On Memorial Day, Remembering An Ironic Wartime Tragedy

Lieutenant Harold Winecoff with other U.S. Navy fighter pilots during World War II. Winecoff is third from the left in the second row. The photo probably was made in Vero Beach, Florida in 1944.

On September 27, 1944 U.S. Navy Lieutenant Wade Harold Winecoff, a farm boy who grew up near Rockwell, North Carolina, climbed into the cockpit of his Grumman F6F-5 "Hellcat" fighter plane. He and three other pilots aboard the aircraft carrier USS Franklin were beginning their shift of combat air patrol, an airborne version of guard duty.

The Franklin was supporting the U.S. invasion of the Palau Islands east of the Philippines. Winecoff and the other pilots in his squadron had been in the thick of the fighting against Japanese forces since American troops had gone ashore on September 15.

On this day, they would stay aloft for several hours patrolling the skies over the U.S. invasion force. Since all Japanese aircraft on the islands had been destroyed before the invasion, the likelihood of getting into a fight was low. But long-range Japanese patrol planes were scouring the seas for the American task force, and so a constant alert had to be maintained.

The Franklin fighters didn't encounter any enemy aircraft that day. Still, something went terribly wrong for Winecoff. He did not return from the patrol. His death was one of those tragic ironies of war that happen simply because a serviceman has to follow orders.

I came across the odd story of Winecoff's death in 1970 when I was visiting Winecoff's nephew, who was living in his grandmother's house near Rockwell, a small town about 45 miles northeast of Charlotte. It was the same house where Winecoff had grown up, and my friend's grandmother was Winecoff's mother. She had moved to Florida, and was allowing her grandson to live in the house while he attended nearby Pfeiffer College.

Winecoff's grief-stricken mother had kept boxes of letters, photos, and other possessions belonging to her son that the Navy had sent to her after his death. My friend said I was welcome to look through them. I took home a couple boxes of the mementos, and spent a few days poring over them. The contents told the story of Harold Winecoff's life.

Harold Winecoff at his home near Rockwell, N.C.
sometime before his death in September 1944.

After graduating from what was then Appalachian State Teachers College in 1937, Winecoff had taught and coached basketball at Waco High School, between Salisbury and Shelby. He enlisted in the Navy in November 1941 and earned his pilot's wings in May 1942.

In mid-September 1942, Winecoff came home for a 15-day leave. Among the friends he saw was Nadine Ellis, a talented musician who taught at Shelby High School. After his visit, Ellis had some time on her hands when her students were excused from classes to pick cotton. She wrote a note to Winecoff encouraging him to visit again before he had to return to duty. "After all when you go back you can never tell when you might get home again--and back to Waco and Shelby," she wrote.

Jack Hoyle, who'd been one of Winecoff's students at Waco, wrote to tell him how much he'd enjoyed seeing him. "I know you look good in your Navy uniform and I sure would like to see you," Hoyle wrote.

Winecoff's experience as a teacher served him well in the Navy. He was a flight instructor at Pensacola Naval Air Station, and the boxes contained letters from friends he'd known in Brewton, Alabama, a small town about 60 miles north of Pensacola. The affable Winecoff had a group of friends in Brewton who nicknamed him "Ace."

He also corresponded with young women in West Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Alabama. All of them longed to see him soon. A few hinted that they'd be amenable to a permanent postwar relationship with him. But he made it clear, in deeds if not words, that he wasn't interested at the moment in long-term plans.

By July 1944, Winecoff had been sent to Pearl Harbor to be assigned to a combat fighter squadron. Around the same time, Bootsie Durant, whom he'd dated when he was in Pensacola, told Winecoff in a letter that things hadn't been the same for her since he'd left town.

"I have had some dates since you have been gone," she said. "Still they don't make me feel happy at all. The boys I've been with are either childish or a bunch of wolves. I guess after you have gone out with a swell person it's hard to get used to someone else."

Winecoff was assigned to Fighter Squadron VF-13 aboard the USS Franklin, designated CV-13 by the Navy. The pilots called themselves the "Black Cats."

The boxes also contained a letter written in 1946 by Hubert Weidman of Los Angeles, one of Winecoff's shipmates, to his sister explaining how her brother had died.

While Winecoff and the other three pilots were on patrol, Weidman wrote, they were ordered to investigate an unidentified aircraft that had appeared on the Franklin's radar. Navy commanders couldn't take the chance that this was an enemy search plane that might discover the American task force. So Winecoff and the three other fighter pilots were ordered to climb and go after this airplane at top speed.

But a towering thundercloud that topped out at about 14,000 feet above the ocean lay between the Navy pilots and the suspicious airplane.

"It was one of those huge white billowy clouds, that usually look so fine, but are really dangerous to get into," Weidman wrote in his letter to Winecoff's sister.

Weidman, the group leader, knew it was dangerous to fly through the thunderhead because such clouds often contain powerful, turbulent wind and hail that could wreck the planes. It would take time to fly around the cloud, however, and the delay would allow the unknown plane to get closer to the American fleet.

So Weidman decided that he had no choice but to take his flight through the top of the thunderhead. The four Hellcats disappeared into the big cloud. But only three emerged. Winecoff's plane was missing. But Weidman couldn't delay the mission to search for Winecoff.

"We were still receiving orders from the base, and the urgency demanded that we continue our search for the bogie," Weidman wrote.

The Hellcats sped on to find the intruder.

The mystery airplane turned out to be an American B-24 bomber. After identifying the plane, Weidman and the two other pilots hastily returned to where Winecoff had disappeared.

Other planes from the Franklin joined the search. But no sign of Harold Winecoff or his plane was found, Weidman wrote.

I put aside the boxes of letters and mementos with the intention of returning them to my friend in Rockwell. Not long after I brought the boxes home, however, his grandmother's house burned down.

I stuffed the boxes into a closet and forgot about them. I came across them years later. By this time my friend had moved away and I'd lost touch with him. I took the stuff with me when my wife and I moved to Florida in late 1991.

Soon after our move, I met Sam Rhodes, who'd served aboard the USS Franklin and later retired in Jensen Beach. With his help, I contacted Ted Engdahl, who'd been a fighter pilot on the Franklin and was one of Harold Winecoff's best friends. Engdahl, a Michigan native and retired school teacher, was living near Winter Haven, Florida.

Engdahl said Harold Winecoff was a quiet man with a dry wit and a "sneaky" sense of humor. "You get little chuckles from it, instead of hilarious laughter," he said.

Winecoff enjoyed smoking good cigars and reading. He was 29 years old in 1944--older than the other pilots in his squadron. So the younger pilots nicknamed him "Pappy."

A few days before Winecoff's fateful flight into eternity, he'd sat on the flight deck of the Franklin with Engdahl and another pilot in his squadron, Ken McQuady. The three young men were best pals and called themselves the "Three Musketeers." They talked about what they hoped to do after the war.

Engdahl played volleyball with Winecoff on the Franklin's hangar deck on the morning of September 27, 1944. Around noon, he'd watched when his friend took off from the Franklin on the patrol. The Franklin's log notes that the three remaining planes of Wiedman's flight returned and landed aboard the carrier at 3:23 p.m.

"Recovered planes of the patrol minus one fighter of the CAP which was last seen in formation as it entered a cloud," the log says. "A search was made and the entire Task Group passed over the area twice. There was no indication at any time on the radar and no trace of any crash observed. The pilot is reported as missing."

The ship's regimental history, Big Ben the Flattop: The Story of the USS Franklin, includes a few paragraphs about Winecoff's disappearance. The patrol flew into a "heavy squall," the history says, and one fighter didn't emerge. "Hopelessly the search planes scoured the area, but no trace of Lt. Wade H. Winecoff, a country boy from North Carolina, was ever found."

Engdahl had had the sad task of packing up Winecoff's belongings and sending them to his family in Rockwell. He was the only one of the "Three Musketeers" to survive the war.

I visited Engdahl several times during the next two years and played some golf with him. I also interviewed him for a story that was published in the Salisbury (N.C.) Post on the 50th anniversary of Winecoff's death on September 27, 1994.

"Maybe we got along pretty well because I like athletics and I kind of worshiped the guy because I became a basketball coach too, and a teacher," Engdahl said. "Maybe he was my idol and I never realized it. He was just a super guy."

With Engdahl's help, I contacted Vernon Osborne of Clarkston, Georgia, who'd been one of the pilots flying with Winecoff the day he disappeared. Osborne remembered flying into that squall. The turbulent winds nearly destroyed all four Hellcats, he said.

"It almost threw all of us into the ocean," Osborne recalled. "You can't fly in those things. You can't see anything in there. It's like flying into a hurricane."

Engdahl thought that the turbulence had thrown Winecoff's plane into a spin. While the Hellcat was one of the best Navy fighter planes of World War II, he recalled that it could be a death trap if it went into a spin. "You get into a spin and you're probably done for," he said. "You're never going to come out of it."

Weidman's 1946 letter supported this theory.

"It was the opinion of most of the boys, that he got slow in the cloud and went into a spin," Weidman wrote. "Because he was in a cloud and had no outside reference point, he could have become excited and gone into a progressive spin."

"I think the explanation lies in the fact that he lost altitude in the cloud and the rough air in the middle gave him a hard time," Weidman continued. "Bad weather and the turbulence in the middle of some cumulonimbus clouds is often too much for the best of pilots."

If Winecoff's plane did go into an uncontrollable spin, Engdahl said, it would have crashed into the ocean and could have been traveling at 500 or 600 mph, killing Winecoff instantly.

The fact that Harold Winecoff died because of an unidentified American B-24 adds a cruel twist of irony to his death. But such events are part of war. There was no way to know if the plane was a friend or an enemy, and it had to be identified, Engdahl said.

In 1994, Harold Winecoff's brother, John, was still living near Rockwell and saw my story in the Salisbury Post. During the Thanksgiving holiday of 1994, I returned Harold Winecoff's possessions to his brother.