WWII pilot keeps war memories alive

By Chris Vaughn

cvaughn@star-telegram.com

HASLET -- The handsome pilot in the leather bomber jacket is now 90 years old, an oxygen tube wrapped over his ears and in the care of a hospice nurse who checks on him every few days.

The French-speaking self-described "coonass" from south Louisiana who dropped bombs on Japan has more friends in the cemetery than anywhere else and knows that the day he will join them is fast arriving. He's even pushing family members to show him which picture they intend to use with his obituary.

"I'm grateful for every day," Elgin Ledet said from his favorite recliner. "I don't know how many more I will have."

This is the World War II generation, or what's left of it.

The most globally expansive conflict in the history of war concluded on Aug. 14, 1945, 66 years ago. That anniversary and the men and women who participated in the war are being remembered Thursday at a museum near Fort Worth Meacham Airport.

For a long time in America, it was possible for everyone to know at least one World War II veteran. It was usually Dad or Grandpa. Sixteen million men and women served in uniform during those four years.

But today the generation that fought at Midway, Guadalcanal, Tunisia, Anzio, Tarawa, Leyte and Bastogne and lived to come home, lies mostly in cemeteries. Fewer than 2 million are alive, and an estimated 900 are dying every day.

Ledet, a decorated B-25 Mitchell pilot who flew his missions from an Alaskan outpost, has significant heart problems and is receiving end-of-life care from VITAS Innovative Hospice Care. Yet his mind is razor-sharp and his memories vivid.

"It seems that it wasn't that long ago I was doing that," he said. "I remember my crew, the people in the mess hall, the enlisted men on the island. ... I miss some of those fellas."

His daughter, Faye Bartley, said Ledet rarely spoke of the war over the years. He was always busy working, she said.

"The older he gets, like a lot of old people, he talks more about the past than what he did yesterday," she said.

"I hear him talking to the hospice aides about the war. But I heard stories he told you that we've never heard before."

Cajun childhood

The war plucked Ledet out of a sugar mill in Montegut, a small town south of Houma in the bayou country of Louisiana.

Working as a timekeeper for the mill, plus five sugar cane plantations, Ledet was pulling in about $12 a week and spending some of it courting a young woman named Joyce Brien.

He had hardly been anywhere outside the parishes of Terrebonne, Lafourche, Iberia and Orleans.

"I had been to Mississippi and Alabama," he said. "Not too far out of Louisiana."

Ledet was born in his parents' shotgun house in Montegut in the autumn of 1920. From the time he could walk, he helped his parents earn a living as shrimpers and trappers. Many of his earliest memories are of a rustic camp south of Morgan City where his parents spent every winter trapping muskrats for the pelts.

"I couldn't set the traps," he said. "My father used to set them for me. I started helping Dad skin the rats when I was old enough to handle the knife. I was probably 5 or 6 years old."

He remembers the Depression, but his family escaped the worst of the joblessness and poverty.

"We had a lot to eat, we had a car, we had two shrimp boats," he said. "I wouldn't call that being poor."

In 1939, the year the war in Europe escalated dramatically when Britain and France declared war on Germany, Ledet graduated from high school in Houma and moved to New Orleans to attend a business school.

Ledet took his bookkeeping diploma and returned home to work in the South Coast Sugar Mill. After the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Ledet looked into joining the Navy as a flier but fell short of educational requirements. So he kept working at the sugar mill.

"I enjoyed the job," he said. "Let me put it this way -- I went into the Army because I was drafted."

It was the fall of 1942. Within days, he would start a journey over which he rarely had a modicum of control. First, Keesler Field, Miss., for basic training, then Sioux Falls, S.D., to learn how to operate radios on aircraft.

"I had never been in cold like that," he said.

But the Army needed pilots, so it lowered its educational requirements. Ledet, a buck private, did well enough on the tests to head for pilot training in Cuero, near Victoria. He can still remember, all too well, his first solo flight in a BT-13 Valiant over DeWitt County.

"I made 17 passes on the runway before I landed," he said, largely because he couldn't master the airspeed necessary for a safe touchdown on the grass runway. "I was getting worried. I finally came in with enough power. I probably used all the runway."

On Aug. 4, 1944, Ledet earned his wings and a flight officer commission, a specially created rank below a second lieutenant. Up until that day, Ledet had gone through training with the stripes of a private first class.

Hair-raising flying

In early August 1945, Ledet flew his last, and perhaps his most memorable, mission over Japan, hitting a convoy of ships in the frigid northern reaches of the Pacific Ocean.

"Out of eight airplanes, we lost two," he said, the six-man crews having disappeared into the water.

Ledet made only 10 combat missions, a fairly low number compared with many other World War II pilots, but earned two Air Medals doing it. The weather was almost always too miserable, and the targets in the northern islands of Japan were apparently few. Perhaps the 77th Bomb Squadron was simply forgotten sometimes. (The unit was later honored with a Distinguished Unit Citation for its work in 1944-45.)

Of all the places for a Cajun to end up, it was the Aleutian Islands, specifically the island of Attu, which was invaded by the Japanese in June 1942 and reclaimed by the Army's 7th Infantry Division a year later.

Attu was about 700 miles from a string of volcanic islands stretching from northern Japan to Russia, which were at the outer range of where the B-25 could fly and still return to base. Ledet's aircraft would have two external fuel tanks strapped on and carry a lighter payload of bombs to carry even more fuel. It was hair-raising flying, even without the Japanese shooting at them.

"We would always fly on the deck, between the water and the low clouds," he said. "We never even used our bombsights. We bombed visually."

When Ledet and the other crews heard about the Japanese surrender, they celebrated modestly and awaited their return home. It would take a lot longer than they thought.

"We were told we would be the first to leave because we were the only combat outfit," he said. "But it took two months. We didn't have nothing to do. We would play cards all night and sleep in the daytime."

At the end of 1945, the Army discharged Ledet as a second lieutenant, and he gladly returned to south Louisiana to resume his job as a timekeeper at the sugar mill. Eventually, he ran a crew boat for hire, then a tug business. Then he opened a bar -- Gene's -- in Montegut, which bears his name even though he sold it 25 years ago.

After his wife died in 1985 and his health began to fail a few years later, Ledet moved to North Texas to live with Bartley in a rural subdivision off U.S. 287.

"I'm very lucky to have a daughter taking care of me," he said.

Outside of his family, he doesn't know many people anymore. The men he served with on his bomber crew are all gone, as far as he knows. His friends in Louisiana, the customers at his bar, the men he loved to fish with, they're mostly gone too.

"That's the penalty for living a long time," he said.

Not that he's giving up. There's still some fight in him.

"I've got one goal -- to be the last World War II veteran alive."

Chris Vaughn, 817-390-7547

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