By Chris Vaughn
cvaughn@star-telegram.com
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Betty Wheeler wanted her father's resting place to be somewhere beautiful and extraordinary. He deserved that.
He had crawled into the ball turret underneath a bomber on missions over Germany, a place that required uncommon courage. Shot down in the spring of 1944, he spent 13 months as a prisoner of war in a German camp.
Five years after he was freed, at midnight in the middle of a nasty northern Pacific storm, her father bailed out of a doomed B-36 Peacemaker based in Fort Worth.
He died in the ocean that night. His relatives knew that, or felt they knew that, since they never received confirmation.
On Friday, a casket containing a few bones of Air Force Staff Sgt. Elbert W. Pollard will be lowered into the ground at San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio, within sight of the Golden Gate Bridge. Weather willing, Air Force planes will fly over to honor him.
Wheeler, Pollard's only child, finally got her confirmation this year that remains recovered in the 1950s are those of her father. Of course she is emotional, but not in a particularly sad way.
"I feel such joy that I am being given my father," she said. "I feel some kind of reverence and a strong desire to honor him. I chose the Presidio because it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. With all my father went through and all the places his bones have traveled, I wanted him to finally be in a place of beauty."
What happened the night of Pollard's death either has been forgotten in the mists of time or was never known by subsequent generations. But it was a major event in Fort Worth at the time, and small wonder: 17 men bailed out of a stricken bomber and were missing for days.
There were several story lines besides the sheer number of missing fliers. One was concern about a growing number of dangerous mechanical problems with the B-36, produced at the Convair plant next to Carswell Air Force Base. Within a few days, 12 of those men were found and returned to Fort Worth, reunited with their families. Five never were -- Pollard, Capt. Theodore F. Schreier, Capt. William Phillips, Lt. Holiel Ascol and Staff Sgt. Neil A. Straley.
Streets were named after some of the missing men on what was then the Air Force base but is now part of Westworth Village.
A story line that never emerged in those days, however, makes the crash all the more fascinating.
The plane the men were on carried a 10,000-pound nuclear bomb.
A midnight crash and erroneous reports
The B-36B -- a monstrous six-engine strategic bomber with a ridiculous 230-foot wingspan -- took off from Fairbanks, Alaska, on Feb. 13, 1950, and headed south to return to Carswell on a 16-hour simulated combat bombing mission.
Several hours into the flight, the plane began icing. That trouble was followed by icing inside some of the engines. It got worse when three engines caught fire. Then instruments started failing.
On board was an Mk-4 nuclear bomb, similar to the "Fat Man" bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. However, according to official accounts, the bomb did not carry the plutonium core required to trigger a nuclear explosion. Still, it had to be dumped in the Pacific Ocean, if the men were to have any chance at surviving a ditching.
It would be the nation's first "broken arrow," a secret term that signaled a mishap involving a nuclear weapon.
*** Thrasher, like Pollard, was a gunner aboard the aircraft. He remembers the entire incident "like it was yesterday." The bomb detonated several hundred feet off the water, and the aircraft turned around to get back to land.
"As soon as the navigator said, 'We've crossed the shoreline,' we started bailing out," said Thrasher, who retired in 1971 as a senior master sergeant and lives in Hurst. "We couldn't tell because there was a cloud deck below us."
It was right at midnight.
Thrasher jumped right after Pollard. He has a theory why it ended differently for him.
"None of the rest of them bothered with a Mae West," he said, referring to a personal flotation device. "I was having trouble fastening my chest strap over the Mae West, then when I got out of the airplane, I couldn't find my D-ring. When I did finally find it, the chute made two oscillations and then I hit a tree."
He has always figured that high winds blew the five missing men out to the frigid waters. The rest all parachuted and landed in lonely forests.
In the ensuing hours, some of the men began to link up, most of them uninjured. Lt. Charles C. Pooler, though, had broken his ankle. Staff Sgt. Vitale Trippodi hurt his shoulder hanging upside down in a tree for hours.
The U.S. military and Canadian authorities launched a massive search-and-rescue operation, but gale-force winds, poor visibility and driving rain hampered the effort. Eight men died in another plane crash looking for the crew.
Twelve of the B-36 crewmen were discovered by fishing vessels and a Canadian Coast Guard cutter by Feb. 16.
The headline on the Feb. 16, 1950, edition of the Star-Telegram proclaimed "All Men Aboard Missing B-36 Found Alive On Canadian Isles ... 10 Are Rescued by Vessels, 7 Safe on Island."
"I feel wonderful," Ascol's wife told the paper. "I just can't express my feelings. I never gave up hope. He's always said, 'If there's one who's gonna make it, it'll be me.'"
Pollard's wife, Betty, said her emotions had been "up and down" all that day, and she was thrilled with the good news.
"The Lord has answered our prayers," she exclaimed, according to the paper.
The next day, the bottom dropped out of five of those families' celebrations. Regardless of why the erroneous reports came out, and whether it was the newspaper's or the Air Force's fault, one can only imagine the excruciating letdown for the five families who found out that their husbands and fathers were still missing.
About two years after the ditching, a fisherman found a parachute and a boot with human remains. Not long afterward, the military held a group burial for the five men at the Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in St. Louis.
Widowed at age 21, Betty Pollard carried on raising children. She had three girls, although Betty Wheeler was her only child with Pollard.
Pollard's widow remarried, but she never got rid of his trunk, which held his flight suit, his dress uniform, his military paperwork, the money he brought back from Europe at the end of World War II, the well-rubbed dominoes he handled, the harmonica he loved to play.
Betty Pollard died in 2000, and now the trunk is in Wheeler's house in Sacramento, Calif.
"I know my mother never recovered from his loss," Wheeler said. "My mother always spoke so highly of him. But there were so many details of who he was I never knew."
Wheeler was only 20 months old when the aircraft went down. She has photographs, and she is convinced that one memory is authentic: a fine summer day at the beach in Corpus Christi when he took her into the water.
"I was always told, 'You couldn't possibly remember that,' but I do," she said. "I've always sensed the presence of my father through the years."
The B-36 wreckage was finally discovered, by accident, in 1953 on a mountain about 6,000 feet high. Air Force personnel recovered sensitive items, and everything else was destroyed.
'I wanted to know if that was my father'
In July 2001, 51 years later, Ascol's daughter, Ann Ascol Rodenberg, finally persuaded the government to exhume the casket in the hopes that the remains could be identified using DNA testing that was unavailable when they were buried.
"There was one grave, five men, one casket and one set of remains," Rodenberg said. "That led me to think, 'Why can't we find out who this is?' I wanted to know if that was my father."
The remains were sent to the Defense Department's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii for testing. After DNA was gathered from the airmen's maternal relatives, the test came back inconclusive. Over the years, the testing was redone, although Wheeler never knew that.
"I had no idea that this was still being pursued," she said.
Her phone in California rang Feb. 13, and someone from the Air Force told her that the last test came up positive. The bones were Pollard's.
She took that phone call on the 62nd anniversary of the crash. Rodenberg received a call around the same time.
"I am ecstatic for her," said Rodenberg, who was born at Carswell, is retired from the Air Force and now lives in Maryland. "It's not going to happen for the rest of us, and that's unfortunate. But there was only one set of remains ever found. It was worth it for Betty."
The other four men are not listed as missing, as one would expect. No one from the Defense Department office responsible for missing personnel responded to repeated requests to explain their status.
Rodenberg said she would like the government to provide a burial with honors and a separate headstone for each of the other four families. But the Air Force has denied her requests.
"It raised my hackles," she said. "These men did a great deal for the government. I feel that they should have some kind of honor. To just forget these guys because of some embarrassment over a broken-arrow incident is just not right."
As Wheeler prepared for the return and burial of her father's remains, a friend asked her why she was going to so much trouble for an event that happened decades ago for a man she never knew.
"This is my father," she thought. "Yes, it was 62 years ago. But there was flesh around those bones at one time. He was a young man when he died, a young man who had plans."
Thrasher visited the site of the bailout in 1998, throwing a wreath of flowers into the water where the five men died. He remembers them all well. The commander of that aircrew, Capt. Harold Barry, died April 27, 1951, when a P-51 Mustang fighter slammed into his B-36 cockpit in Oklahoma. (Thrasher had to bail out of that airplane too.)
"Pollard was a great guy," he said. "He was my buddy. I really feel for his daughter. But I'm glad they did identify him."
Learning about her father, talking to people who can still remember him, reading the details in the government report and planning his burial have made her feel complete.
"It has been an incredible gift," she said. "I always felt like something was missing, this part of my history, who I am."
News researcher Cathy Belcher contributed to this report.
Chris Vaughn, 817-390-7547
Twitter: @CVaughnFW
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2012/05/23/3979687/remains-of-airman-identified-from.html#my-headlines-fortworth#storylink=cpy