. My morning coffee and the newspaper. After the news it is the crossword puzzle. In our paper the horoscope is printed above the puzzle. I seldom read it because it usually says a lost article will be found, or a great romance is in the future (at 84 that is good news). At any rate, I glanced at yesterday’s horoscope, and this is it:

  “Scorpio (Oct. 23–Nov. 21) Emphasis on the long-ago and far-away. You may be contemplating a journey, a reunion with one who played an important role in your past…”

  Then there were the enclosed pictures. The first few pictures were shots of James M. Huston Jr. Bruce and Andrea had seen him in the group pictures and squadron pictures, so they knew what he looked like.

  It was the fourth picture that stopped them both. It was a squadron picture—the usual kind of cluster of smiling young men at the peak of their health and good spirits. That wasn’t what froze them. It was something in the background. For behind this particular squadron was a Corsair.

  “Are you sure?” asked Andrea.

  “The cowling,” replied Bruce. “The engine cowling of a Corsair is unmistakable. It’s a Corsair.”

  The next picture was even more startling. It was just James Huston, and he was standing in front of a Corsair. No mistake. The fuselage, the gull wings, the high cockpit. A Corsair.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  BRUCE HAD STAGED a fighting retreat from the wild conjectures over the meaning of his son’s nightmares. He had dug in and insisted that whatever they were, they were not proof of a past life. Yet, he had lost the battle over the name Natoma Bay—it was an American ship, not Japanese. Jack Larsen turned out to be a real person who flew off Natoma Bay. The knowledge that Bruce’s son had of airplanes and flying was uncanny; the battles in the Pacific were real, and the veterans vouched for the details. Finally, he had to accept that James Huston Jr. was the pilot who was killed in his son’s horrific nightmares.

  Still, he had held out over the fact that James insisted that he flew a Corsair in the war and no Corsairs were reported on Natoma Bay. And now that last bunker had fallen. He had the picture of James Huston Jr. standing in front of a Corsair.

  He was starting to believe in something beyond reason.

  I was baptized and raised as a Methodist. I grew up going t
o church every Sunday with my mother and sister. My father had very little to do with church when I was a child. Church is a place that makes me feel comfortable, safe, welcome.

  When I was younger, I went to church with friends of different denominations, to see what they were like. I went to Buddhist temples, Catholic cathedrals, Lutheran, Pentacostal, Episcopalian… most of the other Protestant churches. I even went to synagogues.

  But as I matured, I became connected to the Evangelical Christian movement, eventually finding myself involved with a Full Gospel Christian Businessman’s Fellowship.

  We met every two weeks for Bible study, discussion, and trying to assimilate the Word into our lives. It was a dramatic journey. I studied the Bible intensely. The Holy Spirit was demonstrated for me in praying in tongues, faith healing, and discernment.

  I have witnessed healings that I know were genuine.

  I have personally realized the true power of prayer. I prayed for a second chance after my first marriage failed because I was spiritually lost. I prayed for a wife with green eyes—and one who was Asian—and my second wife, Andrea, has green eyes and her mother is one half Filipina.

  Suffice it to say that I feel I am a developed Christian on a continuous path of spiritual growth.

  If James’s nightmares were truly a manifestation of a past life—a proof of reincarnation—then, as I saw it, it would threaten the biblical promise of salvation. If the immortal soul can randomly transfer from person to person, generation to generation, then what does that imply for the Christian orthodoxy of redemption? What happens on Judgment Day if the immortal soul is handed off like that? It goes against the evangelical teaching of rebirth through a spiritually transformed personal life.

  The impact of James’s story on my spiritual well-being… well, it felt like spiritual warfare. My purpose for disproving what was happening to my son was to establish that this was all a coincidence, as astronomically remote as that possibility seems.