How 4 Bowie County farm boys took to the air in WWII,
How Four Bowie County Farm Boys Took to the Air in World War II
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the final story in a fourpart series about four young men from the Red Springs community in Bowie County who trained as World War II pilots. In this series, local author, historian and former Texarkana Gazette reporter Dr. James Presley takes readers into the lives of each accomplished man. Today, the story of Lloyd Leslie West is highlighted. In this story, Presley also recalls memories of his second cousin Lloyd.
Lloyd Leslie West, born at home in the farming community of Red Springs on Nov. 10, 1922, liked airplanes and always wanted to fly.
World War II made it possible.
I remembered when I would visit his younger brother W.C. that Lloyd had an intense interest in flying and planes. He constructed model airplanes, which he would hang from strings over the room. I envied his meticulous skill at this and later tried to build model planes myself. Mine were roughly recognizable as planes but not well crafted. In that heyday of pulp fiction when most boys were reading Westerns or perhaps mysteries, Lloyd owned a stack of pulp magazines featuring adventure stories of flying and pilots.
He attended Redwater High School, following seven grades at Red Springs Elementary School, and left school in 1938 in the 10th grade. (Texas only had 11 grades of school then.)
When the government began building the two defense plants in Bowie County, he worked as a carpenter apprentice for a construction company, Winston Brothers Construction Co., on the Lone Star project from September 1941 to May 1942. That May, he took a job as a clerk and timekeeper for Brown and Root Construction.
He was drafted into the Army at Tyler on Jan. 29, 1943, a slender young man, 20 years old. One document spells out the details—he was 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighed 138 pounds.
His letters in April 1943 place him aboard a troop train in St. Petersburg, Fla., en route to Offutt Air Field, Neb. He was put in charge of the small contingent of soldiers.
According to a clipping from the Texarkana Gazette of April 6, 1944, West enrolled in preflight training at San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center. He underwent 10 weeks of intensive training, during which he studied mathematics, physics, naval and aircraft identification and other subjects, as well as physical and military training.
Subsequently, he trained at Chickasha, Okla., the University of Missouri, Columbia, and Garden City Army Air Field, Kansas. His instructors were civilians.
In early 1945, he graduated as a combat pilot at Aloe Army Air Field, Victoria, Texas, earning his wings and second lieutenant’s bars.
On April 7, 1945, still in the Air Corps, he was issued a commercial pilot license. He had in mind following a flying career in civilian life after the war, extending his boyhood dreams. It was an ambition not shared by his family, however.
West, like the Head brothers, found ways to fly over Red Springs and drop his family messages and gifts from time to time.
He bought a pair of shoes for his father, Leonard West, and delivered them in a somewhat unconventional manner. Letting his father know his intentions, he would fly out of Perrin Field in Sherman, Texas, and drop the shoes in the nearby pasture. Well cushioned in their packing, the shoes were dropped out as planned, falling to the earth without damage and ending in his father’s hands and ultimately on his feet.
His niece Claudette Hutchison remembers that when she was a little girl, living with her mother Omegia West Bustian, Lloyd’s sister, at Leonard’s home, they would get a postcard from Lloyd on which he announced he would fly over low on a certain day, perhaps around 2 p.m., and drop packages.
On that day Leonard would go out early and wait for Lloyd’s plane to fly over. On one occasion, of course, he was rewarded by a pair of new shoes. Once, Claudette remembered, Lloyd dropped a box for his sister Omegia containing a shawl as well as a doll baby for Claudette, boxed and cushioned.
With the war in its final stages when he finished training, he remained combat ready but wasn’t sent overseas.
He served until discharged on Nov. 24, 1946, two weeks after his 24th birthday, at 3705th Army Air Force Base Unit at Lowry Field near Denver.
The next year, in Texarkana, he married Marie Chapman, a union that produced six children, Laura, Keith, Denise, Scott, and twins Jerrie and Perry. Subsequently, they divorced and he remarried.
Over the years he kept in touch with another Red Springs boy with whom he had grown up. Sidney M. Hanna (S.M. as he was known in school) also entered the Air Corps, though not as a pilot, and retired from the Air Force at Kirtland AFB, New Mexico, where he lived in retirement. The two talked by phone on a regular basis, and when Lloyd and his wife traveled westward they always went by Albuquerque to see Hanna.
His niece Claudette remembered that Lloyd’s family didn’t want him to fly for a living after the war. Following separation from the Air Corps, he continued flying from time to time, renting planes, and belonged to a flying club at Red River Arsenal, where he worked until his retirement in June 1979.
Lloyd West died in Texarkana on Jan. 17, 2006, at age 83.
By the middle of 2006, with the deaths of Lloyd West, then Virgil Woodrow Head, they were all gone, completing the cycle of the four boys who had grown up within walking distance of each other in the small farming community.
They had gone from the farms on which they had grown up and into the outer world at a crucial time in their nation’s and world history, had flown, and experienced what very few of us do.
Yet they always kept in touch with the land that had shaped them.
If it suggests nothing else, their example documents that determination and ability to learn and serve need not be limited by who you are or where you come from, no matter how small the place where you grow up. These four youths answered the challenges of a worldwide crisis that was like none before.
How had it happened that such a small community spawned four young men who loved to fly, at a time when the country desperately needed them?
Perhaps word of mouth and by example, as the news of one studying flight inspired the others to follow. Was Carlos Dodd the example that others followed? Possibly. He could have inspired others by showing it could be done. Maybe it was just a burning desire to fly and serve their country in its time of greatest need. Or perhaps it was merely coincidental. Each had aspirations before the war.
The simplistic explanation may be that of the fourleaf clover. Where you find one is where you’re most likely to find others. Tiny Red Springs, a community of small farms spread over several square miles, in the early 1940s developed four four-leaf clovers, which, if not unique, is a rarity among rarities for such a small community and proof that the size of your surroundings and where you come from need not keep you from fulfilling your dream.
Carlos Dodd, John Head, Virgil Woodrow Head and Lloyd West, each in his own way, personally acted out that truth.