Book chronicles life of Fouke WWII hero
FOUKE, Ark. — With 2020 marking the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end, Frank McFerrin found a way to honor those quickly vanishing men and women who saved the country and our world.
For McFerrin, curator of the Miller County Historical and Family Museum in Fouke, the quarantine caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
allowed him time to focus on paying tribute to those very few still-living members of the “Greatest Generation” who served in the war. To that end, McFerrin managed to complete a 167-page book dedicated to their memory — most of them born between 1905 and 1925.
McFerrin’s book is the story of the short life of one of the Greatest Generation’s very own — Fouke resident James Elmo Hensley, who would later take on the name James Elmo Smith from his adoptive parents.
To demonstrate the courage of this World War II generation, McFerrin chose to write an “account of uncommon valor” specifically about U.S. Army pilots and crew members on one of the most crucial, calculating, daring and harrowing air raids over eastern Europe — a raid known as Operation Tidal Wave.
The Aug. 1, 1943, operation involved using 178 B-24 Liberator heavy bombers to conduct an ultra
low-flying bomb raid on the Ploiesti Oil refineries in Romania.
James “Jack” Smith would be just one of 10 crew members serving on board one of those B-24 bombers, nicknamed “Sand Witch.” He would serve as both a radio operator and a 50-caliber Browning automatic machine gunner.
With Smith as the central figure of the his book, McFerrin unpacks the extraordinary bravery exhibited by the the fliers.
“I had a slight interest in this raid but I really didn’t know much about it, so I decided to write about it by telling the story from one of our very own hometown boys who was actually there,” McFerrin said in a recent interview. “Jack Smith grew up right here in Fouke and gave his very own life for his country.”
A Fouke boyhood
To establish a solid local connection to the air raid, McFerrin, who started working on the book as far back as last March before getting it published in July, focused on Smith’s early life in Fouke, starting with his birth on Oct. 20, 1917. That event hurt his mother and ultimately led to her death two days later.
Concerned that it would be difficult to raise an infant without a mother, W.J.S. Smith, a local medical doctor, offered to adopt the baby — an offer accepted by the baby’s father, Burrel Hensley.
Now being raised by Dr. Smith and his wife Nancy, young Jack Smith attended private school at age 6 before moving to a Fouke public school at 10. He went on to graduate as one of just 13 members in the Fouke High School class of 1935. At that time, Smith had a propensity for both mathematics and science, according to page 46 of McFerrin’s book.
Following high school graduation, Smith enrolled for one year of studies a Arkansas Poly-Tech College in Russellville before taking up a job as a Fouke High School teacher and coach. He eventually moved to Texarkana, Texas, to take a job as a bus driver for the Texarkana Bus Company at 207 W. Broad St., where he earned $900 a year.
America at War
About this time, news of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor galvanized many local men of Smith’s age to enlist for military service, perhaps motivated by the death of a local resident— 22-year-old U.S. Navy serviceman Hubert Aaron of the Ferguson Community just a few miles north of Fouke — who died aboard the battleship U.S.S. Arizona during the air raid.
Smith himself journeyed to Dallas to enlist in April 1942, volunteering to join the U.S. Army Air Forces.
McFerrin goes on to write that shortly after enlisting, Smith received gunnery school training in Harlingen, Texas, in late 1942. There, he received his gunner’s wings after graduating before reporting to Scott Army Air Forces Base near Belleville, Illinois, for weeks of intensive radio operator and Morse Code training aboard aircraft. He moved up in rank from private to sergeant and eventually to tech sergeant.
Following a 21-day leave that allowed Smith to bid his family farewell, he reported for assignment to the 389th Heavy Bomber Group at Lowry Army Air Forces Base in Colorado. There, Smith would undergo flight crew training with nine other crew members who would be assigned to the B-24 “Sand Witch” for a flight across the Atlantic to Hethel Royal Air Force Base in Hethel, England, for a brief stationing in the spring of 1943.
Upon arrival in Hethel, Smith and the rest of his crew would join a detachment of U.S. B-24 bombers for a flight on to Benghazi, Libya. There the 389th would be re-assigned to undergo specialized, lowflight training for a critical mission depending heavily on both accuracy and surprise.
The need for bombers to fly as low as 200 feet from the ground would put flight crews in risk of being caught up in the upward blast of their own bombs — in addition to the possibility of being shot down by enemy fighter planes and ground-based anti-aircraft fire.
Operation Tidal Wave
To to some degree, the U.S. forces inadvertently may have given the Germans a “heads up” when it came to preparing for Operation Tidal
Wave.
American air power in the region actually staged a lighter raid on Ploiesti on June 11, 1942. Because of this unintentional “heads up,” not only were the German defenders able to beef up their fighter plane and anti-aircraft positions, they also added some screen and balloon barrages to their defense.
The B-24 itself cost the federal government about $300,000 apiece to build and more than 18,000 of them would eventually be turned out of U.S. factories for the war effort.
Continued training focused on low-flight bombing grew more intense at Benghazi, starting on July 4 and lasting at least three weeks, which included mock bombing runs on replicas of the oil refinery buildings constructed in the Libyan desert.
Because of the hot North African climate, Smith and his fellow crew members had to live in tents rather than barracks. This meant that insects, along with such critters as rats, mice, scorpions, grasshoppers and fleas, were a problem.
As an aside, Smith was actually receiving about $9 less in military pay then he was receiving in his civilian job as a bus driver in Texarkana. As a bus driver he was getting paid $75 a month just before he enlisted — taking a pay cut to $66 a month to become a radio operator for Uncle Sam. But to Smith and brave men like him, saving the country was far more important.
It was estimated that Ploiesti produced at least 35% of Nazi Germany’s oil supply , and the need to hit the target with surprise and accuracy had become a top priority. To ensure security, U.S air crews in the flight toward the city were strictly prohibited from using both Liaison Radio Communication (plane-toground contact) and Command Radio Communication (plane-toplane contact) since both external radio waves were subject to enemy monitoring from the ground.
As for chances of being detected on enemy radar was concerned, the planners of Operation Tidal Wave felt the B-24s would be able to fly under the radar-detection waves.
To limit the size of the attack formation, the B-24’s were expected to go in unescorted by U.S. fighter planes, which at that time consisted mainly of P-47 Thunderbolts and twin-engine P-38 Lightnings.
With this much danger, the bomber flight crews were told to write letters home in case they didn’t come back from the raid. They were instructed to leave their letters on their cots or footlockers so postal personnel could collect them the morning after takeoff.
Survival Uncertain
Just a couple of days before the mission, Lt. Gen. Lewis Brereton, commander of all U.S. Army Air Forces stationed in the Middle East, spoke to the mission’s flight crews about concerns of surviving and never seeing their families again.
Brereton basically told the men to “make your mind up right now that you’re not going to see your families again.” Brereton went on to tell the men to stop worrying about living beyond the day of the mission, adding that if they couldn’t accept the task, they wouldn’t be able to perform the mission.
”Take time to think about what I just said to you … then come see me before morning and if you feel you can’t go through with it, we’ll find someone who can.”
In the end, most of the flight crew stayed with the mission.
“I had a slight interest in this raid but I really didn’t know much about it, so I decided to write about it by telling the story from one of our very own hometown boys who was
actually there. Jack Smith grew up right here in Fouke and gave his very own life for
his country.”
—Frank McFerrin
The Mission
The entire air armada lifted off the runways just after dawn, Aug. 1, 1943, for what would amount to a 1,250-mile flight to the target that would take from 14 to 16 hours to complete and return..
Of the 178 B-24s that took off for the raid, about 54 were near, over or returning from the target when they were where shot down — one of those planes being “Sand Witch,” the one that Jack Smith was aboard. As for the rest of the planes, 88 of them returned to Benghazi with various amounts of heavy, moderate and light enemy flak-shell damage and fighter plane bullet damage. Of the 88, only about 33 of the returning B-24s were considered undamaged enough to be air worthy. About 36 of the B-24s were apparently unable to make it back to Benghazi and forced to land in other parts of North Africa or Eastern Europe.
The Ploiesti oil refineries sustained enough of a pounding to keep them off-line and halt oil production for about three months. Oil production, however, would gradually start picking back up and would eventually exceed its previous preraid output. Such a low-level raid of that size would never be tried again.
As to what became of Jack Smith and his fellow crew members, their B-24 — to the best that could be observed by other participants in the Ploeisti raid — crashed into a nearby river bed not long after overflying the target and dropping their bombs.
Of all 10 crew members, nine died upon impact — Jack Smith among them.
The aircraft’s only survivor would be flight engineer and top turret gunner Staff Sgt. Zerill “Todd” J. Steen, a West Texan who, at the time, wound up being the oldest member there at age 36. He died in 1973 at age 66.
Smith’s parents would eventually receive two telegrams at the Texas & Pacific Railroad Depot in Fouke. The first notified them that their son was missing, the next regretting to inform them that he was deceased.
For his valor, Smith would posthumously receive the Distinguished Service Cross for his “extraordinary heroism in connection with military operations against an armed enemy while serving as a radio operator of a B-24.”
A Hero at Rest
Romanian civilian volunteers buried the soldiers in a meadow not far from where the B-24 crashed. The volunteers also placed Smith’s military identification tags on of his grave — as they did with the rest of his flight crew. This would make it easier for them to be identified later by U.S. military officials.
Following the war’s end, U.S. military policy stated that all Americans buried on previously enemy-occupied soil couldn’t remain there, so about three years later, Smith’s remains, along with those of his fellow crew members, were removed and the U.S. Military Graves Commission had Smith, and at least two of his fellow flight crew members, reinterred at the American Cemetery at Ardennes Forest in Belgium.
Fouke and the war
Besides offering well-researched text, McFerrin also made sure that the book includes a rich supply of 126 local vintage photographs on 45 pages.
Along with Smith himself, McFerrin also mentions at least eight other Fouke-area residents who served in World War II. They include those who served in the U.S. Navy’s construction battalions in the Pacific, U.S. Army ground units (in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, southern France and Germany) and others assigned to New Guinea and Luzon in the Pacific.
Many cities and towns across the U.S. contributed young brave men and women to fighting tyranny throughout the world, and Fouke was no exception.
Those interested in the book can call McFerrin at 903-824-4167 about whether copies are available at the museum.