Category: We Remember

USAFRetired sends us a link to the news that Captain Albert Schlegel is coming home. Hondo told us last year that his earthly remains had been identified by DPAA.

The ace of Cleveland, Ohio.

He was a local legend who had been declared killed in action in 1944 after flying a mission over France. He was 25 when he died.

Schlegel will be buried with full military honors in Beaufort National Cemetery at the end of March. The ceremony was organized by the only living family member to remember Schlegel — his nephew, Perry Nuhn.

Nuhn, 84, lives on Callawassie Island and is a retired U.S. Air Force colonel and decorated pilot.

You’ll notice in the picture above, Schlegel is wearing two sets of aviator wings, that’s because he joined the Canadian Royal Air Force before the US entered WWII and then transferred to the US Air Corps when they went to war. He had 15 kills as an air ace.

On Aug. 28, 1944, Schlegel was flying with his squadron over Strasbourg, France, on a mission to strafe German trucks, trains and oil on the ground. The weather was poor, and the P-51D flew low.

Schlegel radioed that he had been hit by anti-aircraft fire and disappeared into the clouds.

Back home, his family received a series of notices: missing in action in 1944; killed in action in 1945; body unrecoverable in 1949.

[…]

Along with the car crash injuries, pictures of Schlegel’s skull show a bullet hole in the top of the head and a large exit wound in the back.

Witnesses had reported seeing an American seated in a car with several Germans headed toward a train station on the evening Schlegel went missing.

Another witness later reported hearing two gunshots behind the station about dusk, according to the report from the federal agency.

[…]

The remains showed evidence of a beating.

After taking flak, freeing the bubble canopy of the P-51D and parachuting to the ground, Schlegel had apparently been captured and executed.

He’ll be laid to rest in Beaufort National Cemetery, South Carolina on March 30 after three days of ceremony;

His casket will arrive in Savannah on March 27 and be transferred to Nuhn during a short ceremony by an Air Force Honor Guard.

A set of Schlegel’s medals recommissioned for his burial and an Army uniform will go to the National Museum of the Mighty Eighth Air Force in Pooler.

A memorial service at the museum March 29 will end with a flyover of four F-15s from Schlegel’s 335th Fighter Squadron out of Goldsboro, N.C. The jets will form the “missing man” formation, with one aircraft peeling off in the fallen pilot’s memory.

“They are tremendously proud of their aces,” said retired U.S. Air Force Col. Jack Berry, who lives in Goldsboro, worked for Nuhn at the Pentagon and helped facilitate the flyover.

Back in November, Hondo told us that the remains of Sergeant First Class Robert Cummings had been identified by the DPAA. Jill sends us a link to the story that tells about his son, Rex, who waited for the father he never knew;

“It’s what I prayed for,” said Rex Cummings of Clarksville. “Never give up. Never give up.”

Sixty-six years. That’s how long Cummings has waited. Wife Deborah sat with him on a couch at Neal-Tarpley-Parchman Funeral Home as he finally got a chance to say goodbye to a man he never had the chance to meet.

From the Leaf-Chronicle;

Rex Cummings was born was born two months after his father, Sfc. Robert Roy Cummings, went missing in Korea. Robert Roy Cummings’ remains were found in November, more than half a century after he disappeared.

“I can’t explain it, 66 years of emotions flooding, but the main thing is that I have got my dad back home,” Rex Cummings said. “It’s closure for the family, his brothers and sisters.”

Someone sent us the story of Naval Aviation Machinist Mate (Gunner) 2nd Class Loyce Edward Deen;

Loyce Edward Deen, an Aviation Machinist Mate 2nd Class, USNR, was a gunner on a TBM Avenger. On November 5, 1944, Deen’s squadron participated in a raid on Manila where his plane was hit multiple times by anti-aircraft fire while attacking a Japanese cruiser. Deen was killed. The Avenger’s pilot, Lt Robert Cosgrove, managed to return to his carrier, the USS Essex. Both Deen and the plane had been shot up so badly that it was decided to leave him in it. It is the only time in U.S. Navy history (and probably U.S. military history) that an aviator was buried in his aircraft after being killed in action.

Luckily, the solemn and unique ceremony was recorded for posterity;

William “Bud” Liebenow, the PT boat commander that took his vessel behind enemy lines to rescue the crew of PT 109 – John F. Kennedy’s crew, has passed at the tender age of 97. From the New York Daily News;

Liebenow and Kennedy were each captains of PT boats in the South Pacific in 1943 when Kennedy’s boat was destroyed by a Japanese destroyer. Kennedy and 10 other surviving crew members swam to a small island. Kennedy scratched a note into a coconut that two Solomon Islands natives carried to an American base.

Liebenow guided his boat behind enemy lines to track down the survivors of PT-109 on the island where they were hiding.

“Pulled right up to the beach,” Liebenow told WRAL-TV in 2015. “Just a part of the job really.”

[…]

The following year, Liebenow commanded a PT boat that was part of the D-Day invasion of northern France. His PT-199 was tasked with zooming around the waters off Normandy and rescuing men whose boats had been blown up by Nazi defenders. Liebenow’s boat helped rescue about 60 crew members from the destroyer USS Corry, which was sunk during the invasion struggle.

“We went in to pick up survivors and do what we could,” Liebenow told the Mount Airy News in 2014. “We spent most of that day picking up guys out of the water.”

Thanks to Mick for the tip.

The absolute embodiment of an Airborne Ranger officer has passed at the age of 94. I say that with complete confidence even though the man made but a brief pass through my life long ago and far away. He literally whirled into my life on a quickly departing Huey that dropped him outside our battalion forward tactical operations center in the middle of what would come to be known as the Battle of Trung Luong in the summer of 1966. My unit, the 2d Battalion 327th Airborne Infantry, 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, had choppered into another routine search and destroy operation with intel that the North Vietnamese 18-B regiment and perhaps another regiment might be active in the target area.

They were active indeed—our two infantry companies landed in the midst of 18-B regimental operations and the fight, which would last three days, was immediately on. As Field Force II, our higher headquarters, realized from our contact reports that we might be into much more than they had anticipated, they ordered in reinforcements from the 1st Cavalry Division at An Khe and with those cavalry troopers came their commander, Colonel Harold Moore, he of Hollywood fame as portrayed by Mel Gibson in one of the most realistic depictions of ground combat in Vietnam ever made, We Were Soldiers Once and Young.

Then-Lt. Colonel Moore in Vietnam

We had no idea who this tall, strapping, lean colonel was who blew through the flaps of our forward Tactical Operations Center tent like a whirling dervish with questions, orders and possible salvation, but even more possible menace. I had been a paratrooper for five years at that point, a combat infantryman in a rifle company for several months prior to coming to battalion headquarters, and an NCO for a few of those years. I must confess I had never seen anything quite like Colonel Moore in my previous years of service. The man exuded that essential quality of leadership that all officers so desire: command presence. Hal Moore had it in spades. In my six years of Army service, I never saw another officer so confidently, completely in command. Yes, he has detractors who would say he was too confident, but I am only relating impressions from my brief 36 hour encounter with this soldier’s soldier.

Inside the TOC Moore demanded to know who the best radio operator present was and a couple of fellow NCO’s fingered me, the battalion chemical, biological and radiological NCO, deferring to my previous experience as an RTO, a radio operator in infantry companies. Moore glared at me and ordered me to take control of the battalion tactical net and to stay there until relieved. That relief order came about 36 hours, hundreds of his orders and no more than two piss breaks later when the battle was finally winding down. During that time I was the mouth and ears of the most confident human being I have ever known in circumstances that would make many strong men waver if not fail completely.

Lieutenant General Hal Moore was a soldier’s soldier and a paratrooper’s paratrooper. May he rest in the old warrior’s peace he has earned so well.

Garry Owen, Sir!

Crossposted at American Thinker

The sad news comes that Lt General Hal Moore, the co-author of the iconic Vietnam book “We Were Soldiers Once…and Young”, has passed at the age of 94. From Stars & Stripes;

Joseph Galloway, who with Moore co-authored the book “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” confirmed Saturday to The Associated Press that Moore died late Friday in his sleep at his home in Auburn, Alabama.

Galloway said Moore, his friend of 51 years, died two days shy of his 95th birthday.

“There’s something missing on this earth now. We’ve lost a great warrior, a great soldier, a great human being and my best friend. They don’t make them like him anymore,” Galloway said.

[…]

On a Facebook page managed by Moore’s family, relatives said he died on the birthday of his wife, Julia, who died in 2004 after 55 years of marriage.

“Mom called Dad home on her day,” the statement said. “After having a stroke last week, Dad was more lethargic and had difficulty speaking, but he had always fought his way back.”

Our buddy, Andy Kravetz examines a national loss from a hometown perpective;

Chief Special Warfare Operator William “Ryan” Owens, 36, a 1998 Illinois Valley Central graduate, died Saturday in the Arabian Peninsula of Yemen, of wounds sustained in a raid against al-Qaida, according to a Department of Defense news release.

Cody Jackson, a high school friend of Owens, said he was shocked to hear of his death but not surprised, as Owens wanted to be a SEAL from the time he was 15.

“Since he was a freshman in high school, this kid decided he wanted to protect his country. He never once wavered from that. He always said he wanted to serve, and as much as this hurts, he would not have wanted it any other way,” Jackson said. “Everyone has dreams and not everyone knows what they want to do in high school, but he did. He wanted to be a Navy SEAL. Back then, he wasn’t the most fit guy in the world but he’d get up every morning and do the Navy SEAL workout because that’s what he wanted to do.”

Debra Coffey was 9 years old when her father, Air Force Captain Robert Russell Barnett was lost over Laos in 1968. On Friday, the Air Force met with her and her family and gave her details on the discovery of his earthly remains and how they will finally return those remains over to her according to Fox4;

In the nearly four-hour meeting, Coffey says the Air Force described the efforts to search a crash site the size of three football fields.

“They found the tail number of the B57 so it was absolutely his plane. It was absolutely that crash site,” she explained. “And they just took us through a massive inventory of things that they found.”

The inventory included pieces of glass from the plane, the co-pilot’s dog tag and a tooth. It was compared to Air Force medical records and confirmed to belong to Captain Barnett.

[…]

“We are so appreciative and just so grateful and thankful to our country that they did this for us,” Coffey said. “We’ll be at peace, and our dad will be at peace. Our dad will home. He’s a Texan, and he needs to be brought back to Texas.”

Thanks to Tom for the link.