San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Pilot’s training led to romance — and tragedy
I’m trying to find a library or place on some base where I can find information on my uncle who flew over the Himalayas in World War II and was shot down and never found. He was married to my aunt, Anne Wright. Their son, Gordon Custer Leland Jr., who died in February, was born Jan. 17, 1943. Where can I go for some history on my uncle? I’d love to see a photo of him; he was said to be very handsome.
It has been said that San Antonio is the “mother-in-law of the Army,” referring to the many matches made between military personnel stationed here and their local partners. Your aunt and uncle were one such couple, who met during the prewar defense buildup at a time when Randolph Field (now Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph) was called the “West Point of the Air” for its pilot-training mission.
Gordon Custer Leland was born Dec. 7, 1914, to the former Carolyn Custer and Raymond Leland, a teacher who became a high school principal in San Jose, Calif., before his death in 1933 in a car accident, not long after his son’s graduation from that school. Within weeks, Gordon was off to the U.S. Military Academy (West Point), where he impressed his classmates with what seems to have been a big personality.
Pictured in the 1937 Howitzer yearbook as a classically handsome platinum blond, “Gordie” is described as a “a jack-in-thebox, Lon Chaney, a child at a circus, a California Chamber of Commerce and an animated appetite, all combined in a ‘real guy’ with an excellent sense of humor and a fertile, resourceful imagination … One can’t help but like him.”
Upon his graduation, Leland
was commissioned as a second lieutenant, infantry, but he didn’t stay on the ground long.
According to Cullum’s Register of (West Point) Graduates and Former Cadets, he was transferred to the Army Air Corps and started Primary Flying School on Sept. 13, 1937, at Randolph. As a “student officer,” he continued his training from June 1938 with Advanced Flying School followed by an Attack Course at Kelly Field.
Leland and Wright had a lot in common.
In the “Here’s a Debutante” feature in the San Antonio Light, Oct. 28, 1937, the “romantically beautiful” Saint Mary’s Hall graduate says her “chief hobby is flying” and “wants to be an aviatrix.” She “adores a football game” and “loves swimming” — two of the sports Leland played
at West Point. Just as his yearbook sees him as “beset by love’s dilemmas,” the Light predicts that the “most attractive, cutetalking” 19-year-old deb would “certainly keep the stag line in a flurry.”
They must have gotten together before he was reassigned to March Field in California because their engagement was announced in both the Light and the San Antonio Express on May 2, 1940. She’s identified as 1939’s Queen of the Order of the Alamo, a Junior Leaguer and a former student at Finch Junior College in New York; he’s now a first lieutenant “with many friends here.”
They were married at night in St. Mark’s Episcopal Church amid candlelight and lots of white flowers, followed by a reception at the bride’s family
home, Chittimwood (covered here July 2, 2016).
For their honeymoon, the newlyweds drove west toward his new duty station, McChord Field (now Joint Base LewisMcChord) near Tacoma, Wash. There, says the Express, May 11, 1941, they took “a most attractive house on Spanaway Lake … (where) the big lawn surrounding the house runs down to the water’s edge, and there’s plenty of room for the Lelands’ acquisition, an Alaskan Huskie.”
Subsequent assignments sent him to Louisiana and Florida, where he was attached to the 11th Bomb Squadron and sent to the China Burma India Theater, established in March 1942, where the Army Air Forces and Navy pilots were based for assaults on Japan and from which they flew supplies to Chinese forces fighting the Japanese, using a route known as “The Hump” for crossing the Himalayan foothills.
A May 7, 1947, report from the War Department’s Air Historical Office to the Memorial Division of the Office of the Quartermaster General “in response to a telephoned request” establishes that Leland and six crew members were still considered missing in action after their “failure to return from air combat mission in Asiatic Area.”
An excerpt from the History of the 11th Bombardment Squadron tells the story of what happened to Leland, by then promoted to major.
On June 2, 1942, he was flying one of six planes, a B-25C bomber, that left Allahabad, India, on a secret mission that was supposed to take 15 days. Overnighting in Dinjan, India, they left at 6 a.m. June 3, 1942, for Kunming, China, “detouring by way of Lashio, Burma, (where the airfield) was the first target.”
The raid was successful, but one plane was attacked by enemy aircraft, and one of its crewmen was killed, though the plane later reached Kunming. The other five planes flew in formation with Leland in the lead. Due to thick cloud overcast, his plane crashed into the side of a mountain. The two planes behind him “missed the mountain by only a fraction.” Their crews, for only a second, were able to see grass and trees and the flash from the explosion of the first plane and avoided its fate.
Leland was the posthumous recipient of the Air Medal and the Purple Heart.
Despite extensive programs for the recovery of war dead over several decades, he is one of 72,000 Americans whose remains are still unrecovered, according to the Defense POW/ MIA Accounting Agency. Leland is listed as “status nonrecoverable” on its roster of World War II casualties from California.
His wife kept his name until she remarried Edgar A. Basse Jr. on Aug. 15, 1950, also in St.
Mark’s but in a simpler ceremony at which “only the immediate families of the bride and bridegroom were present.”