Las Vegas Review Journal - Las Vegas, NV, USA
By KEITH ROGERS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Two weeks before John Lenox was born, his father went missing in action. Sixty-five years later, Lenox had almost lost hope he would ever know exactly what happened.
As a youngster growing up in Hartford, Conn., he was told only that his dad died in a plane crash in World War II.
"When you're young and you don't have something, you don't necessarily miss it," he said Wednesday. "My mom never spoke too much about my father. She just said, 'OK. This is your father. He was killed in the war.' We never got a lot of details."
Later in life, he learned a few things. The plane crashed while flying a supply route over the "Hump," the name pilots gave to the treacherous eastern Himalayan Mountains.
But the retired financial manager for Fortune 500 companies, his 92-year-old mother, Frances, and his older brother, Bill, knew one thing for sure: Staff Sgt. Alvin Jack Lenox was never found.
Frances Lenox said after the War Department had declared her husband dead in a letter on Sept. 10, 1945, she tried to stay focused on life with her sons.
"I just went on and had to live every day and take care of things," she said. "My brother used to say, 'Now you've got those boys. You've got to raise them. You go on with that.'"
She took the $4,000 from his military life insurance and bought a summer cottage on Long Island Sound. Going there was therapy for her, John Lenox said, and provided fun-filled memories for him and his brother.
There also were keepsakes from his dad, like the black-and-white photographs in the family album that Alvin Lenox took on his first stint in the Army. That's when he was stationed in Hawaii in the mid-1930s and got to meet such celebrities as slugger Babe Ruth, comedian Jimmy Durante and pilot Amelia Earhart.
"You can't help but think, 'Gee. Wouldn't it have been great to know him.' And then, that's not going to happen," John Lenox said, sitting with his mom at the dining room table in his North Las Vegas home.
"We would love to be able to find the remains and bring them back for closure. But what are the probabilities of that after 65 or 66 years?" Lenox said. "They can't even find them. They don't have any idea where it went down specifically. And so you say, 'OK.' That's just what you have to accept. That's the way it's going to be, but there's always hope."
Hope finally came through last month in a phone call. A Lenox family relative in Connecticut was contacted by a relative of another of the five crew members in that C-87 cargo plane on its fateful flight from Yantai, China to Joraht, India, on Aug. 9, 1943.
Word had circulated that an adventurer from Prescott, Ariz., named Clayton Kuhles had traveled to the Himalayas in October and found pieces of the wreckage containing the plane's construction number on a bamboo-covered slope about 8,000 feet up.
"When we got the call kind of out of the blue, I wasn't quite sure how to react," John Lenox said, describing how the weight of the moment began to sink in.
"Then when I went to the Web site and saw the listing of the plane and the identification of the men on board, it was really emotional. I didn't think it would be, but it hit me pretty hard.
"I talked to my brother and I said, 'How do you feel?' He says, 'You know I'm torn. I don't know exactly how to feel, because obviously we didn't know the man; but he was our father and this is an important issue now to try to get his remains back,'" John Lenox said.
Kuhles, whose hobby is to find World War II planes that went down flying the Hump, had posted a report about the find on his Web site, including paperwork he filed with the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.
After tracing records of the plane to its mission, he listed the dead Army Air Corps airmen as Staff Sgt. Alvin J. Lenox, radio operator; Cpl. Donald A. Johnson, crew chief; 2nd Lt. John W. Funk, navigator; 1st Lt. John T. Tennison, co-pilot; and Capt. Tom Perry, pilot.
"This site was almost a five-day trek. It was definitely one of the more interesting because of the river crossings and the jungle," the 55-year-old Kuhles said by telephone Thursday.
With the help of a guide and two interpreters, Kuhles interviewed an elderly Mishmi tribesman, Ayema Keche, who was in his late teens or early 20s when the plane went down.
"He was out hunting and he witnessed the plane crashing and saw the fire," Kuhles said. "When he got there, the wreckage was still smoldering three or four days after the crash. ... He told me he buried the remains and salvaged bits and pieces of the plane that he could use at the village."
According to John Lenox, his father's plane was returning from airlifting military supplies, equipment and personnel to the Chinese government and allied forces after the main land route through Burma was seized by the Japanese.
"The best information we have is that the plane was shot down. Japanese gunfire hit the plane," he said.
Although much of the information can't be verified, Lenox believes his father's last radio transmission were words to the effect, "'We've been hit. We're going down.' And that was it. Communication was cut off at that point."
Kuhles, who has documented 15 crash sites since 2000, said most planes that crashed flying in that part of the Hump didn't go down as a result of enemy fire, however.
"I'm not aware of any Japanese attacks in that area," he said. "In the vast majority of cases, crashes were usually from navigational error or weather. Either way, the mountain and the plane collided."
Strong winds often blew planes off course, or icy conditions added weight to the aircraft, causing them to lose altitude. Matters were complicated by trying to navigate at times in zero visibility.
"It was Russian roulette," Kuhles said.
After reading books about flights in 1940s-vintage aircraft over the Hump and knowing what his father had told his mother, John Lenox said it's "a miracle that any of these planes made it."
"These guys were flying planes that were kind of wired together," he said.
"My mom would tell me that my father would write letters saying, 'These things are flying coffins.' Every time a new plane comes in, they don't fly the new plane. They strip it and keep the others going.
"One plane could keep a half a dozen other planes flying. The experience must have been just unbelievable," he said.
Regardless of what happened to that transport plane on Aug. 9, 1943, John Lenox said his family and those of the other crew members are trying to launch a congressional effort to have a recovery team sent to the crash site to search for remains.
He realizes, it could take years "before they will even undertake the task. It's just so remote."
"I would like to be able to bring him back and bury him in Connecticut," he said.
Contact reporter Keith Rogers at krogers @reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308.
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