1st Lt. Lucien earned the Distinguished Flying Cross while serving in the 41st Fighter Squadron in New Guinea.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/35021604/lucien-roy-johnson
https://www.flickr.com/photos/peacelovescoobie/5633542133
First Lieutenant Lucien Roy Johnson never had a chance to reach 100 years old today. Instead, he sacrificed his life for our freedom.
He died at the age of 23 on December 3, 1943 when his fighter plane crashed on takeoff from Nadzab, New Guinea.
Born August 13, 1920 in DeQuincy, Louisiana, he was the third of seven children, four girls and three boys, of Paul Nathan Johnson and Agnes Roy Johnson. His father, a conductor with Kansas City Southern Railway, had two children from a previous marriage. After his first wife died in 1910, he married Agnes in 1916. He died of a heart attack at age 72 in March 1944, just three months after his son was killed. Lt. Johnson’s mother passed away in 1964.
He attended Southwestern Louisiana Institute (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) for three years before enlisting in the Army Air Forces on June 5, 1941 at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas. After earning his wings from a base in California he was sent to the Pacific in late 1942, where he flew the one-seater Bell P-39 Airacobra fighter plane.
He flew numerous combat missions while serving with the 35th Fighter Group, 41st Fighter Squadron. For his service he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for “. . . extraordinary achievement while participating in fifty operational flight missions in the Southwest Pacific area during which hostile contact was probable, and attack missions, and patrol and reconnaissance flights. In the course of these operations strafing and bombing attacks were from dangerously low altitudes, destroying and damaging enemy installations and equipment.”
He was initially interred at a cemetery in New Guinea, and his remains were returned to the United States in 1949 for burial at the Perkins Cemetery in DeQuincy, Louisiana. In 1950, Southwestern Louisiana Institute placed a plaque on the campus in memory of the 132 alumni who died in the war, including Lt. Johnson.
All three of his brothers served in the war and survived. The last of his siblings, his sister Letitia, died in 2010.
Thank you, Lt. Lucien Roy Johnson for your sacrifice. Let's Earn It for Lucien.
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This profile was written by John F. Schlatter. “I’m from Knoxville, Tennessee and a retired corporate public relations manager, living in Las Vegas. I served as an active duty and reserve Army officer 1974-82. I’ve written two books about veterans. One tells the stories of WWII veterans through postcards they wrote to the folks back home, and the other honors about 50 of the 168 Americans who died in Vietnam on the Fourth of July. I’ve also been a volunteer in the effort to find photographs of all 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam. Researching and writing the stories of those who died to preserve freedom has gone from a hobby to a passion for me. If we don’t honor and remember, who will?”
This is one of the final 50 stories (21) to be written as part of this project which ends on September 2, 2020, the 75th 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 I profiled Guadalcanal fallen and US Naval Academy graduate Eugene Huntemer, USS Cushing. You can read about Eugene 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!
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