Finding Francis: Mystery of missing WWII pilot may be solved

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Posted at 10:12 on Sunday 20 July 2008 by POW/MIA Chairman in General News

Longview Daily News - Longview, WA, USA

Finding Francis: Mystery of missing WWII pilot may be solved
Sunday, July 20, 2008 11:43 AM PDT
By Tony Lystra

The boys had raised their little brother themselves because there were no parents left to look after him.

They'd fed him first, given him loving nicknames — Lefty, Tully — and placed all their hopes with him.

But then, on Nov. 10, 1943, Lt. Francis McIntyre, who had lived in Longview with his brothers, was gone.

The plane he was flying lost control during a bombing run on a Buka Island Japanese air base in the Solomon Islands and disappeared into the smoke. Neither the two-man bomber, nor the 25-year-old's remains, were found.

In the years that followed, the surviving McIntyre brothers — Cornelius, Donald, Mathew and Joseph — would quietly mourn. Their children would hear often of Uncle Francis — and of another brother, Angus John, who died in Germany — and know the war had taken something precious from them.

Now, years after each of the McIntyre brothers have grown old and died, Francis, who would have been 90 on Wednesday, finally may be coming home.

In February, the Post Courier, a Papua New Guinea newspaper, reported that a man had been digging near a garbage dump on Buka Island when he discovered a U.S. Navy plane. Among the wreckage, the newspaper said, were human remains and a dog tag.

The Web site PacificWrecks.com, which tracks such discoveries, said the dog tag reads, "Francis Bernard McIntyre."

The U.S. Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, the agency charged with recovering the remains of lost U.S. military personnel, declined to talk about the discovery last week, saying it did not yet have permission from the pilot's family to release information about the case.

"We did receive some remains, unilaterally turned over by citizens," a JPAC spokesman said. "We are now preparing a recovery mission for that area."

The news has stirred the the McIntyre brothers' children — the lost pilot's nephews and nieces — who live largely up and down the West Coast. They're hoping this, in fact, is their uncle, and that by bringing his remains home, they can pay tribute to him and to their fathers.

John McIntyre, Mathew McIntyre's son and an employee of a civilian contractor for the military in Dubai, has no doubts his uncle has been found.

"The crash site is precisely where it's reported to be," he said. "I think all the evidence is there. It seems to be that even the serial numbers on the plane match."

'Something I didn't eat'

To understand what it meant to lose Francis, the McIntyre family says, you have to know how and why the brothers bonded. They'd had a difficult start, living in Mitchell, S.D. The boys' mother, Kathryn, died in 1924 of what was said to be uterine cancer, although Mathew McIntyre later told his children that his mother may have simply withered from exhaustion after years of caring for her boys on the barren prairie.

Before she passed, the boys, all good Catholics, knelt around their mother's bed, John McIntyre said. "She was weaving in and out of consciousness and begging God to look after her babies."

When she was gone, her sister, May Cameron, came from Detroit. She took the youngest of the brothers, Angus John, who was just a baby, back to Michigan and adopted him. May, who had no children, had wanted to adopt the other boys, too, John said, but their father wouldn't allow it.

That left Mathew, just 10, to care for the younger ones. Donald Senior, the boys' father, was an entrepreneurial type who wasn't around much. The oldest of the boys, Donald Junior, had gone to live, at least for a time, with another family.

Mathew would tell his son years later that his childhood ended the day his mother died.

The boys toughed it out through the Great Depression, winters with no heat, little food and scant money. They worked odd jobs, sometimes selling ice cream cones for a small profit.

Donald Junior once explained a stomach ache by saying, "Must be something I didn't eat." And when Mathew scrapped together enough change for a candy bar, he took it home, split it into equal pieces, and gave it to his brothers. Eating it all himself was unthinkable.

"They all took care of each other before they cared about themselves," said Francis "Tully" McIntyre, whose father, Joe McIntyre, named him for his lost brother.

"No matter what they had or how much they had, they thought of the others first."

With Angus John being raised in Detroit, Francis, who was 6 when his mother died, was the baby of the family. The brothers shielded him from the hardship as best they could. They made sure he ate first, scooted him off to school, even let him stare off and daydream while the others worked on a car.

"Don, my Dad and Joe just decided one of them had to have the better life," John McIntyre said. "One of them deserved not to have to struggle so hard. Francis was the obvious choice."

The boys' father died in 1934 and, about a year later, they set out to join their oldest brother, Cornelius, who was married and living in Longview.

Don, Mathew, Joe and Francis, who would have been about 17, all lived in an apartment together.

They found jobs, some of them in the mills.

"They did well," Tully McIntyre said. "They thrived for probably the first time in their lives. They wore new, adequate clothes. They had a warm meal on the table every night. ... They always talked about their time together there. It was quite possibly one of the best times in their lives."

Francis attended Lower Columbia College. His yearbook from 1939 says he served as his class vice president in 1937, played basketball and baseball and participated in a host of other activities.

When World War II broke out the brothers were separated for the first time in a long while.

Mathew served with the Army and Don served with a Naval construction battalion. Angus John flew with a B-17 squadron with the 8th Air Force over Europe. He would later die when his bomber was hit over Germany, and would be buried in Belgium. Joe was the lead bombardier with a B-26 squadron in the 9th Air Force. And Francis flew a two-man bomber called the SBD-5 Dauntless for the Navy.

A boy lost, Francis, 24 and just learning to fly a small bomber, sent a letter to Mathew on Feb. 1, 1943. His aircraft carrier had just been commissioned, he wrote, and his flying skills were progressing. "It is really fun dive-bombing ... and so far my scores have been as good as anyone else's.... By the time you receive this letter and answer it I'll probably be out on the high seas someplace."

He signed the letter "Riley." He used the nickname because his brothers had given him "the life of Riley."

Nine months later, on Nov. 17, 1943, Francis' squadron commander dispatched a letter saying Francis had disappeared over Buka Island.

Francis, the letter said, was leading a division of planes in an attack on a Japanese-held airfield in the northern Solomon Islands on Nov. 10, 1943. He had dropped his bomb load, hit the target, and was flying low when "his plane was seen to pass through the blast of a large explosion on the enemy base," the letter said. Another pilot said Francis' plane "appeared to go out of control."

The McIntyre family believes an exploding munitions dump damaged Francis' plane.

The pilot who witnessed the incident assumed the plane had crashed. But since no one actually saw it hit the ground, Francis and his co-pilot were listed as missing in action.

This, the letter said, had been Francis' fourth flight in enemy territory. Francis, it said, "led his division skillfully and with good effect on each of them."

Eileen McIntyre, Mathew McIntyre's widow, who lives in Boise, said her husband had big dreams for Francis.

"He had so many plans for him," she said. "All the boys thought he would succeed more in life than any of them."

That the brothers had coddled Francis made his death all the more tragic, John McIntyre said.

"There went their hopes for him, not to mention the loss of a brother," he said.

After learning that Francis had disappeared, Joe, still a lead bombardier in a B-26 group over Europe, is said to have written messages on the ordnance that fell from his plane: "For Francis."

Decades later, Joe suffered from dementia and often couldn't recognize his family members. But tears streamed his face whenever someone mentioned Francis. "He would use his hands to start simulating aerial tactics," John said.

For years, Joe, who flew more than 60 bombing missions over Europe, felt somehow responsible for Francis' death. Joe insisted he should have reminded his brother not to circle back over the drop site, to drop his bombs and get out of there. He apparently never knew that Francis, in fact, never doubled back, that the exploding munitions cache had instead damaged the younger McIntyre's plane.

"My father shouldered responsibility for Francis' death all his life," said Tully McIntyre, who lives in Seattle.

On both Francis' and Angus John McIntyre's birthdays, Mathew McIntyre would fly a flag for his lost brothers.

"It affected them their entire life," said Kathy McIntyre, Mathew McIntyre's daughter. "They had been so close all their lives and survived with so little. That was a huge loss to them."

When he was younger, Francis "Tully" McIntyre didn't appreciate that he'd been named for his uncle. Francis, of course, isn't an easy name for a boy to grow up with.

But that changed several years ago, Tully said, when he, his wife and Joe were visiting on his boat in Elliott Bay in Seattle. Joe had never said much about the war. But now he started talking. He spoke of missions during which men aboard his plane were killed by anti-aircraft fire. Joe, Tully said, cried as he talked about bombing a hospital believed to be a munitions factory. He also said his squadron had attacked a troop train, killing as many as 5,000 German soldiers in a single afternoon.

"That was the day I realized how much naming me after his brother meant," Tully said.

Francis' survivors have yet to decide where their uncle, if this indeed is him, should be buried. Some suggest Francis might be laid to rest with his brothers, Cornelius and Don, in Longview.

John McIntyre said he's hoping Francis' remains might be placed at Arlington National Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Francis is eligible for a burial and ceremony there, he said, an uncommon honor these days. A bonus: John's son, Mathew, has just entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Anapolis. He'd like his son to be there for the ceremony.

Still, John said, he's willing to accept the majority vote in the family should the others choose to bury Francis in Longview. What's important, he said, is getting Francis home.

"My dad, until he passed away, remained optimistic that eventually Francis would be found," John said. "It's a mystery that I have been aware of and I have followed for five decades. Fifty years."

Editor's note: Sandy Rountree, who has tracked Cowlitz County's war casualties for the newspaper for decades, first discovered that Lt. Francis McIntyre's remains might have been discovered and first contacted the McIntyre family. The Daily News appreciates her efforts.

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