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Return of a Hero
The factories that sustained Hitler's war machine had to be knocked out, whatever the risk. Equally important were the Rumanian oil fields that fueled the machine. According to The American Heritage Picture History of World War II, the decision to bomb Ploesti, Rumania was made at the Trident Conference in Washington D.C. during May, 1943. |
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On August 1 a force of 178 American B-24's took off from Libya to make the 1,500- mile flight. The waves of bombers met fighter attacks but they fought their way through. Refineries and oil tanks were enveloped in range flames and black smoke. Homefolks saw the pictures in black and white, in newsreels, newspapers and magazines. The enemy's damage came at a high cost to the U.S. Army Air Corps. Of the 1,733 men on the mission, 446 were killed. Only 33 of the original 178 planes were undamaged enough to fly again. Many planes were shot down over Rumania and Bulgaria, others collapsed into the Aegean Sea and some made it to neutral Turkey. That was the goal of F/O Lindsey's plane when it crash landed into the sea short of the hoped -for sanctuary, killing Pilot Gilbert Hadley and Co-Pilot Lindsey. Their remains would be there yet, but for the tenacity of one of the surviving crew members, Leroy Newton, who devoted his own time and money to the long and finally successful quest to locate the shattered wreckage. James Rex Lindsey was only 22 when he died in a mission essential to the strategy that finally humbled the mighty German air force, the Luftwaffe. The
British writer A.E. Housman was speaking of an earlier World War when
he wrote these appropriate lines, No. 36 in the collection "More
Poems." Here
dead lie we because we did not choose Relics from WWll aviator Rex Lindsey's downed B-24 bomber are on loan to The Flight Of The Phoenix Museum, by his family, Mary Kathryn and Grafton Don Lindsey, The flight gear recovered about 50 years after the crash of Rex Lindsey's plane near Turkey's south coast includes an A-8B oxygen mask, T-30 throat microphone, a B-4 life preserver, an HS-33 headset for an ABN-B-H-1 radio receiver, an A-11 leather flying helmet, B-3 goggles, leather flying boots, rubber overshoes and a leather map case. |
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For Information on the Museum and
Hours of Operation Courtesy
of Steve and Linda Kay Dean
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Who
could not be touched by the story of how an East Texas hero, Flight
Officer James Rex Lindsey was returned to his family's plot in the old
Gilmer City Cemetery? Consider the historic context of his death. In
the summer of 1943 the Allied forces were waging day and night air war
to soften up German defenses for a land invasion still a year away.