Freedom Flyer Reunion salutes heroes
The mission he led in World War II would be the last for Army Air Forces Maj. Peyton S. Mathis Jr., commander of the 44th Fighter Squadron. He clambered aboard a P-38J Lightning to lead a bombing mission on Japanese troops in the northern Solomon Islands and took off from his home base, only to be recalled home because of bad weather at the target. Somewhere along the way, Mathis lost his right engine and began to run out of time.
His story was told Friday as the Air Force saluted Americans killed or missing in the nation’s wars, including three who survived captivity in Vietnam who attended the annual Freedom Flyer Reunion at Joint Base San Antonio-randolph.
This year’s event was a scaled-down ceremony on a runway tarmac rather than Randolph’s Missing Man Monument, with fewer people in attendance as a precaution against the coronavirus.
Col. Scott Rowe, commander of the 12th Flying Training Wing, recalled the last flight of Mathis, whose remains were found 70 years after his plane crashed that day in 1944.
“Major Mathis elected to remain airborne and circle the field while his squadronmates landed first,” Rowe said. “While circling, according to eyewitness accounts, his P-38 suddenly straightened up and crashed in the dense jungle.”
Rescuers who found the plane partially buried in a swamp couldn’t recover Mathis, who was 28, but the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command found him decades later and contacted Rowe, who was then the commander of the 44th. He presented a folded American flag to Mathis’s family in 2015 at a funeral service in Montgomery, Ala.
The reunion at Randolph marks the day Vietnam POWS came home from the war and requalified to fly with the 560th Flying Training Squadron. Friday’s event included a flyover by T-38C Talons in a “missing man” formation and other tributes to the more than 81,700 Americans still missing from World War II, the Korean War, Vietnam War, Cold War, Persian Gulf War and Iraq.
“No other nation devotes the time and resources that we do in locating and repatriating servicemen and women from far-away fields of battle,” said Rowe, who led the 44th Fighter Squadron at Kadena AB, Japan.
“During my time at Kadena, we routinely deployed personnel to assist recovery missions in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia,” he added. “Our folks fought tooth and nail to be selected for these missions because of the unspoken and unbreakable bond between members of the profession of arms.”
Rowe also cited Gen. George S. Patton, who said, “It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.”
“It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather, we should thank God that such men lived.”
Gen. George S. Patton, as quoted by Col. Scott Rowe