Hello all!
With the new screenshots I got a boost of excitement for the B-29 and thought I'd post my wife's great uncle's plane and story in order to ask some kind skinner to take on the project. It's a bit long winded so bear with me.
My great uncle's name was Robert Finneran and he was a 1st Lt in two B-29's that I have been able to track down via my research. He served with the real 444th and this is the motivation for making my squad in AH2.
My investigation began several months ago when AH2 announced the B-29, so you could say that AH2 spurred me to dig up this bit of history that I am very proud of. I remembered my Grandfather (He was in Alaska in the 11th AAF) telling me about his baby brother who was killed at Tinian during the war. I did a search on Robert Finneran and got very lucky on a google books search when a casualty list from the appendix of a book showed his name as a casualty of the 444th. Thus began the journey. (
http://books.google.com/books?id=bLcMbtifiCkC&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=finneran+444th&source=bl&ots=VK1SS9Uohe&sig=asc486Ei6uIoRXqiNOgDuTvASPw&hl=en&ei=GlhbTYK3J4rqgQekjdHLDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CFAQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q=finneran%20444th&f=false)
I began doing research on ancestry.com and other sites. I found the 444th bomb group association (
http://www.444thbg.org/) and that led me to the 58th bomb wing site. (
http://www.neam.org/58th/bombwing.asp) I sent an email to the site and they forwarded it to a man in Cincinnati that was more familiar with the group. The only thing he was able to find about my uncle was a training accident report from 1944 which had no fatalities, but did list members of the crew and some of those crew members that were listed were listed as KIA at a future date. So we suspected my uncle may have been killed in a crash on May 16, 1945 at West field Tinian, but we had no way to confirm this. I thought I had the mystery solved when I found this account of the 5/16/45 crash:
http://www.neam.org/profile.asp?ID=390. We found that Mr. Hall was still alive and well, so I picked up the phone and called him. Bless his heart he was out working in the car garage his family evidently runs, but he was happy to speak with me and a perfect gentleman. As he mentions, he was a substitute on the crew and he either did not know or remember the crews names. He was the main gunner and posted in the rear of the plane and my uncle being an engineer would have been behind the pilots in the nose of the plane. He said that the crew in the back all got out and away, but the crew in the nose all died in the fire. So it was great to talk to him, but I still could not confirm what happened to my uncle.
We were so close that I could taste it, the plane that crashed was serial number 44-70002. I had sent to the national archives for the aircraft cards for two airframes. 44-70002 and on a hunch, 42-24472. Both had served the 44th, one was older and one newer. 442-24472 was in India and a bit of an old hand in the 444th. 44-70002 was brand new and only arrived with the 444th at the beginning of May 1945. I still needed to confirm my uncle was on 44-70002 when it crashed, so I broke down and paid for the original accident report that was filed after the crash of 44-7002 in hopes of confirming what happened on that day. (
http://www.accident-report.com/usaf.html) Then I waited for it to come.
Robert graduated from Notre Dame in 1942 and then joined the USAAF. He was my grandfathers baby brother and was a natural athlete and a typical young man from Columbus, Ohio. Being that he was an engineering officer on a B-29 this tells me that he was in the top 10th or so of his training classes.
I do not know exactly when he was posted to the 444th, but I know he was in India (he mentioned India in a letter) and then Tinian with the group. One of his childhood friend told my dad that he had something to do with the manhattan project, but I have not been able to confirm that. It may simple be that he was on B-29's in the states and they were the same planes training to drop the bomb. I know that he was not finished with his tour in May of 1945, so it stands to reason that he was doing something before late 44-45.
I found some photo's that my dad had of him before I got the accident report so I took them home and scanned them. he has a very distinctive look and is pretty easy to identify in photos. Here are the pics that I scanned.
This is an official type photo of him.
Here he is with some friends from the AAF.
This is my favorite of Robert and his older brother who is my wife's Grandfather.
Explaining all this to the family was a very emotional experience as my father in law's middle name is Robert after his uncle who he of coarse never knew. I walked dad through the whole story as best as I could tell and told him that I was 90% sure that he was killed in the crash of 44-70002. This is when Dad brought out the above photos, a letter Robert wrote, his Purple Heart and a letter from President Truman. This was all very emotional. The letter he read me was received a few days after the telegram telling my great-grandmother that he was KIA and is full of confidence in his cause and typical disregard for the dangers of flying these missions. He speaks of his faith and says that he is not afraid to die knowing that he id fighting for a noble cause. Dad told me that grandpa told him that his and Roberts father passed away within a few days of each other and his mother had to hold a double funeral for her youngest son and husband within I believe a single week. This had to have been a very dark time for the family that most of use can only imagine. I realized at this point that this is the same sort of thing many families had to go through at that time when our nation was fighting this great war.
So several weeks later I received the accident report which is some 24 pages long. On the second page of the report it lists the crew involved and I finally can confirm that my great-uncle was killed in this crash on May 16th, 1945.
Here is the list of crew:
Here is a summary of the report:
So we finally have confirmation of what happened to my uncle, to my knowledge the family did not know what actually happened outside of him being killed on Tinian in an accident. I was very gratified to do this research and find the exact circumstances of what happened, but the story was not over yet and is not over still.
If you look at the crew on 44-70002 you will notice that the pilot is a Howard Mather. If you recall, I also knew Robert was in India, but 44-70002 was not. There must be at least one other B-29. 44-70002 was a new airframe that was shipped out to replace a war weary bird. I had a hunch that this was the case, but I can't remember why. I remembered that the 444th site had a picture of the Mather crew and I hopped over there to look at it again to see if I missed anything. (
http://www.444thbg.org/677thsquadron.htm#2870551) If you check this page and scroll down to Sky Chief (42-24472) you will see two photographs and a few notes with them.
This is a color photo of 42-24472's nose art.
You can see in the notes on the site that the tail markings were as follows
CBI Markings: Diamond #64
Tinian Markings: Triangle N #64
But the most revealing part is the fact that is was returned as war weary on 6/12/1945. This adds credence to me suspicion that this was my uncles original plane, but the other photo there seals it for me.
This is a photo of the Mather Crew:
Lo and behold this is a picture of my Uncle's crew, the arrow points to the man who is the same man in the family photo's. This was my uncles plane, but I did not know when I looked before because I did not have any photo's to compare it to. With the accident report and the photo's, I have no doubt that this was his original crew and plane and they got a new one in early May of 1945 and this new one was the one they were killed in in the crash.
This is probably the longest skin request ever posted, but I thought maybe some of you would appreciate the history and the story of uncovering the history.
So if any of you skinners want to help me out, I'd love to see my Uncle's plane in the game, I can provide what other 444th aircraft looked like as far as tail markings and so forth and we have the nose art section in color even. It should be doable.
He was was a real hero who was killed in the line of duty serving his country.
