Alonzo Minor West III (1925 - 1959)

Born 27 Jul 1925 in New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana, United States

Ancestors

Husband of Jane Boyd (Pitcher) West — married 20 Aug 1949 in Minden, Webster, Louisiana, United States

Descendants

Died 1959 at about age 33 in Texas, United States

Problems/Questions Profile manager: J. West [send private message]

Biography

Lon was born in 1925 in New Orleans. He graduated from Christ School, an Episcopal boarding school in Arden, North Carolina, in 1943 and that summer enlisted in the Army Air Force and began training. He became a Second Lieutenant, Navigator, ^[1] and in 1945 during World War II flew 33 combat missions over Germany from an air base in England^[2]. He was just 19 years old at that time.

The first mission of the First Lieutenant Harvey E. Towne (pilot) crew, mission 314, on 14 February 1945 to Dresden, Germany, made an emergency landing in a farmer's field just within Belgium, returning from Germany, with no casualties. The B-17G 43-38619 (no name) (359BS) BN-A was on its 22nd dispatched combat mission. Lon reported in a letter to his parents that the British soldiers who picked them up were the best hosts ever.^[3]

Lon returned to New Orleans in the summer (or autumn?) of 1945 and enrolled in Tulane University.

He met the great love of his life at Tulane in 1947. They married in August of 1949 and lived in New Orleans. .^[4][5] Their first child, a son, was born in October 1950. Lon graduated from Tulane Law School in 1951.

Later in 1951 he signed up to fight in the Korean War and flew 55 combat missions there during the first few months of 1952. His wife and baby son remained in Louisiana with her parents. She was pregnant during this time with their second child, a daughter. He wrote many letters to his wife from Korea and all are full of his love and devotion to her and their son and his hopes and dreams for their life together.

After he returned, he was an attorney for the Pan American Petroleum Corp. (Pan-Am Southern) living in Shreveport (with a brief stint in Lake Charles) for seven years. In March 1959 the family moved to Houston where he worked for the law firm Vinson Elkins.

His eldest child, Lon West IV, in 2020 wrote the following description of the letters written by Lon West III at various times in his life. The family has about 150 of his letters.

Alonzo M. West III -- Letters from 1943 to 1952

AMW III (who was called Daddy-o by his children) was a prolific letter writer. Very articulate, humorous, sarcastic, and informative about his life at whatever time he was writing. Letters to his parents and his sister, Ann, from 1943 to 1946, mostly concerned his entry into the military and World War II. His occasional separate letters to his sister are usually humorous, with lots of comments about their dating and social lives.

Letters to his girlfriend (and later wife), Jane Pitcher, from 1947 to 1949, were about his romance with her and about their life as they moved toward eventual marriage in August, 1949.

His mother and his wife saved these letters and gave them to us in various batches over a long period. I think there must be 150 or so. I have learned so much about him. I also picked up a lot about the history and feel of those times, which encouraged me to do a little more research in some cases, particularly about WWII. I thought I would summarize the letters and quote a few, for the benefit of anyone who may be interested in part of his life. He clearly had a very vibrant and full, if short, life, which is worth appreciating.

Spring 1943 (age 17):

He was born and still lived in New Orleans, but these letters were from his senior year at Christ School in Arden, NC. Three letters to his family (“Dear Folks…”) from this location. The U.S. had entered WW2 in December, 1942, and the draft was in force. He planned to join the Army Air Corps (the predecessor of the Air Force) after he turned eighteen in the summer. Hoped to be a fighter pilot. Took a mental exam in Arden and a physical exam at Greenville Air Base. Was enlisted and sworn into the Reserve Corps in Asheville in April.

In one letter, he apologized to his parents in case he disappointed them by not going into the Navy. His father had been in the Navy from May 1918 to February 1921 (not sure if he served in WW1 combat), so that may have had something to do with his parents’ preferences.

Aug-Sept 1943 (age 18):

Reported for active duty in New Orleans on August 25, then transported to Amarillo Air Field, TX, for basic training. Five letters. Nothing too notable -- just the grind of going through basic training. A few sarcastic comments about characters on the base, the terrain*, K.P. duty, the Army bureaucracy, etc.

* “I would like to get out of this desert oasis. I heard there was a tree not many miles from here but not more than a handful of men know where it is and they won’t tell.”

Oct 1943 – Jan 1944 (age 18):

Training and courses in aviation at East Central State College in Ada, OK. Five letters. Toward the end of this period he started flying an Aeronca TL single engine trainer. Some comments:

“Today I took up spins and did about five or six two and three turn spins. I mean, it was positively wonderful. … My landing today stunk. The instructor accused me of trying to kill him.”

After reviewing a bunch of his friends’ military service and what they were up to, he continued about his own situation, using third person:

“ ‘Kid’ West is an aviation student in Ada, Oklahoma. I think he has about eight hours stick time and it’s rumored that he really loves flying. It seems that his mother (a likeable old lady) is worried about the parachute situation. Someone should tell her that he is not learning to be a paratrooper but more or less not to be one.”

Jan – Apr 1944 (age 18):

San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center (pre-flight school). Fourteen letters. Lots of physical, visual, mental, psychological, coordination, and aviation related exams, with some detailed descriptions of tests he took. This is where the cadets would get classified to their specialties after all the evaluations. He was very disappointed when he learned that he had not been chosen to be a pilot. He would start training for other positions: gunnery, navigator, bombardier, radio, etc. But he was happy to be chosen to fly. Some of his friends didn’t get chosen to fly in any capacity. Several came out of their classification interviews crying.

From a 3/8/44 letter to his sister:

“I’m mighty eager to get into advanced navigation which lasts from 15 to 20 weeks.” [He later did get into this program.]

Apr – Sept 1944 (ages 18-19):

Navigation School at San Marcos Army Air Field, TX. Thirteen letters. An exhausting schedule of study. No GPS or computers back in those days. Sextant and slide rule type devices, compasses, maps, clocks, speed/altitude/wind readings, pencil & paper, and lots of geometry. They got some flying experience around TX and out over the Gulf in an AT-7 trainer. Navigators were judged by how close they got to the base on their return, and how close they got to their estimated time of return, after flying their assigned course. On one complex course he was off by 34 miles on his return, but on a lot of the others he pretty much nailed it. His letters give very detailed descriptions of all the instruments they used and all the factors they had to take into account to figure out where they were, and where they should be headed.

Life in the barracks:

“We got back from our mission last night about 12 o’clock and this morning when we were sleeping late they came in the barracks and sprayed tear gas all over us. Every Tuesday morning for an hour they have gas alert and anyone is subject to a gas attack on the field. You never heard so much cussing in your life. We tore out of the barracks and me being barefooted naturally had to run through the cockleburs. ‘Oh Beautiful Texas’. Everyone was cussing and crying around there for a half hour.”

He passed the navigator course in San Marcos and was commissioned a 2nd lieutenant.

Oct – Dec 1944 (age 19):

Combat training at Avon Park Army Air Field, Florida. Five letters. Here he joined the crew that he would stay with for the rest of his war service in Europe. There were nine: pilot, co-pilot, navigator, engineer, bombardier, radio guy, and three gunners. They flew B-17 “Flying Fortresses” on mock bombing and machine gunning runs around Florida and over the Gulf -- the same type of bomber they would fly in Europe.

They cross-trained to do several of the jobs. In a 11/13/44 letter to his sister he describes a scary, but later funny, outing when he was learning one of the gunner jobs and firing .50 caliber machine gun rounds out over the Gulf. The pilot accidentally activated the bail out alarm, and at the same time another crew member’s oxygen cut off. Pandemonium reigned for a spell, during which the pilot made a turn and Daddy-o ended up shooting back toward the Florida mainland:

“He had made a turn and ordered cease firing but the man on interphone in the nose didn’t get it so I just kept banging away at the poor Floridians. Hope I didn’t shoot anyone. I was cussing the pilot for ringing the bail out bell, he was cussing me for shooting at Florida, the bombardier was cussing the gunner for not hearing the pilot’s orders and the ball gunner was cussing the waist gunner for not fixing his oxygen properly. What a day!”

He and his crew took a two-night vacation to Havana, Cuba during this period.

Jan – Aug 1945 (ages 19-20)

Three letters (from Savannah, GA, New Hampshire, and Iceland) as he and his crew made their way to England. Twenty-four letters from England. He and his crew were in the 303rd Bombardment Group (“Hell’s Angels”), 8th Air Force, stationed at Molesworth, England, about 70 miles north of London.

A picture of him and his crew can be found here.

From the website above, I was able to determine that his first mission was one of the controversial Dresden bombing missions on 2/14/45. After the bombing run, they ended up having to crash land in a turnip field in Belgium. Three of their four engines had been knocked out. After a run-in with some angry farmers, they were safely rescued by British officers. The Normandy invasion (D-Day) was in June 1944, so by February 1945 there were a lot of Allied forces on the Continent.

The Dresden attacks were controversial because they targeted heavily populated areas in a massive fire bombing, at a time when Germany was in retreat and the war was nearing an end (the Germans surrendered about three months later). The bombings were the subject of the anti-war novel “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, who was a prisoner of war being held in Dresden at the time of the bombings. Wikipedia says that Churchill was ultimately responsible for the approval to bomb Dresden, but afterward issued an opinion that such “area” bombings should be discontinued. The Brits were the victims of German bombing of many industrial, military, and civilian targets, including regular raids on London, in 1940-41, and of scattered V-1 rocket attacks on London through 1945. They were not so sympathetic toward the German civilians.

Letter dated 2/20/45:

“ I never thought I could sweat when the temperature is 47 degrees below zero but I found out differently when coming down that bomb run and over the target. Those black orchids (flak) aren’t very rare over here and Jerry doesn’t spare them.” ("Jerry" referred to German soldiers.)

He was lucky not to have entered the war a year or two earlier. Initially, the Air Force brass assumed that the B-17’s could fly high and fast in unescorted mass formations, protecting each other with their machine guns, and punch through any German fighter plane resistance. This strategy proved disastrous, as the Luftwaffe fighters were very effective. On some of the raids into the industrial heart of Germany in 1943, the B-17 formations lost more than 20% of their aircraft.

The Allies eventually developed very good long-range fighters to escort the bombers all the way. Those fighters helped the Allies to gain control of the airspace over Germany. By the time Daddy-o was flying in 1945, German fighter planes were not a serious problem, but there was still a lot of anti-aircraft fire from the ground. A couple of times, he mentioned the great work of the P-51 “Mustang” escort fighters.

One letter mentions returning from a mission with about 20 holes in the plane, “fist size on down”. Another letter included a small piece of shrapnel which penetrated the nose cone of the plane. In another, he talked about being hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel. He thought he was a goner, but it had been deflected off something that slowed it down and it didn’t even break the skin.

He showed appreciation for the troops slogging it out on the ground. From a March 24, 1945 letter: “Looks like the big push has begun. I wonder how long it will take the doughs to do the job. We’ve been doing our share of the work lately but must realize that the boys on the front are taking the rough end of things. … I see where old Patton has crossed the “crik” [the Rhine] and no doubt many others will before long.” He didn’t know it at the time, but Doc Caffery (his sister’s future husband) was down there as a tank commander with Patton’s Third Army.

At the time, he was not allowed to mention how many missions he was flying, or where they went. From a March, 1945 letter: “There ain’t much news to relate except that I am continuing my profession as you may guess and am unable to tell you much about that so there I is.” After the war, he did make a map of the bombing missions his crew went on.

From his April 1, 1945 letter, closing paragraph:

"I received the air medal and an oak leaf cluster today probably for cool, brave, and gallant action against the enemy. Like hell ! I’m so damned scared that my knees shake for two hours after I get down from a mission. I’ll close for now. Lots of love, Lon

p.s. Enclosed find very small souvenir of a mission. It came thru the nose when we were over a large German city. the experts call it flak." [that little piece of metal is still in the envelope]

He took a few trips to London on leaves. Saw a few plays and movies, and gave brief reviews to his family. He saved a program from one of the plays. It stated that if the air raid sirens sounded, the audience would be offered the opportunity to leave, but the show would go on. He told his sister that he had met a few English girls, but got tired of listening to their accents after a while.

V-E Day (German surrender) was May 8, 1945. He wrote a letter on the 10th describing the celebration at his base, and around the rest of England. Also described some flights his crew took to survey Germany and France, sometimes with ground personnel and infantry along. Some of the infantry guys who didn’t like flying said they would rather be in a foxhole. They were able to fly pretty low since the war was over. Poignant descriptions of the sullen, downtrodden look on the German people, and the utter devastation of so many of their cities, contrasted with the joy and celebratory moods he could see in Paris. He took some pictures on these flights, which are in his collected stuff. They were from a window, and high enough that it is hard to make out many details, but historically interesting. He described the Cologne Cathedral as particularly beautiful, even with the holes and broken windows.

Having flown 33 missions, he was sent back to the U.S. He spent some time as an instructor at an air base training facility in Texas, and was discharged from the military in the fall of 1945, after two years of service. The Japanese had surrendered in August of that year, so he was never transferred to fly more missions in the Pacific, as he feared he might be.

Some time in 1945-46 he started attending Tulane. He dated Lydia Caffery (the sister of his sister's husband, Doc Caffery) for nearly two years. In 1947 he met and started dating Jane Pitcher from Minden. She was working as a secretary in the engineering building at Tulane.

-- Written October 16, 2020 by AMW IV

Sources

1. ↑ Responsibilities of the Navigator
2. ↑ http://www.303rdbg.com/359towne.html Photo and notes regarding the flight crew of the 303rd Bombardment Group, World War II, in England.
3. ↑ Personal letter from AMW to his parents about the incident as well as notes at http://www.303rdbg.com/359towne.html
4. ↑ Marriage: "U.S., Newspapers.com™ Marriage Index, 1800s-current"
   The Times; Publication Date: 1/ May/ 1949; Publication Place: Shreveport, Louisiana, USA; URL: https://www.newspapers.com/image/219772376/?article=fcef8cc1-09cf-4735-8880-9136e6a6fd89&focus=0.024058808,0.053211167,0.27748668,0.28245232&xid=3398
   Ancestry Record 62116 #300984501 (accessed 28 December 2023)
   Alonzo Minor West III marriage to Jane Boyd Pitcher in 1949 in Minden, Louisiana, USA.
5. ↑ Marriage: "U.S., Newspapers.com™ Marriage Index, 1800s-current"
   The Times; Publication Date: 28/ Aug/ 1949; Publication Place: Shreveport, Louisiana, USA; URL: https://www.newspapers.com/image/219865321/?article=8760bd4f-56d6-4cd9-9710-b5bccb38fcbb&focus=0.030066248,0.040402748,0.27219588,0.52318424&xid=3398
   Ancestry Record 62116 #73347968
   Alonzo M West III marriage to Jane Bovd Pitcher on 3 Sep 1949 in Minden. (Wrong date)

• 1930 Census: "1930 United States Federal Census"
  Year: 1930; Census Place: New Orleans, Parish of Orkans, Louisiana; Page: 14B; Enumeration District: 0236; FHL microfilm: 2340546
  Ancestry Sharing Link - Ancestry Record 6224 #35393843 (accessed 29 December 2023)
  Alonzo West III (4), single son, in household of Alonzo West Jr. (34) at 1019 Andubon St., New Orleans, Parish of Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Born in Louisiana.
• 1950 Census: "1950 United States Federal Census"
  National Archives at Washington, DC; Washington, D.C.; Seventeenth Census of the United States, 1950; Year: 1950; Census Place: New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana; Roll: 6015; Page: 76; Enumeration District: 36-721
  Ancestry Sharing Link - Ancestry Record 62308 #77531709 (accessed 29 December 2023)
  Alonzo M West (24), married, Pipe Fitter Helper [summer job while in law school], head of household in New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Born in Louisiana.
• Military: "U.S., World War II Draft Cards Young Men, 1940-1947"
  National Archives at St. Louis; St. Louis, Missouri; Wwii Draft Registration Cards For Louisiana, 10/16/1940 - 03/31/1947; Record Group: Records of the Selective Service System, 147; Box: 601
  Ancestry Sharing Link - Ancestry Record 2238 #334848905 (accessed 29 December 2023)
  Registration Date: 26 Oct 1945; Weight: 160; Name: Alonzo Minor West III; Birth Place: New Orleans, Louisiana; Residence Place: New Orleans, Orleans, Louisiana; Complexion: Ruddy; Height: 6'; Next of Kin: Mr Alonzo Minor West Jr; Registration Place: New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana; Employer: None; Hair Color: Brown; Eye Color: Blue; Race: White; Birth Date: 27 Jul 1925; Age: 20;
  Household Members (Name):
  Alonzo Minor West.

• Personal recollections of the family