Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 8
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
December 1998 | Volume 49, Issue 8
My quest began sometime shortly after World War II. I was a young boy when my maternal grandfather told me the story of how my father, Lt. Col. Francis R. Stevens, had been killed in the skies over New Guinea. In the spring of 1942 Dad was assigned to OPD, Operations Division in the War Department, what Col. Red Reeder, who replaced Dad a few months later, referred to as General Marshall’s command post. Gen. George C. Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, was concerned that he was not getting a clear enough picture of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s activities in the Pacific Theater. MacArthur’s dispatches kept calling for more of everything—more troops, more equipment, more supplies—but they provided precious little in the way of information about what he planned to do with all this added capability. The general’s approach appeared to be that if he didn’t tell higher headquarters what he was planning to do, it couldn’t tell him to stop. So General Marshall decided to send my dad and a highly qualified Air Corps officer, Lt. Col. Samuel E. Anderson, on a fact-finding mission to figure out what MacArthur was up to.
At about that time the commander in chief of all U.S. forces was having the very same problem with the Pacific Theater commander. And President Roosevelt had another problem to deal with: a protégé named Lyndon Baines Johnson, a congressman from the great state of Texas, who had reverted from his status as a commander in the Navy Reserve to active duty. Johnson was champing at the bit, eager to get an assignment to a combat theater. Roosevelt was not at all happy at the prospect of his representatives and senators heading for the front. Moreover, being politicians, once one of them did it, the rest would feel compelled to follow. So FDR solved both problems by sending Johnson on temporary duty to Australia for the same mission on which Marshall had sent Dad. While the young congressman was away, the President promulgated an edict that prohibited members of the House and Senate from active service: They could serve in Congress or they could serve in the armed forces, but they could not do both.
Halfway across the Pacific the three men met up with one another. Once they realized that they were there for the same purpose, they decided to combine forces and continue on as a team. They visited MacArthur’s headquarters together and they resolved together to get as close as they could to the front. So they made a side trip to southern New Guinea to take part in a bombing mission over a Japanese base. It was on this mission that my father was killed when a Japanese Zero fighter shot down his plane.
My grandfather concluded by adding that he believed that there were pictures of the action buried away in some Air Force archive. I did not give this much thought. Then,