Broad Valley Orchard

Hello,

For a couple years I have been posting essays regarding my ‘lost family’.  I guess other folks  are also looking for my people, and they have Googled their ancestor’s  ancestor’s  names, and presto! the pilgrims are transported to this site.  I have located my long lost aunt and cousin this way, and a few other distant cousins (I did not even know they existed) have contacted me about our shared ancestors.  We are all working as a “collaboration of cousins”, to try to regain our familial heritage.

Now I am going to provide the names of my father - Captain Arthur Allen (A.A) Dunn’s weather detachment in NW Europe inWW2.  He left a photo for me of his crew posed in front of a cargo plane ( a C-42 Dakota?), with the number 276 on its nose, and a large “A2″ (or perhaps “H2″)  on the fuselage, under the port side  of its cockpit.

I have figured that this was perhaps in September 1944, when “YI” ( which had been activated in Southern England on D-Day Plus One),  deployed to Northern France.  My father printed his comrade’s names on the back of the photo.

I have had to search it with a magnifying glass = it is tough to make out the exact number of dark brown chevrons and rockers on their olive drab uniforms, so I give you my best guess.  I was able to find a credible  ‘paper trail’ on ancestry.com for 9  of them -marked with (*) of these 20 weather warriors, and I found two that are ‘possibles’ marked with (?), but the other 8 airmen have names which are quite common and I was not able to learn more about them.

I was quite pleased to find so much information, which included some  of their US WW2 Army Record of Enlistments, Social Security Death Indices,  Obituaries, US Veteran’s Gravesites, and the 1930 US Census listing of them as children while they still lived  with their parents.  Of the men I discovered, I fear they have all departed our still war torn world.

So as Jim Lehrer states on The News Hour,  I present them in silence:

Front Row L>R - crouching

CPL Maury Hampton *, CPL Bill Ferebee, Lt Bob Burnight*,  Lt. A.A. Dunn*, CPL Bart Kline, Leo Mitchell.

Second Row L>R -standing

Joe Williams,  SSGT  Ralph Upton*, CPL Tony Myers*, SSGT Renee Duplessis*, SGT Jim O. Hibbets*, 1st SGT Art Brown.

Third Row L>R - standing

Kenny Christianson (?), Sgt John Schobinger*, Murrel Davis*, John Myers, George Rice, John Strong, Jay Zimmet*  (the stripes of the third row’s uniforms are obscured by the men in front of them).

note: Lt. A.A. Dunn and his two non-coms, Ralph Upton and John Shrobinger are given honorable mention in the 21st WX SQDR’s Unit History for being out on patrol along the Cheirs River, near Douzy, France on 8 Oct 1944 when they saw an overloaded ferry capsize in the flooding river.  They dove in and each saved a French child.  For this the Commanding General of the 9th Air Force awarded them with the Soldier’s Medal.  This is the army’s highest award for lifesaving in a non-combat situation.

So, if any of you are magically transported to this site after you typed in your veteran’s name - I look forward to hearing from you.  As a former Coast Guardsman, I really valued the life-saving beacons along our coasts.  I hope that my humble scribblings on our web site can be a beacon for all of us who are adrift in the seas of the past…

Thom Dunn Marti