Keeping their memories alive: Families of B-24 crash return to remember airmen killed 81 years ago on Mount Holyoke

SOUTH HADLEY — Clyde Dechert came from his Bellingham, Washington home to stand on the side of a mountain in western Massachusetts as it rained on a Friday evening. His son Kirk held his umbrella, and around him were 30 or so community members of the Pioneer Valley.

This was the exact place he stood in 1989, when for the first time in his life he got to “meet” his father, a man who has “always been more a picture and a name.”

Now 80, Dechert was just three months old when 81 years ago, on May 27, 1944, his father, Sgt. Wilburn Dechert, was aboard a B-24 bomber that crashed into the side of Mount Holyoke shortly after takeoff.

Dechert said that even his father’s remains didn’t feel quite authentic after 20,000 pounds of fuel melted the plane’s aluminum frame and burned for three days.

“They didn’t ship much home — not after burning like that,” he said, which makes this spot of the earth, where his father crashed, all the more sacred to him.

Nine other Westover-based air crewmen were aboard the bomber that day, including Sgt. Arnold H. Anderson, Cpl. Ronald C. Lloyd, Lt. William M. Ashley Jr., Lt. Donald D. Dowden, Sgt. Ambrose D. Griffith, Lt. John D. Logan, Lt. Talbot M. Malcom Jr., Cpl. Robert J. Ohr and Cpl. Kearney D. Padgett.

Thousands more met similar fates from aviation incidents during the World War II, including instances in both Belchertown and Williamsburg.

As many as 18,000 men and women were killed in aviation combat, and another 7,000 died in training accidents, according to Staff Sgt. Brian Willette, head of South Hadley’s American Legion Post 260, which led last Friday’s B-24 Remembrance Ceremony.

Ceremonies to honor the 10 who crashed into Mount Holyoke have been held irregularly since 1989, the first time Dechert had been to the spot.

That year, a towering 6-foot stone monument was erected close by to where the bomber crashed, around which participants gathered as they remembered the fallen soldiers.

Those services had been held the past two years, Friday’s ceremony had added festivity.

In addition to hosting the Decherts, the day also welcomed Laurie Malcolm and Valerie Macfie, the nieces of Malcolm. Macfie made her way from New Jersey to be present, and Malcolm came from Plymouth with a couple other family members.

“My dad was 16 months younger than Talbot [Malcolm], and they were very close, very competitive,” said Macfie, describing Malcolm as the oldest of three boys and a girl.

“I’m honored to come and represent my family,” she said to those gathered, which included state Rep. Homar Gomez and Col. Gregory Buchanan, who oversees the Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee.

After work done by Sgt. 1st Class George Randall, who has done extensive research on the victims of the crash, a poster with photos of all 10 men — assembled by Willette’s wife, Gina — was on display at the ceremony. Last year there were only portraits of two of the men.

“I picked it [the poster] up from Staples on Tuesday, and the first place I brought it was to Westover — back to where this crew belonged, back to where this crew started,” Willette said.

Giving some insight into the men aboard the B-24, Willette said Anderson and Orr were Chicago natives.

Padgett, of Mississippi, he described as deeply religious. “It was astonishing to his family that he ended up a gunner and bomber,” said Willette.

Dowden’s wife, Shirley, was living locally but didn’t hear the crash that night. Instead, the sirens work her up and she couldn’t go back to sleep.

Just before the crash, the B-24, “touched the trees, clipping the tops of the tall pines which rose between it and the rock face of Mount Holyoke, just a few minutes out of Westover on a training mission,” said Willette, retelling the incidents that took place.

“The pilot struggled to get the plane’s nose up just 75 more feet of altitude, and they would have made it over the summit,” he said.

Randall invited those present to, “Picture this if you will. You are the pilot and copilot, sitting on that short runway over at Westover field.

“You get the clearance to take off. You throttle off, release the brakes. Slowly, the plane lumbers down that short runway, slowly picking up speed. You reach over and grab the throttle and push forward as far as you can, and pick up a little bit more speed, and then you reach over again and try to push them through the dashboard for more speed and climbing power.”

Randall continued, “But the plane is maxed out with weight, and the motors too. I can picture what the pilot and copilot were saying to each other. I won’t repeat my thoughts as I speak.”

Once the engines had given up, the bomber skidded 200 yards before it finally slammed headlong into a cliff.

“Death was instantaneous,” said Randall. “An explosion, a ball of flame. On that May evening for them, World War II was over.”

Dechert shared how news of the event shook his home 81 years ago, almost to the day — a story he inherited from his mother, Lillie Gerloff Dechert.

It took Dechert a few more years, when he was in first grade, to realize for the first time that he didn’t have a father after a classmate asked him why his father wasn’t at a school function. That’s when his mother told him the story.

“She was at the time living with his mother and father, and his father was holding me at the time when the Western Union deliverers brought the ticket to the door, and mother read it,” he said. “And she screamed, and my grandfather started to fall, and she had to catch him and me both. He just all but passed out at the news. And that was how it began, with the telegram, Western Union Telegram, which I still have with me here actually in the car.”

He also brought a collection of letters exchanged between his mother and father while he was in the service.

Dechert described his parents, as “close knit,” although he added they had only seen each other in person twice after his father had been drafted. Before that, they had already been married and lived together for a year.

“This helps bring him to life,” he said about Friday’s ceremony. “Because I had nothing to go on. He was just 20 years old. Life had hardly just started. But as it was in those days, people grew up a lot faster, and they had responsibility a lot faster.”

Before being drafted, Dechert father drove a gas truck about 400 miles everyday from his home in Fredericksburg, Texas — “a great close knit German community,” in his description.

The younger Dechert remembers a wife of one the fallen men approaching him at the 1989 ceremony and saying, “we got an engineer for the flight crew now — and he was the nicest young man from Texas.”

“I had never heard anybody say that about my father, and I was 40 years old,” he said.

On that day 36 years ago, Dechert’s mother, who remarried and took the name Neffendorf and later died in 2005, was there. “She said, ‘I feel like I visited his grave.’ My mother felt like she had closure.”

“So yeah, this is near and dear to my heart,” said Dechert.

Samuel Gelinas can be reached at sgelinas@gazettenet.com.