WW2 Fallen 100: WW2 Fallen - Silver Star hero and B-24 pilot David Wilhite

Captain David Wilhite earned the Silver Star while serving as a B-24 pilot in the 389th Bombardment Group.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/56651458
http://www.americanairmuseum.com/aircraft/7506

David Lee Wilhite never had a chance to reach 100 years old today. Instead, he sacrificed his life for our freedom.

If you have enjoyed reading the stories of the WW2 fallen, Can you help write some stories? It's a big project. The more help, the better.

Announcing "The Stories Behind the Stars", see https://www.storiesbehindthestars.org.

This crowd-sourced national project has the goal of compiling stories of all 400,000+ of the US World War 2 fallen in one free-to-access central database. We are going to need a lot of volunteers.

Anyone visiting a war memorial or gravesite will be able to scan the name of the fallen with a smartphone and his story will appear on the phone.

David was born on June 1, 1920 in Owensboro, Kentucky. His parents Edgar and Anna were also both born in Kentucky. His father worked as a general store salesman and later as a post office mail carrier. David had an older brother and sister. By 1940 he had completed one year of college at Western States Teachers College where he participated in ROTC. David graduated from Western Kentucky University in Bowling Green with a BA in History and was planning to become a teacher. He was still living at home and worked as a farmer. At some point he married the former Stella Meggison.

He enlisted in the army in June 1941 and volunteered for the Army Air Forces. He received his wings in November 1942. While at flight training school in San Antonio, Texas, he met and married Stella Megginson on April 30, 1943. He was trained as a B-24 pilot and eventually became a captain in the 566th Bombardment Squadron, 389th Bombardment Group. He arrived in England in June 1943.

On October 7, 1943 then lieutenant Wilhite's plane, Kentucky Babe II, had an engine knocked out by flak while on a bombing mission to Danzig, Germany. At the time he was the leader of his flight group. The flak also damaged the bomb bay doors. Not quite to the target, to lesson the strain on the remaining three engines, they dropped their bombs THROUGH the closed bomb bay doors, damaging them further and leaving unable to close now. He flew back to England on three and then two engines with the bomb bays stuck open, losing altitude the whole way. The tail gunner and right waist gunner tried using a rope to "lasso" and close the bomb bay doors but were unsuccessful. The ship's engineer managed to close the rear bomb bay doors but could not reach the front ones. Lt. Wilhite was the tallest man on the plane so he leaned over the catwalk thousands of feet in the air and pulled up the doors. He crash-landed his B-24 in a beet field on the English coast. His whole crew survived. He was awarded the Silver Star for his actions on this mission. In December 1943 he was promoted to captain.

On January 7, 1944 Captain Wilhite was piloting B-24 42-41013 with the nickname Trouble. As a lead plane for the mission to Orleans, France, he was joined by the 2nd Bomber Wing commander Major Kenneth Caldwell. Trouble had the misfortune of running into German fighter ace Egon Mayer, who managed to shoot down Trouble and three other B-24s that day plus a B-17. Only one man from Wilhite's plane, Robert Sweatt, made it safely to the ground.

Captain Wilhite's grave is at Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, France. His widow remarried and she is still alive as of this writing.

Thank you Captain Wilhite for your sacrifice. Let's Earn It for David.

This profile was written with the heavy assistance of Larry Smith, who is the son-in-law of Robert Sweatt -- the only crewman to survive the last mission of Trouble. You can read a book about Robert Sweatt's wartime experiences by the name of "Trouble" by Larry Smith. You can find it at Amazon in Kindle or paperback.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

The date was October 9, 1943, and the target was the submarine pens in the Danzig dockyards near Hamburg, Germany.

We were carrying thousand-pound bombs, which pushed the weight capacity of our plane to the limit. It took a long time to get off the ground because of the extra weight, but then things seemed to settle down into our familiar routine for most of the mission. We were in the bomb run when flak took out the number four engine. At the same time we hit prop wash from another plane in the formation. Our plane canted at about a forty-five degree angle, and we started to lose altitude. The damaged engine was not responding to normal controls, and we couldn’t feather the prop, so it was wind-milling, and it felt like the vibration was going to shake off the end of the wing.

Wilhite called on the intercom and said “Get rid of those bombs!”
Mac answered, “I can’t get the bomb bay doors open!”

So Wilhite hit the salvo lever and dropped those thousand-pounders right through the bomb bay doors. Then he opened the throttles to maximum, trying to regain altitude and get back into formation.

The windmilling prop finally got so hot that it seized up and was causing a severe drag on the plane. The bomb bay doors flapping in the wind didn’t help either. We managed to stay close to the formation through the bomb run and the turn to head back to England. The other planes in the formation really tightened up around us to protect us, and, boy that really felt great.

We threw out everything that wasn’t nailed down to lighten us, but we kept losing altitude. The whole group stayed with us in formation though. It was far from certain that we would make it to England. Caplinger and I thought we could somehow rein in those bomb bay doors and reduce the drag enough to make a difference. NOW it seems like a pretty stupid idea, but at the time, we were more concerned about getting home than about the risk.

We thought we might be able to lasso the corners of the doors with some rope we found and pull them in and tie them up. So the two of us went to the bomb bay and walked out on the little nine-inch-wide catwalk, fighting the tornado of air with no parachutes. The wind was simply too strong, and after about fifteen minutes with no luck, we gave up.

Wilhite managed to keep us airborne until we reached the coast of England, but we were steadily losing altitude. We made the coast at Dover with an altitude of about two hundred feet. I’ll bet we weren’t over land more than a minute or two when the number one engine ran out of gas. We now had only two engines running. Wilhiteordered the copilot to feather number one, but he accidentally hit the wrong switch and feathered engine number two, which left us with only ONE engine. Wilhitehollered over the intercom, “GET OUT OF THAT NOSE, WE’RE GOING IN!”

I was standing at the waist window, looking out, and saw the ailerons kicked as high as they would go. We were coming down at about a forty-five degree angle. Wilhite let the right wing dip a little, which pulled the left wing up and made what seemed like a 0ne-eighty-degree turn. He leveled off, and a few seconds later, we belly landed in a beet field. The field was only about a quarter-mile long, and it had trees on both sides, but Wilhite landed us safely.

None of us were seriously injured. I remember that Soltys, the navigator, got a little cut on his finger. I can still see in my mind the ball turret as we were skidding along the ground, with dirt piling up in the floor of the plane through the opening. After we stopped moving and got out of the plane, I noticed that it was balanced on the fuselage and the wings were almost level. Amazing!

This is one of the final 100 stories to be written (94) as part of this project which ends on September 2, 2020, the 75 anniversary of the end of World War II. At that time more than 1,370 men and women will have been profiled. The project will live on in an expanded program to write the stories of all 400,000+ US World War II fallen. Visit www.storiesbehindthestars.org to learn more. We welcome your continued support and interest and encourage you to help write some of these stories.

Last year on this date Bob Fuerst profiled Katsuaki Miho, 442nd Infantry Regiment. You can read about Katsuaki here.

On behalf of the fallen, if you would like to see more people become aware of this project to honor the WW2 fallen, be sure to share with others on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Thanks for your interest!

I created this video to explain why I started this project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXt8QA481lY.

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