This post may or may not be interesting to anyone who is not related to me… I’m not sure. But I’ve been researching on the internet when I should have been writing on my blog, so now I’m writing on my blog about researching on the internet. (If you aren’t related to me, and this is interesting to you, you should buy the book that my great-grandmother wrote about her life with C.L. – it’s a really sweet and powerful love story.)
My dad sent me an email about my great-grandfather, Lt.Col. Churchill L. Scott. He served in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and gave his life on a bombing run in 1943. There were eleven men on his flight; five of them were killed in action. According to the official reports, two more were held as POWs in Stalag Luft 3 (where The Great Escape took place!), one was held as a POW elsewhere who eventually died from wounds sustained in action, two escaped altogether, and one evaded capture, was interned in Spain and eventually returned to the UK. My dad has done a bit of poking around the web looking for information on these men, and he’s found some really interesting stuff, which I won’t divulge here just yet on the off-chance that my sister’s starting to write the screenplay about it. BUT! I started digging around myself to see what else was out there about my great-grandfather and the men with whom he served.
First of all, this is my great-grandfather, C.L. Wasn’t he super handsome? And the man definitely knew how to rock his ‘stache.
I already had the picture above, but I also found one of Granddaddy C.L.’s college yearbook photos online, and an entertaining article about him in college from the school’s newspaper. He’s on the far right on the top row in the yearbook page (or you can just look for the best-looking guy on the page) and the article about him is right underneath the headline “Campus Comments.” I would put those up here, but WordPress is being weird, so you can click on the links instead. If it ends up working later, I’ll edit this and put the pictures in. Update! I got one of the pictures to work, so here’s his yearbook photo.
My aunt is really into genealogy and research of that nature, and she managed to find the name of Granddaddy C.L.’s bomber, which was “We Ain’t Scared.” Pretty great, right? Having that information made it a lot easier to find things about the mission and the rest of the crew. Like I said, my dad did most of this legwork but I got curious and did a bit more.
I found out that the official government records aren’t entirely accurate about what happened to the men who survived the initial crash. (The idea of inaccurate government records is shocking, I know…) There were two men listed as having escaped altogether – Virgil W. Jones and John L. Anderson – but they were actually both taken as prisoners of war. Jones was held in Stalag Luft 3 along with two of the other crew members (Leroy Lawson and John “Jack” Lee), while Anderson was held in Stalag 17B. All four of them survived over two years as POWs. Virgil Jones died in 1988 and Leroy Lawson died in 1990; John Anderson died on June 7 of some year, which I couldn’t find out because the person who took this picture of his headstone failed to uncover the year of his death. Sigh.
Clifford E. Cole was the guy who evaded capture but joined the French Resistance. After being released in the UK, he continued in his military career and became the deputy commander of McClellan Air Force Base. There’s lots of information about his evasion on this page but it’s all in French. I understood some of it and was very proud of myself as a result.
The most surprising thing that I learned was that the man who was wounded in action, held as a POW, and then died, actually didn’t die. What?! Yes, that’s right. Daniel W. Jenkins was alive and well until his passing in 1989. In fact, he ended up being the deputy commander of Shaw Air Force Base. You can read all about his impressive career on his Air Force biography page.
Basically if you were part of the crew of We Ain’t Scared, you were awesome. That’s the gist of what I discovered today.
On a more sobering note, I found out too that the man who shot down Granddaddy C.L.’s plane was named Hans-Walter Sander, and he was killed by British forces over France in June of 1944. All I could think of was that he had a family, too, and how awful it was that all of these boys with families were killed for the sake of one man’s horrific vision.
Anyhow, back to not-so-sad. Someone named David Parmer wrote a really fantastic and in-depth article about one of the men who was killed in action with Granddaddy C.L., Lydle Ocheltree. The comments section on this page was where I learned that Jenkins didn’t die (a commenter’s father was wounded in action around the same time and was hospitalized with Jenkins). I also discovered the grandson of We Ain’t Scared’s pilot, Clifford Hamilton, who was also killed in action on August 12. I sent him an email asking if he would be willing to share some of his family’s stories about his grandfather, because I’m interested to see how our family legends line up; and I want to know more about the man my great-grandfather served under. We shall see!
UPDATE! I heard back from Steve Rima, Hamilton’s grandson, this morning! He sent along a couple of stories about Hamilton along with quite a few things he has collected over the years about the crew of We Ain’t Scared. The thing I was most excited about was a photograph of the plane’s tail, as I have looked and looked for pictures of the plane and haven’t found any. So thank you so much, Steve!