Clues in WWII case
The remains of a Tuskegee Airman, thought to have gone down over Italy on Dec. 23, 1944, may have been found in Austria, according to the Defense Department.
EAST ORANGE, N.J. — World War II in Europe was over, the celebrations had ebbed, and peace was on the horizon. But from her apartment in Harlem on June 5, 1945, Phyllis C. Dickson wrote a plaintive letter to the War Department about her missing husband.
Capt. Lawrence E. Dickson, 24, a black fighter pilot who had trained at the Tuskegee Army Flying School, had gone down over Italy, it was thought, on Dec. 23, 1944.
Months had passed since she’d heard any word. “Please believe me when I say I have been greatly distressed,” she wrote. “I have tried to be brave (but) it has really been an effort.”
“I meet the mailman daily hoping & praying for some news but so far none,” she wrote.
Seventy-three years later, the Defense Department finally might have some.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is investigating the possibility that human remains and other items recovered from a wartime crash site in Austria last summer may be those of Capt. Dickson. If so, he would be the first of the World War II black aviators known as the Tuskegee Airmen that the DPAA has accounted for, and likely the first found since the end of World War II.
The agency stressed that it is not certain the remains are Dickson’s, that scientific testing is still underway, and it cannot tell when or if a positive identification would be made.
But strong circumstantial evidence points toward Dickson.
The crash site is a few miles from where his P-51 Mustang was reported to have gone down.
“Historically, the site is a match,” Joshua Frank, a DPAA research analyst, said in a recent interview.
There are 27 Tuskegee Airmen missing, Frank said.
“Captain Dickson is one of those,” he said. “If his remains are identified, he would be the first of the 27.”
Phyllis and Lawrence Dickson had been married in November, 1941. He was a native of South Carolina, had taught himself how to play the guitar, and spent two years studying chemistry at the City College of New York.
On July 14, 1942, in Harlem’s old Sydenham Hospital, they had a daughter they named Marla.
Last August, a white-haired, 75-year-old woman named Marla L. Andrews got a phone call at her home here in northern New Jersey from the Army’s Past Conflict Repatriations Branch.
It was about her father, Lawrence Dickson. “Have you found his body?” Marla said she asked. “No, but we’re looking,” she said the caller replied.
Marla, whose mother Phyllis died in December at age 96, is hoping to fill the last part of her void. She knows the case may or may not be soon resolved.
“At this age, I’m supposed to know that you roll with the punches,” she said. “You take it as it comes.”
She just hopes she’s still around when it comes.