Any day is a good one to thank our veterans
By Van Craddock
I began writing a column for the Longview News-Journal in 1978. Over 38 years I've had the opportunity to meet and befriend many amazing people. A number of those have been military veterans.
Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) came to town in 1979 and I got to interview him. Muggeridge was a British philosopher, BBC commentator, and World War II soldier and spy. I remember his telling me, "The media are great fun if you don't believe anything they say."
Then there was Cecil "Ike" Bell, a Longview resident who was the sole survivor of a 1943 plane crash over Nazi-occupied France. For almost two weeks the French Underground hid the U.S. airman from the Germans before spiriting him across the English Channel to safety in England. Only last year the 94-year-old wrote a memoir of his World War II experience titled "The Old Flight Jacket."
Another remarkable veteran is Milton Saxon, a longtime friend and Longview ISD administrator. In 1945 he was a 19-year-old U.S. Marine who landed on Japanese-held Iwo Jima. He, too, published his war experiences in a memoir, "The Fighting Fourth of World War II."
Another vet with a harrowing tale was the late Van Smith Jr. who served with the 15th Air Force as a tail gunner on a B-24 Liberator. In October 1944 he was flying over Italy when his plane was cut in half and he was knocked out of the tail section.
Normally, Smith would have a chest parachute pack lying beside him. But on this particular flight the bombardier traded his seat pack chute for Smith's chest pack. So Smith was wearing a parachute. It saved his life. Smith was the only member of the crew to survive.
A veteran with a special place in my heart is George Gause, who I interviewed in 1992. He was 94 and living in a local retirement home when I talked to him. Mr. Gause had been an Army aviator … in World War I.
His mind was sharp as a tack and his eyes brightened as he shared some of his experiences in 1917-1918 when U.S. troops fought "The War to End All Wars."
Mr. Gause, an Indiana native, joined the fledgling Army air service in June 1917. At the time he said the U.S. Army had two aviation fields, 55 airplanes and 100 qualified pilots.
"I lied about my age to sign up," he recalled. You had to be 21 and I was just 19."
He was sent to Wichita Falls' Call Field in early 1918. That's where he learned to fly a Curtiss airplane with open cockpit and four-cylinder engine.
"They gave us only two or three hours of instruction. The officer said, 'Get in the plane or I'll break your neck.' We had a lot of crashes there."
Mr. Gause said the tiny planes had "a bad habit of conking out on you all the time. And the pilots didn't have any parachutes."
Once he had to make a forced landing in a cotton field, breaking his propeller. Another time he survived a crash while practicing night landings with only a searchlight to guide the pilot's way.
"I was coming in and they cut the lights out when I was about a hundred feet up," he said. "I tore that plane all to pieces. I still don't know how I lived, but I walked away."
Mr. Gause was assigned to a bomber squadron that was ordered overseas. However, the orders were canceled at the last minute. "I wanted to go, too, but I never left Texas," he said.
Some 4.7 million Americans served in the military during WWI. When I talked to Mr. Gause in 1992, fewer than 60,000 WWI veterans were still with us. Those WWI vets are all gone now. George Cause died in August 1995 at age 97. He is buried in Kilgore City Cemetery.
There are other veterans, too. Kilgore's James Logan, a Medal of Honor recipient. Longview's Dave Davidson, who joined the Army at 15, became a Marine and fought in Korea. Bob Elswick of Longview, who was awakened by Japanese bombs falling on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and helped treat the wounded.
Yes, I've been blessed to know so many American heroes who live among us in East Texas.