For Memorial Day, remembering the 14 flyboys who died in Palm Beach County during WWII

Yahoo

22-05-2025

Fourteen flyboys, young men in their 20s and late teens — some married, others just out of high school — along with their hopes and dreams died three days before Christmas 1943 in likely the deadliest air crash in Palm Beach County.
A final adieu was never broadcast far and wide, and their story hardly ever told until a Palm Beach Post reporter learned what happened 70 years later. They came to be known as The Forgotten 14.
It was smack in the middle of the most destructive war mankind has ever known. The 14 servicemen loaded onto a bomber in the wee hours of Dec. 22, 1943 to travel to a secret destination from Morrison Field, which later became Palm Beach International Airport.
They flew in a bomber, the 24H. A previous model had had problems lifting off the runway.
One of the servicemen, Bert Sauls, called his family ahead of the flight, worried: "We'll never make it. We're overloaded."
Read the Post reporter's full story: The Forgotten 14: A story never told
They cleared the end of the runway and then clipped the tops of three or four Australian pines about three-quarters of a mile from there. Engine parts were found at the base of those trees.
The plane bounced off the ground and came down in a cow pasture. Then the full fuel tanks burst into flames.
Onlookers, many awoken by the sound of the crash, raced to the site. They said they couldn't get past the "sheet of flames." They did manage to rescue two survivors — Artillery Gunner Howard Sewell and navigator Radamés E. Cáceres.
Sewell told an officer from his hospital bed that the engines had no problems; they were "purring like a kitten."
Within 36 hours of the crash, he and Cáceres were gone.
The oldest of the 14 was pilot Samuel Gerald Dean, of Helena, Montana at age 27. He met his wife, Louise, not long before he signed up, which was about a month after Pearl Harbor — Dec. 7, 1941. She followed him from base to base and was pregnant when he died. Sam Jr. would be born about two months after the crash.
2. Dean's co-pilot was Edward Joseph Wolbers of Loveland, Ohio. He died days shy of age 27, a Christmas baby.
"He was a wonderful person," his sister-in-law Dorothy Wolbers said in 2014.
3. Cáceres, like Dean, enlisted about a month after Pearl Harbor. The 21-year-old single man hailed from Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico.
4. Bombardier Douglas Laurent Dauphin, 22, of St. Claire Shores, Michigan descended from French Canadians. He was the only one of six brothers who didn't make it back. He and Henrietta had been married three months.
5. The only Floridian was master gunner Sauls, 20, who came from Mango, a little settlement east of Tampa.
"My dad was a Christian, and he wanted to fight for his country," daughter Sylvia Diane Sauls Waugh said in 2014.
Sauls's second daughter, Linda Louise, would be born two months after he died.
6. Staff Sgt. Kenneth N. Markle, 25, the radio operator, was another one from New York — Middletown in the Hudson Valley region.
7. Artillery gunner Louis Karp, 25, another staff sergeant, had been a clerk in the Bronx when he enlisted on Nov. 14, 1942. He is buried in Queens in Mount Lebanon Cemetery.
8. James Henry "Jim" Henderson, 21, a second artillery gunner, had already lost his cousin Pete to noncombat injuries when he enlisted in October 1942. He was single and a civilian truck driver.
9. Douglas Vincent Schmoker, 20, another artillery gunner, also signed up in October 1942 and was single. He'd had two years of high school.
10. Sewell, one of the initial survivors of the crash, had turned 19 two weeks before the crash. He hailed from Erie, Pennsylvania and had a girlfriend.
11. George M. "Pud" Durrett, due to turn 23 three weeks later, was one of four brothers to join the military. Durrett of West Point, Mississippi was the only one to die.
12. Robert H. Watson, 22, of Fresno, California, attended Fresno State College for one semester in 1939. He had a brother in the Navy.
13. Harold Edwin Richards, 25, from Elmwood, Nebraska, worked for Nabisco when he enlisted more than a year before Pearl Harbor. In December 1942, he was transferred to the Army Air Corps. He'd married Verna Faye Miller on March 15.
14. James Dixon "Big Jim" Fore, 22, from Whiteville, North Carolina, was the first in his family to graduate from West Point. Two days after graduation, he married his wife, Theo.
They didn't get the send-off they deserved until now-retired Post staff writer and historian Eliot Kleinberg happened upon their story.
Kleinberg, who wrote the Post-Times history column for decades, was corresponding with the U.S. Air Force Historical Research Agency in Alabama when a researcher told him they had a number of files about Morrison Field.
Day after day, fat envelopes began to arrive.
Many were reports of minor plane mishaps.
"Then I came across one that stopped me cold," he said. "It listed 14 names. In the column for injuries, each box read, 'F' — Fatal. Fatal, fatal, fatal. — Fourteen times."
He thought he knew everything important that had happened in Palm Beach County and the Treasure Coast during World War II. But not this.
"I stood up and walked right into the Post library and pulled out the microfilm roll for December 1943," he said. "And there it was. A small article. Five paragraphs. The next day, two paragraphs. Then nothing."
Kleinberg had months — in time for Memorial Day 2014 — to tell their story, including finding photos to show all of their faces. He did.
He tracked down and called relatives.
"Many were touched, and a little confused, that I was writing this seven decades later," Kleinberg said. "I told them simply that the first time around, we hadn't."
Holly Baltz, who has a passion for history, is The Palm Beach Post's investigations editor. You can reach her at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: For Memorial Day, remembering 14 World War II flyboys who died in PBC