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Wall of Honor Level:
Air and Space Friend

Honored by:
Ms. Helen K. Chase

WWII - service record Flight Navigator; B24 Heavy bombers; 460th Bomb Group; 760th Bomb Squadron; 15th Air Force; Italy; 1944. 50 missions; Distinguished Flying Cross; Air Medal with 3 Oak Leaf Clusters; European, African, Middle Eastern Theaters; Southern France Campaign; 6 Bronze Stars; Distinguished Unit Badge.
The date I was called up is easy to remember -- December 7, 1942 -- one year to the day after Pearl Harbor, and 61 years ago today as I write this (Dec. 7, 2003). At the time, I was a graduate student at Cornell University, working toward a Ph.D. in plant cytology, with first minor in genetics and second minor in philosophy. I lacked two months of finishing my doctorate, a cytogenetic study of the genus Najas, and thought then that the war could have waited a couple of months more for me. As things worked out, I went back to Cornell after three years service, had GI funds, and was able to do a more advanced thesis and start a new and very productive line of research -- on parthenogenesis in maize (corn).
I had three years of "foreign service" during the war: the first in Texas, the second in Italy, and the third back in Texas. I don't talk much about my war experiences.
After pre-flight training at San Antonio, I started out in pilot training Uvalde but was switched to navigation at Hondo after ten hours solo time, for landing my plane regularly twenty feet off the ground.
My highly competent combat crew of 10 formed up at Davis Monthan Field, Tucson, and trained at Chatham Field, Savannah, as part of the 460th Bomb Group (H), 760th bomb Squadron (H).
I married Catherine Compton while stationed at Chatham Field. Unable to get leave for a Washington, D.C. wedding, we were married at the romantic Church of Frederica on Sea Island. And we had our wedding night at the Cloister, guests of the manager who happened to be a remote Compton cousin.
Our 15th Air Force group base in southern Italy was near Spinazzola. There were many combat missions flown between March 19, 1944, and August 15, 1944, among them Budapest, Ploesti, Leghorn, Munich, totaling fifty missions. During that period, our 460th Bomb Group required more than 100% replacement of combat crews. Of my crew of ten only two were killed, Guy Marsh and "Shorty" Long. They were lost flying with other crews.
Examples of some combat missions -- a B24 just ahead of ours exploding in the air, a single parachute opening and then a lazy moving detached propeller cutting the parachute shrouds; another later instance, a few minutes after a bomb run on Friedrichschafen, with more memories of death in the clear blue skies than on any other flight -- bombers burning, exploding; four missions over Ploesti seemed as one -- black bursts of intense antiaircraft fire all around us on our straight bomb runs toward our targets, with flames and black clouds of smoke below. I received the Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission where our group bombed oil storage tanks at Giurgiu, Roumania.
Assigned to Ellington Field after return from Italy. In approximately 15 days, we were to set up a full training program, specify training equipment, for crews destined for a new bomber, the B-32. We planned four alternative training programs supplementing existing B29 training. About 118 B32s were built; none exist today. The plan at early design time had been for the plane to play the same role to the B29 of Pacific fame as the B24 did to the popular B17 -- to fly higher, farther, faster, with heavier bomb loads. The last combat flight in the Pacific War was flown by B32s.
Our first child, Catherine Harrington Chase, was born in Houston, on August 7, 1945 -- between atom bomb one and atom bomb two. This was somewhat appropriate, as her grand uncle, Arthur Holly Compton, had headed up the Manhattan Project, the cover name of the early atom bomb project. I was released from service shortly after.
Our second child, Helen Kelsey Chase, was born in Ithaca where I returned to Cornell to finish my doctorate. It is Helen who has submitted my name to appear on the Wall of Honor.