World War II B-24 pilot's remains laid to rest at Arlington

  • Published
  • By Senior Master Sgt. Matt Proietti
  • Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs
ARLINGTON, Va. (AFPN) --  The remains of an Army Air Forces pilot who died in an aircraft crash 64 years ago in Alaska were interred Sept. 7 at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

"It's fulfilling to get the recognition he deserves," said John S. Hoskin, 82, of his late brother, 2nd Lt. Harold E. Hoskin of Houlton, Maine.

Lieutenant Hoskin, 22, was one of several crew members who died Dec. 21, 1943, when a B-24 Liberator crashed 120 miles east of Fairbanks, Alaska. His remains were identified in April following an investigation spurred on by Douglas Beckstead, the historian for Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska.

Two crew members bailed out before the crash. One of them, co-pilot 2nd Lt. Leon Crane of Philadelphia, survived for 86 days in the wilderness after he stumbled upon trappers' cabins where he found food and refuge from the elements. Crew chief Master Sgt. Richard Pompeo, the second man who made it out of the bomber, was never found. His sister and nephew attended the Sept. 7 service.

Others aboard the B-24 were 1st Lt. James B. Sibert, a propeller specialist, and Staff Sgt. Ralph Wenz, a radio operator, whose bodies were later found inside the aircraft.

The B-24 left Fairbanks' Ladd Field, now part of the Army's Fort Wainwright, to test a procedure that allowed the pilot to bleed aviation gas into the hydraulic system to feather the propeller, Mr. Beckstead said.

While flying at about 20,000 feet two hours into the mission, the aircraft entered into clouds and its instruments started to act irrationally, according to a statement by Lieutenant Crane that Mr. Beckstead discovered.

It went into two spins, both of which were controlled somewhat by the pilots. When it started a third spin, Lieutenant Hoskin hit the crash alarm signal and yelled for the crew to bail out of the aircraft.

Sergeant Pompeo and Lieutenant Crane exited the aircraft through forward bomb bay doors. Lieutenant Crane later reported that he watched the sergeant drift over a ridge but never saw him again, Mr. Beckstead said.

In a meeting with Lieutenant Hoskin's survivors Sept. 6, Mr. Beckstead said he blames "ice fog" for the accident.

"You can see through it vertically, but you can't see through it horizontally," he said. 

Though dressed in cold weather gear, Lieutenant Crane exited the plane without gloves or mittens into air that was 60 below zero. He waited for a week to be rescued, then started to follow the nearby Charley River, figuring the closest human might live on its shore.

Lieutenant Crane, a Philadelphia native, stumbled onto a series of cabins used by trappers and found gear and food that helped him survive. He spent half of his time in the outdoors, though, and covered 75 miles before discovering an inhabited home whose occupant took him on a dog sled and snowshoes to a settlement. A mail plane brought him back to Ladd Field in mid-March 1944.

A few days later, he accompanied search and rescue workers to the B-24 wreckage, where they located the bodies of Lieutenant Sibert and Sergeant Wenz in the rear of the fuselage. Snow covered much of the area, which hampered their efforts to find any sign of Sergeant Pompeo. 

According to the initial incident report reviewed by Mr. Beckstead, Lieutenant Crane said Lieutenant Hoskin was in the radio operator's compartment preparing to bail out the last time he saw him. The search turned up no sign of Lieutenant Hoskin.

Lieutenant Hoskin was the third of four children born to George and Eva Hoskin in the northeastern Maine town of Houlton on the Canadian border. John, the youngest child and only one who remains alive, turns 83 this month. 

He said he "always" misses his brother.

"We were in school together," Mr. Hoskin said. "He was a friendly brother. There was no sibling fighting or anything."

They fished and hunted. Lieutenant Hoskin earned excellent grades at Houlton High School, was a sprinter on the track team and played trumpet in the band.

Their father, George, worked in real estate, but suffered from poor health. Their mother, Eva, was a homemaker. The family tended a garden, had a cow and raised chickens to sustain themselves during the 1930s.

"It was the Depression, a time of scrounging to live," Mr. Hoskin said.

Lieutenant Hoskin attended Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, leaving his pre-medical studies his sophomore year to enlist in the military after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. 

He was accepted into the air cadet program and finished undergraduate pilot training in early January 1943. Later that month, he married Mary McIntosh, also of Houlton. She was pregnant with their only child when he was killed later that year.

"(They) only had 10 months together of married life and were still very much in love, and when he was taken from her, she never got over it," said their daughter, Joann Hoskin Goldstein, 63, of Punta Gorda, Fla. "She never got over it."

After her husband was declared missing, Mrs. Hoskin returned to Maine to raise their daughter. She worked as a bookkeeper and didn't remarry until their daughter was grown.

"We lived with my (maternal) grandmother," Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said. "My mother was like the dad and worked, and my grandmother was like my mom."

The family hosted a funeral service for Lieutenant Hoskin in 1949 after the Army declared him dead.

Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said she is amazed at the turn of events.

"It's crazy. I always knew where he was in Alaska, in a plane, never to come home again," she said. "All of a sudden I hear they found his remains 63 years later."

Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said it's important that her father's remains were found and returned, but she said she will always think of him as being in Alaska.

"Part of him is there, part of him is here, part of him is always in my heart," she said. 

Her mother, who remarried 24 years after she was widowed, died in 2005 at age 82 not knowing an archaeological study was about to take place. She never talked about the loss of her husband.

"I always felt that she was depriving me because she couldn't talk about it, but I gleaned things from what people said about him, so that I knew he was a good man," Ms. Hoskin Goldstein said. "She hated every war that came after (World War II) because of what she went through and what I went through. It was terrible."

In 1991, Mr. Hoskin visited Lieutenant Crane, the crash's only survivor, for an hour at his Pennsylvania home after tracking him down through the man's brother.

"Leon's phone number was unlisted," Mr. Hoskin said. "I have the feeling that he didn't want us to think he had caused the crash, which had never crossed our minds. He never talked about it even with his children."

Mr. Beckstead, visited the B-24 wreckage in 1994 when he worked at Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve in east-central Alaska. The crash site is within its borders. He conducted some research into the incident and discovered parachute buckles on a subsequent visit.

He said he believed they belonged to Lieutenant Hoskin as they seemed to be in the radio operator's compartment where he was last spotted. Mr. Beckstead convinced the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii to send a team of investigators there in 2006. He assisted them in their work for 10 days in summer 2006. They found bone fragments and contacted his brother for a DNA sample. It was a match.

Mr. Hoskin said his father, who died in 1960, always held out hope that his son had survived the accident.

"He always felt like Harold was going to walk up to the house one day," Mr. Hoskin said. "We couldn't get any answers from the military, so he felt he was justified in his opinion. He really felt like he was going to knock on the door." 

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