April 21, 1997
Dad's dog tags recovered from long-lost crash site
By Ed Koch
On Nov. 3, 1944, Army Air Force Pvt. Elmo "Buddy" Churchill wrote to his wife, Betty Anne, and his 3-year-old son, Chuck, saying he had an uneasy feeling about that day's final training mission at Kingman Army Air Field.
After mailing the letter, the 25-year-old trainee and 14 other men, several of whom were to graduate from the gunnery school the next day and then head off to serve in World War II, boarded a B-17 Flying Fortress.
While flying in loose formation with two other bombers, a P-39 Airacobra, pretending to be an enemy fighter plane, swooped down on the larger craft. The gunners took turns firing blanks at it -- gaining vital mock war experience.
Then, something went wrong and the mock battle turned into horrifying reality. The P-39, piloted by experienced bomber pilot -- but inexperienced fighter pilot -- Martin Hoyt Campbell, crashed into Churchill's plane at 20,000 feet.
The two metal fireballs spun to Earth, crashing in the Arizona desert. No parachutes opened. All 15 soldiers perished.
As the Air Force celebrates its 50th anniversary this week in Las Vegas, little is remembered about the Kingman incident, though it was one of the worst training mission disasters on U.S. soil during the war.
Search ends
Days before Christmas last year, a young Arizona boy, part of a party of people who look for old military crash sites long secreted by the military, spotted a piece of shiny stainless steel in the dirt under foot-high sagebrush.
The metal object, a bit bent but showing no other signs of its age, was a military dog tag. On it was the name "Elmo E. Churchill." It had been there, untouched, for 52 years about 20 miles northwest of the base that had earned the dubious nickname "Half-Mast Kingman" because of numerous training crashes.
Just weeks earlier, Charles "Chuck" Churchill, 55, had visited one of the group's leaders and told him he had long spent weekends from his job as a Las Vegas construction engineer for Reliable Steel -- builders of the Stratosphere Tower roller coaster -- to search for the site where his father's plane went down.
"The man just about fell out of his chair when they told him about what they had found," said Chuck, a 24-year Las Vegas resident. "I had told him that I had searched so long and never was able to find the site. The desert foliage covered the area so well, hiding everything."
The discovery has given family members of the victims a closure to a tragedy they have lived with for more than half a century.
They say military officials stonewalled them. Chuck even believes the sealed casket containing what the military says are his father's remains -- buried in Olivet Cemetery in Perkins, Okla. -- may be little more than a bunch of rocks that gave it weight to fool the pallbearers.
Though the family requested to have the American flag-draped casket opened, military officials refused to allow it.
The site was cleaned of most of the wreckage and its exact location was never revealed. It was wartime, and perhaps the government did not want potential enemies getting their hands on any technology -- even small pieces of aluminum and Plexiglas, which also were found there late last year.
For a week, the Arizona boy wore the dog tag on a chain around his neck, while the searchers contacted Chuck, who, along with his son, Jeff, went to the site on Jan. 4. There, the boy presented the tag to Chuck.
"I was glad they gave us a little quiet time to be alone at the site before they alerted others," Chuck said. "It was very important for me and my son to be there together. It felt as though dad was with us too."
Together, they planted poppies and ocotillo -- flowers that are just now beginning to bloom.
Tragic footnote
Buddy Churchill was a tall, handsome man -- a strong, Oklahoma farm-raised fellow with a budding future. Before the war, he worked for Douglas Aircraft Co., first as a machinist and later as turret lathe operator.
He married Betty Anne in 1940, and Chuck was born a year later.
As the war raged on, Buddy was called to duty, despite holding a key war factory position, which usually meant a ticket out of military service.
He received basic training at Fort Sill, Okla., and Air Force indoctrination in Texas before going to Kingman to become a gunner.
Some witnesses to the crash -- including a gunnery student in a plane beside Churchill's craft -- say the P-39 went out of control. Others say the B-17 was in an incorrect position.
Whichever the case, the tragic result made front-page headlines in Arizona newspapers. However, with more vital news from the warfront, the events of that day in Arizona have been relegated to less than a footnote in history.
When Chuck called his mother, now 77 and living in Oklahoma, and told her that Buddy's dog tag had been found, she cried. But they were not tears of joy or even relief.
"The news really upset her," Chuck said. "It brought back bad memories that she had long ago tried to put behind her. She's OK about it now, though."
Betty Anne had saved every news clipping of the crash of Buddy's plane and every letter from the many officers at the base who sent their condolences. She kept that and other similar memorabilia in a scrapbook that she gave to Chuck.
She remarried in 1949 to a survivor of the Battle of the Bulge. He was a good father to Chuck and a good provider for Betty, who had spent the war years as a "Rosie the Riveter" airplane factory worker.
Chuck's stepdad died a few years ago. That, and the news of the location of her first husband's crash site, served only to heap sadness on Betty Anne's autumn years.
At the crash site, more than just Buddy's dog tag was found.
Searchers also found a gold ring that belonged to the B-17 pilot and returned it to his loved ones. Also found were parachute harness straps, a bent Indian head penny and other old coins, heels from boots and buttons from uniforms. Even a wingtip from the B-17 and a door off the P-39 were found a mile from the crash site.
Mail brings mementos
Betty Anne, already in receipt of a tersely worded government telegram announcing her husband's death, opened a much friendlier letter dated Nov. 8, 1944, from Col. Walter Wheeler, commander of the Kingman Army Air Field.
"Your husband was held in high regard by the officers and men of his organization, and his death was felt as a definite loss to them," Wheeler wrote.
About that time, the letter from Buddy, dated the day he died, also arrived.
Betty also received Buddy's silver wings and his gunnery school diploma that was awarded posthumously on Nov. 4.
In later years, when the Churchills and other families sought more information, they were given just official conclusions from military inquiries, which told them pretty much what they already knew.
"The P-39 had been practicing an attack on the formation when the collision occurred," one military report read. "Both aircraft were totally destroyed, and all individuals received fatal injuries."
The Air Force, as a result of the crash, instituted rules that fighter pilots, as part of their training, fly bombers to better learn their capabilities, according to the April edition of Arizona Flyways, which told Churchill's story in an article entitled: "Lost Airman's Dogtag Becomes 'A Memory of Dad' for His Son."
To fly in a B-17
Today, Chuck holds no resentment toward the military for keeping quiet or toward the pilot of the other plane.
"We all lost people we loved -- it doesn't matter who was at fault," said Chuck, who has made plans to meet soon with R.K. Campbell, brother of the P-39 pilot, who in Ducktown, Tenn., has an airport named for him.
This week Chuck plans to attend the air shows at Nellis Air Force Base as part of the Air Force's 50th anniversary festivities.
"For me, what would really be a candle on that birthday cake would be to get a ride in a B-17," Chuck said. "I've walked through one, but I've never flown in one."
He indicated that by taking off and landing in the big bird it would bring him closer to his dad and allow him to complete the mission his father did not. Chuck was not required to serve his country during the Vietnam War because he was a sole surviving son of a soldier killed in action.
Chuck, who is in the process of building a case in which to display his father's casket flag, wings and tag, also is working with Arizona officials and other family members of the victims to have a memorial built at the crash site.
"It would be not just for my father or even the others killed that day," Chuck said,"but for all of the men who lost their lives in the service of their country while training at Kingman between 1942 and '45."