Soul Survivor (28 page)

Walter was a big kid who grew up to be a big man—just about six feet four.

All of Andrea’s computer magic couldn’t locate a living member of the family. She found a James J. Devlin, who died in 1995.
Through the census records she found out that Gerard had enlisted in 1942 and served in the Army Air Corps. Although she had
his social security number, there was no way to tell if he was still alive or dead. There were seventy-four Gerard Devlins
in New York—fifty in Brooklyn and Queens alone—and Andrea called every single one, but to no avail.

The only way that they pieced Walter Devlin’s story together again was through the eyes of the veterans of
Natoma Bay.
Ken Wavell, a former Avenger pilot, had powerful memories of “Big Red,” who, in the squadron photographs, looked like Gary
Cooper.

He was lean and lanky and far too tall to be a pilot, really. I couldn’t imagine how he even fit into the cockpit of the FM-2
fighter. Irish, with all that big red hair. Every time they pulled a physical, he’d crouch down a little. Typical Yankee.
Big Brooklyn Dodger fan. And he liked to play bridge. Rumor has it that he had even been a race car driver, so he didn’t have
a lot of fear. But there was one thing that worried Red: water. He couldn’t swim, and he was afraid of the time he might have
to land in the ocean. A water landing terrified him.

On October 26, 1944, two sorties were sent after the Japanese ships that fled from the Battle of Samar into the Visayan Sea.
Thirteen planes made a run on a destroyer and sank it. Among the attack aircraft was one flown by Red Devlin. The group leader
was Ken Wavell.

On the return flight back to the carrier, Ken Wavell got a call from Red Devlin. He said his fuel was low; he was flying on
fumes. Wavell called the carrier on his command set and asked them to let Devlin land first because his fuel was critical.
The ship didn’t acknowledge his call, so when Red came in, the ship was still turning into the wind. The landing signal officer,
unaware of how critical the situation was, waved him off.

Red Devlin took the wave-off, pulled up his wheels, and ran out of fuel. He crash-landed in the ocean a few hundred yards
away from
Natoma Bay
. The men on deck watched him get out of the cockpit, stagger out onto the wing, and then fall into the water. Ken Wavell,
flying overhead, dropped a life raft.

“He was floating facedown in the water,” said Wavell.

The men of
Natoma Bay
were a little baffled by it. They saw Red Devlin walk out onto the wing, a life raft within easy reach. Why didn’t he just
dog-paddle his way to safety? Even a poor swimmer could manage that.

The only explanation was that he was dazed by the crash landing. He may have been stumbling out onto the wing, but he was
probably only going through the motions—a sort of muscle memory of walking away.

They had good reason for their speculation. Everyone knew that the cockpit on a Wildcat had a tendency to jam shut on a hard
deck landing or ditching in the ocean. Devlin, fearing that he would be trapped inside the cockpit, probably unstrapped his
harness before hitting the water, so that he would be free to get a running start on evacuating the sinking plane.

When his plane actually hit the water, without the harness to hold him back, Devlin’s head slammed into the airframe and he
got knocked silly.

When the men on deck saw him stagger out onto the wing, Red Devlin was probably suffering the effects of a head injury. And
his greatest fear was realized: he drowned after a water landing.

And that’s how Walter “Red” Devlin, the last action hero, died.

You just have to know what to ask for and how to ask. I love computer research.

I
T ALL CAME together in February.

Now Andrea was a dancer, weaving through the information hub, the links and Web sites and blind alleys. She had found eleven
families of the twenty-one dead servicemen in one month. But more than that, her worries about the character of James Huston
Jr. had gone. The casualties of
Natoma Bay
all turned out to be decent, honorable boys. In the face of all the heroic sagas, the notion that James Huston Jr. might
turn out to be an exception seemed ridiculous.

In the end, the dead servicemen represented an elegant cross-section of American life, ranging from the children of dirt-poor
farmers to the scions of powerful industrialists.

And as each story unfolded, it revealed its own heartbreaking poignancy. For instance, there was Richard Quack, who grew up
on a farm in Sault Saint Marie, Michigan. An early enthusiast of flying, he had his room filled with model airplanes, and
his head full of real ones. He joined a civilian flight training club in high school, and when the war came along, Richard
Quack joined the Navy and volunteered for flight training. Just before he was shipped off to the Pacific, he married his high
school sweetheart, Dorothy. She was pregnant when he sailed.

His daughter, Karen, never saw her father. Richard was killed in a midair collision on a predawn takeoff on April 9, 1945.
He was twenty-two years old. There was a touching familiarity to the story.

Peter Hazard was one of Andrea’s more difficult searches. His family was from Rhode Island, but in the 1920 census records
they were also listed as living in Santa Barbara, California. A clue to the multiple listing was contained in the description
of the members of the household: Rowland Hazard, thirty-eight, head of household; Helen Hazard, thirty, wife; Caroline, six,
daughter; Rowland Jr., two, son; Peter, one, son; Elizabeth Stevenson, thirty, nurse; Catherine McCaughey, twenty, nursemaid;
Marie Ziegfeld, forty, chambermaid; Anna Tobin, forty-five, cook; William Ryan, nineteen, butler; Samuel Lopes, twenty-seven,
chauffeur.

The family of five had six servants. (Another son, Charles, would be born after the census.)

Under the head of household’s occupation it said, “None.” The Hazards were rich.

By the time Andrea began her search, they had all passed away except for Charles’s wife, Edith. Since Andrea could not find
a death record, she typed in “
aabibliography.com/rowlandhazard.htm
.” There was no help in the white pages, but during a purely random search, she found Edith Hazard listed as a board member
of a Rhode Island museum.

Andrea called the museum and spoke to an official, who refused to give out Edith’s telephone number, but Andrea finally convinced
the reluctant curator to give Edith her number. Within half an hour, Andrea got the call back, and the Hazard saga unfolded.

The Hazards were an old aristocratic family from England—the genealogy dated back to the eleventh century. Peter’s ancestors
fought in the Crusades.

In the beginning, they were woolen magnates who dabbled in oil and banking. They were also afflicted with that peculiar balance
of tragedy that seemed to deliver a kind of rough justice to America’s aristocracy. Sons died in war, from World War II to
Vietnam, and daughters died of peculiar diseases (pernicious anemia or an allergic reaction to penicillin). They were scattered
and shattered by divorce and alcoholism.

And yet, at times of crisis, they all answered the call to duty. That, too, was written in the family code of honor. Rowland,
the oldest son, was killed in a training accident in Florida. Peter, who went to St. Paul’s in Vermont and then Harvard, where
he captained the crew team, became a naval aviator. He died heroically on March 27, 1945, during the battle of Okinawa. He
was twenty-six.

Peter was flying an Avenger, ready to attack a land target, when a swarm of kamikazes crossed his front, about to begin an
attack on the American fleet. Without hesitating, Peter Hazard broke from his own attack and attempted to intercept the Japanese
suicide planes. He flew directly into American anti-aircraft fire to break the Japanese formation. It was suicidally reckless
and brave and may have saved the fleet.

They didn’t find wreckage or survivors, just a yellow dye marker where Hazard’s plane went down. Peter Hazard was lost, along
with his crew, radioman Bill Bird and machinist’s mate Clarence Davis.

Charles, the youngest son, was fighting in a tank battalion in Europe. He was brought home as the last surviving male heir.

None of the details about Peter’s death were known to Edith Hazard; Richard Quack’s sister, Elizabeth, had lived with the
mystery of her brother’s death for half a century.

It was the policy of the Navy Department to keep the details “Top Secret,” fearing at the time that the enemy could benefit
from learning tactics or even knowing who was missing. It was a security-minded time, when the slogan “Loose lips sink ships”
was the byword.

The families would send letters to commanders or shipmates asking for information, and, with a few exceptions, they were met
with denials for security reasons. Even after the war, some form of bureaucratic inertia kept the government from disclosing
the facts.

Bruce thought it was time to break the silence, so after every contact the Leiningers would send a letter thanking the family,
a copy of the Aircraft Action Report diagrams, and any other official document relating to the death. He would also include
transcripts of any informal interviews with crewmates, giving a human narrative to the story. And last of all, he enclosed
copies of pictures he had found at the reunion.

It was always a relief. These families had spent sixty years clinging to the slim threads of doubt and hope. Closure was always
welcome.

Bruce also included a poem. It was something he wrote after the first reunion, on December 7, 2002. It was entitled “Knights
of the Air and Water.”

Knights who never saw the last sunrise.

Who await you in the last call to GQ or TWO BLOCK FOX.

It is truly all for one and one for all.

God, give this day to the bread of fellowship of these men as a crew.

To each loved one left behind, may Your Spirit of eternal love embrace them.

This, too, was a comfort to the survivors.

T
HE ELDER JAMES McCready Huston haunted Bruce Leininger. The thought of the father attending those old reunions back in the
sixties, wandering among the veterans, asking about his son, trying to find out how he died, and coming away empty-handed,
felt like an open sore. James McCready Huston died in 1973, but Bruce thought he still owed the old man an account of his
son’s death.

The past month’s work had built up Andrea’s computer confidence, and she had a larger pool of Web sites and links to work
with. And she and Bruce had shed the fear of what they would find. It was time to tackle James M. Huston Jr. again.

I started with the census record because that would show me if I was onto the right family. I looked up all the records in
Pennsylvania that contained the name James M. Huston or James Huston. On the third or fourth try, I found the one I was looking
for: James M. Huston, head of household; wife, Daryl; daughter Ruth; daughter Anne; and son, James Jr. I knew, of course,
that James M. died in October 1973 and that Daryl died four months later. And I knew that they died in Los Gatos, California.
But that’s where the trail stopped cold. By now I was determined to dig deeper and try harder. And that meant shifting back
again to the Pennsylvania base.

Andrea went to the social security death index and confirmed that James and Daryl had died in 1973 and 1974 in California;
then she hunted around on
ancestry.com
, trying to find marriage records for Ruth or Anne. Back to the female dead end.

The only thing to do was to switch tacks and go back further in history. She wanted to see if she could track down any cousins—any
male relatives. The more details, the better.

So she went back to the census records for James, 1910, then 1900. McCready Huston’s father was a dentist, Dr. Joseph Andrew
Huston. He married a teacher, Elizabeth Fishburn. They had three sons: John Holmes Huston, James McCready Huston, and Smith
Fishburn Huston. John Holmes Huston died when he was twenty-three, possibly a casualty of World War I. He was single and left
no children. Smith Fishburn Huston, who died in 1960, married Christena Williams and had five children, four of them girls.
The only boy was Robert M. Huston.