David Venditta

Second of three parts

—

Walter Hannum was just a toddler when his mother died. She was in her late twenties and had taught in Chester County public schools. A newspaper story said she had been ill for six weeks with typhoid fever. It described her as “an estimable woman … of a high Christian character and greatly esteemed by all who knew her.”

Until his dad remarried several years later, Walter lived on his grandparents’ dairy farm in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. His father had a young brother named Ralph, who was the same age as Walter.

“He was my uncle, but he was only three months older than myself. So we were raised together, and he was more like a brother.”

They would grow up to share an interest in motorcycles and airplanes. But early on, they did chores on the eighteen-acre farm, where the Hannums had three horses and twelve to fourteen cows.

“You went out and hoed corn and picked the bugs off the vines. You kept busy. Ralph and I didn’t get in on the milking back then, but there was a hand pump to pump water. Up in the attic was a big wooden tank, and every evening we had to fill that tank. And this pump, Ralph and I couldn’t work the handle ourselves, so we had to team up to pump this water. And of course, where they watered the cattle, that trough had to be filled. So that was our job every day.”

Initially, Granddad Hannum resisted new technology.

“A way back, the horses were used in the field to plow and pull the wagons, mowers, hay rakes, everything. Dad got to talking about a Fordson tractor. Granddad said no, that they weren’t good for the ground because they packed it down from the weight, when you plowed or harrowed with them.”

He gave in after a big farm nearby got a Fordson.

“Ralph and I used to go up and run it, like for crops, because they liked a kid on there, because they used the men for the heavy work. Ralph and I would get to fighting over whose turn it was to drive it.”

Walter’s dad bought a 1917 Fordson at an auction for $90. It had iron wheels. The entire differential unit was lying on the ground when he made his bid, and he didn’t know what, if anything, was wrong with it. He took the part home and installed it. The tractor ran fine. Walter and Ralph later improved it with rubber tires.

—

Walter was a lanky lad with a crinkly grin. Sometimes his granddad had him smarting and scratching his head.

“He had these leather slippers with elastic inside. And you talk about a man with a fast draw! He could whip one of them off and crack you across the back before you knew what. Times I stood there and wondered, well, what was this for? Something I did. I wasn’t always sure.”

In time, he thought highly of farm life.

“I look back, and I think it was a good way to be brought up.”

Still, his eyes were on flying machines. As kids, he and Ralph would stand out in the field and gawk at the old Jennys flying overhead. The Jenny biplanes were cheap and available after the First World War. Then once, there was a big, old LWF biplane at the far end of the field.

“Ralph and I had been fussing so much about flying, Grandmother Hannum got in her sugar bowl and she got out $12 for us. It was $6 apiece for a ride. The thing held four. Ralph and I had to face the back. Two people faced the front. We had a ride, and Grandmother figured that would quiet us down. But it didn’t. That was it.”

Walter’s dad, Bill Hannum, remarried in 1921, and the family moved to a house up the hill, across from Northwood Cemetery. Bill and the former Clara Pierce had met at a square-dance. They went on to have two daughters, my Aunt Hilda and my mom, Elizabeth.

During his first and only year of high school, Walter helped an older friend, Cliff Young, build a little biplane. Walter made ribs for the wings instead of studying at night. When he quit school, he signed on as an apprentice in the pattern shop at Downingtown Manufacturing, and stayed with it until Cliff drew him away to a dream job working on airplanes.

Cliff had gotten a job in the experimental department at the Bellanca aircraft factory in New Castle, Delaware. He brought Walter, now about eighteen, into the company. Walter moved into Cliff’s farmhouse near Marshallton, a village about four miles from Downingtown.

“Then I got short on clothes. Cliff brought me home in the Model T. I got the clothes, and my dad gave me the devil.”

Bill told his son, “Those airplanes are no good. You can’t use them for a thing. It’s just some guys fooling around, and you’ll never amount to a damn if you follow that job. You go back and learn your trade – pattern-making.”

Walter did as he was told.

 “It was just as well. The Depression hit, and airplane factories closed up. At least at Downingtown, we were making parts for paper machinery three days a week or three days every other week.”

He kept tinkering with planes and going aloft in them, but not always safely. Once, he and Cliff crashed through a post-and-rail fence during takeoff when a headwind kept them from clearing a stone house. Neither was hurt, but the propeller was broken and the landing gear and bottom wing were damaged.

And then about 11 a.m. on August 9, 1931, the unthinkable happened.

“Cliff had got ahold of a real nice, modern biplane, not a world war surplus. It had a big V-8 water-cooled engine with ninety horsepower, and could haul three people.

“So one Sunday morning, I’m goin’ down the road in my hot ’29 Chevy roadster, and I stopped at Granddad’s, and young Eddie Mendenhall come out. Now he was a cousin, he was just fifteen at the time, and he wanted to go with me over to Cliff’s to fly. He was interested in aviation too.

“Cliff  had his plane there in the field by the barn. Eddie and I got in the front seat, side by side and facing forward. Cliff fired her up and we went flying. Half an hour later, when we came back to land, the engine quit at around 300 feet, and the plane went into a spin. A spin is very simple: If you get that airplane too slow to stay in the air, one side will quit flying first.”

The plane, a Challenger, spiraled into a field, hitting on its nose.

Four men, two of them Cliff’s relatives, hurried to the wreck. So did a friend of Walter’s, who sped there in Walter’s roadster, crashing through farmers’ fences. He found Walter sticking out between the plane’s firewall and gas tank. The engine had smashed back into the forward seats.

Eddie was the worst off. He had broken bones in both legs and both feet, and a fractured skull. He died four hours later in the Homeopathic Hospital of West Chester, where the three fliers had been taken by car.

Cliff, at the controls, had been seated behind Eddie and Walter. When the plane hit the ground, his head snapped forward, and the safety belt knocked out all of his teeth, Walter said.

With no sensitivity, an Associated Press story the next day said Cliff, who was thirty-eight, “suffered many broken bones and shock from which he is expected to die.” But he hung on, and during eight months in Abington Memorial Hospital, he underwent three surgeries.

“He never did recover,” Walter said. “Four years later, he died.”

Walter’s injuries included lacerations on his face, bone fractures in his left foot and right ankle, and a broken jaw. He believed he survived because Eddie, seated beside him, cushioned him on impact.

“I think his body protected me when we went in.”

My mom, who was just shy of three years old, says that seeing her brother all bandaged up frightened her.

So, why did the plane’s engine quit? Walter knew the answer.

“It was carburetor ice. In them days, they knew nothing about it. It was in August, and who would’ve thought you’d have ice in the carburetor in August?”

In the Homeopathic Hospital, Walter met student nurse Emma Collier, a 1928 graduate of Radnor High School. “Emma is a girl who, no matter what happens, is always ready to laugh” and has a “musical giggle,” according to the yearbook blurb alongside her photo. She was an athlete, with a letter in track. “In jumping, she cannot be excelled,” the blurb’s writer said.

Walter had a couple of dates with Emma after he got into shape. He courted her with his Chevy roadster, taking her to movies at the Warner Theater in West Chester. But there was a hurdle: She had a boyfriend. Walter talked with him one night about automobiles and soon had him out of the picture.

“I kind of overcome him. He lost out,” he said with that crinkly grin.

Often, Walter didn’t have enough gas money for his car, so he rode his Harley to see Emma.

“Her parents lived down back of Paoli, so I’d bum a quarter off my dad – I could buy a lot of gasoline with a quarter back then for a motorcycle – so I’d go down to see her on the motorcycle. So then her parents, they made me park it out on the main road and walk in, because I guess they didn’t want the neighbors to know that Emma went with a lowlife that rode a motorcycle.”

In 1932, the year after the plane crash, Walter was riding his Harley on Baltimore Pike one Sunday morning when someone in a Buick roadster pulled out from a stop sign and hit him. That was the end of the motorcycle. Walter was banged up, too, and landed in the hospital again.

He and Emma were married on April 12, 1934, but on the sly because she was still a student nurse and would have been canned if word got out. The students’ house mother knew about the nuptials but covered for Emma.

Walter told his dad about getting hitched and had a moment of dismay.

“Well, there’s no use in telling you anything,” Bill told his son in disgust, and walked away. Then he turned to come back and said, “Well, she seems like a nice girl. I think you’ll be all right.”

The couple lived for a few years in an apartment above a garage on Downingtown’s Brandywine Avenue, then rented a bungalow along Route 113 owned by Walter’s Aunt Marie for $20 a month.

Walter was still working at Downingtown Manufacturing, where on March 7, 1931, he had completed four years’ pattern apprenticeship and the vice president wrote, “We cheerfully recommend him as trustworthy and competent.”

When his “brother” Ralph bought a plane, a Taylor J-2 Cub, while working in Ohio, Walter and a pal became part owners for $200 apiece. Ralph brought the Cub to the Main Line Airport in Malvern, where Walter took flying lessons. In 1941, he got his pilot’s license.

Four years later, with Walter in the Navy and World War II almost won, he left Washington state’s Whidbey Island for Adak in the Aleutians. He found out what “further transfer” meant.

He was going to Attu.

Part 3 coming Friday, August 13

First of three parts

My Uncle Walter liked to say that if he’d kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t have landed in the Navy and ended up at one of the most desolate, unforgiving outposts of World War II.

Walter Leroy Hannum was my mom’s older brother, born in 1910 to a southeastern Pennsylvania farmer and his schoolteacher wife. In his youth, he crafted wooden patterns for machinery, rode motorcycles, built biplanes and learned to fly. As a thirty-something sailor in the North Pacific, he specialized in aircraft ammo and bombs bound for Japan. Back home, he used the GI Bill to earn a commercial pilot’s license.

The lure of machines almost cut his life short.  When he was twenty, a biplane he was riding in dived into a field, killing a young cousin and critically injuring the pilot. Walter was seriously hurt, but the accident gave way to good fortune. While laid up in the hospital, he met a student nurse, his future wife. The next year, a motorcycle crash banged him up again.

Undaunted by the plane disaster, he got a private pilot’s license in 1941. When America entered the war that year, he was exempt from the draft because his employer, Downingtown Manufacturing Company, did defense work. In peacetime, the plant built paper-making machinery, for which Walter made patterns for casting. Now it made steam winches to raise anchors and lift cargo onto Liberty ships, and produced the steering mechanism for airplane rudders. Walter once made a pattern to carry the breech mechanism on a submarine’s five-inch deck gun.

He liked the work but bristled over the plant’s personnel manager, who’d come down to the pattern shop and tell Walter, “I got you a deferment. Isn’t that pretty nice?” Walter steamed over it.

“I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like him, and I didn’t like him having me in debt to him,” he told me in 1997, when he was eighty-six.

The manager told Walter again and again: “I got you another deferment. Isn’t that pretty nice?”

Then in 1944, when it got near the time for another one, Walter told his foreman, “It’s about time for that big SOB to come down and tell me I have another deferment and isn’t that pretty nice. I’m goin’ up to Personnel and straighten him out.”

He confronted the manager. “I don’t want no more deferments.”

“Well, if you feel that way, I’ll just take you off of it.”

That was a Wednesday. The following Monday, Walter was on a train to Philadelphia to report for induction into the military. He was married and thirty-three years old.

With his background in aviation, he hoped to get into the Army Air Forces as a mechanic. “If you wanna go in the Air Force,” he was told in Philly, “you gotta go in the Army first.” Walter had a problem with that. He didn’t want to do a lot of marching. The heck with that, he thought.

“I’ll take the Navy,” he said, but with no promise of getting the kind of job he wanted. He was inducted on May 5, 1944, a month before the D-Day invasion of France that doomed Nazi Germany.

“Boy, was I wrong about the Navy!” he said. “I went to Camp Peary in Virginia for boot camp, and we marched from 8 in the morning till noon, and you went and got somethin’ to eat, and you went out and you marched from 1 till 5 in the evening for seven weeks.”

One day, the trainees were tested on math, history, geography. A proctor said, “Anybody that’s interested in an aviation rate can stay for a special test.” Walter didn’t think he could pass it, but took it anyway.

“I guess I passed because they interviewed me one day about what I wanted to do in the Navy, and they found out I had seventeen years’ pattern experience. They wanted to put me in pattern-making.”

He didn’t want to do that. He wanted to get into aviation.

“No, you can’t,” one of his two interviewers said, noting Walter didn’t have enough education, just one year of high school. But the other said, “Look at his aptitude test,” and with that, he got a green light for schooling.

He was off to Memphis, Tennessee, to the Naval Air Technical Training Center, where right away the trainees had to pass a math test to stay. Walter fretted again, but he passed. He wouldn’t have, if he hadn’t taken an International Correspondence School course some years earlier – a course that opened a life’s worth of work for him.

“If I hadn’t taken that ICS, I never would’ve made nothin’.”

Now, Walter was among twenty-one students in a class studying aviation ordnance – bombs, fuses, ammunition, machine guns, all of the armament for airplanes.

“We had classes all day, and all day Saturday you took tests on what you studied that week. The next week started, you were on an all-new subject. And if you didn’t pass all those subjects, you had to go at night to try to pick up what you failed.”

An officer urged Walter to volunteer for aerial gunnery, but he balked. He’d seen what fighter planes did to a target with six .50-caliber machine guns, and didn’t want anyone shooting at him.

“Are you afraid to fly?”

“No,” Walter said, “I’m a civilian pilot.”

But he changed his mind about gunnery when classmates pressed him to join them. The draft for gunnery school was filled, though, meaning he couldn’t go. He was in sick bay with a cold and fever when he got word that a slot had opened up for him.

Others in sick bay razzed him that he’d made a mistake.

“Boy, are you foolish! You have the highest marks in our class, and there were two openings at the Philadelphia Navy Yard.”

That didn’t matter to Walter. He didn’t like the cold and thought he’d be learning aerial gunnery where it was warm, in Florida.

“When they read all the drafts out, it was Whidbey Island. I asked somebody if Whidbey Island was off the coast of Florida. He said no, it’s off the coast of Washington – the state of Washington. Good Lord, that’s up there in the Northwest and this is December!”

But Walter found the weather up in Puget Sound, above Seattle, was pleasant that winter of 1944-45. The place was Naval Air Station Whidbey Island, home of Fleet Air Wing 6, where he studied weapons in a classroom and then went outside to fire them.

“Your platform was moving and what you’re shooting at is moving, and you’re only allowed to fire in bursts of twelve shots, because you had an air-cooled gun. If you fired too long, your gun would get hot and quit.”

He shot at all kinds of targets, instructed to always lead them, and learned to use a turret.

“I liked the hydraulic turrets. I could get that gun right where I wanted it. But the electric turret was kind of uncertain. You moved your control, it went too far. If you tried to move your control to slow up, then it was too slow and your turret was erratic trying to follow a target.”

Walter finished the course and worked as an instructor on the firing range while waiting for reassignment.

“All we had was cotton for our ears. You had four hours in the morning and four hours in the afternoon of these guns firing. After two weeks, my ears were ringing night and day.”

His chief said he could stay on as an instructor or put in for a draft out of Whidbey Island. Walter opted for the draft, figuring anything was better than the bedlam in his ears. In the meantime, he went on seaman guard at night, keeping watch on the station’s patrol planes.

One Sunday morning, after he and others finished six hours on guard duty and were crossing a field, they came across a petty officer. He told one of the weary sailors to square his crooked hat. The sailor made a disparaging remark and was put on report. That sealed it for Walter.

“I thought, I’m tired of this chicken nonsense around here.”

He asked to leave the island. It was early June 1945. A pal who worked in the station’s draft office told him that an officer saw Walter’s application and said, “We’ll fix him up.”

When Walter’s orders came through, he couldn’t make out where he was headed. His assignment was just a bunch of letters across the top of the page, “alphabetical soup,” he called it. He went to the post office to get his address changed, and the clerk asked, “You know where you’re goin’?” Walter hadn’t the slightest idea. “You’re going to Adak for further transfer.”

“Where’s Adak?”

“That’s up in the Aleutian Islands.”

Walter went to the library to look at a map and saw that Adak is about midway out the Aleutian chain from mainland Alaska.  

Good Lord! he thought. Alaska! He worried about the “further transfer.” Where would it take him?

Part 2 coming Wednesday, August 11

Uncle Louie was a rascal and a jokester.

“He was kind of a character, wasn’t he?” his older brother Frank said. “He was a fun person, always out for a good time.”

Yes, he was great for laughs, but I saw another side of him.

Louie, Frank and their brothers Sam and Carmine, my dad, all went to war against Germany and Japan. They’re on the Honor Roll of Malvern, Pennsylvania, for their service in World War II. Frank was an Army medic in Panama and at a Long Island psychiatric hospital run by the War Department. Sam was in the Army Coast Artillery in the South Pacific. My dad was a Coast Guard radio operator on patrol frigates in the North Atlantic.

Louis Charles Venditti was born in Lewistown, in the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians of central Pennsylvania, and went to school only as far as eighth grade.

(When my grandfather arrived at Ellis Island from Italy, his name was recorded as Venditta instead of Venditti. Louie and an older brother, Tony, reclaimed the original spelling. My dad and the other siblings – there were a dozen children in all — did not.)

In his late teens, Louie worked at chemical company Foote Mineral, operating a furnace. He joined the Army Air Forces early in 1943 and arrived in England that November, a week after turning twenty. He was a private first class, a ground crewman with the 8^th Air Force. What kind of unit? “Pursuit!” he told me, and said of the hotshots who flew the P-38 Lightnings and P-51 Mustangs, “Oh, those guys were sharp.”

Louie was assigned to the 77^th Station Complement Squadron at Wattisham in East Anglia. His specialty was running heavy-duty automotive equipment. “Hauled personnel, supplies, and equipment,” his Army separation papers say. “Drove fire truck, answering emergency calls to extinguish fires caused by aircraft accidents. Made minor repairs to vehicles.”

Wattisham Station 377, about sixty miles northeast of London, was the base for the 479^th Fighter Group, known as “Riddle’s Raiders.” It had three fighter squadrons that used P-38s and P-51s for ground attack and bomber escort.

One day was seared into Louie’s memory. He told me about it in the spring of 1995, as the family gathered after the funeral of his sister Josie.

A crippled P-38 was returning to the base from Nazi-occupied Europe. Its pilot might have been injured. He had to crash-land the twin-engine fighter, and when it hit the ground, it flipped over and caught fire. Louie rushed to the scene in a firetruck, but the plane had turned into a fireball. There was little that Louie and the other responders could do. Through the flames, Louie saw the pilot upside down in the cockpit, banging on the bubble canopy with his fist. He could not be saved.

“That really got me,” Louie told me, and then he looked away and his voice trailed off. “It got me for a long time.”

He left England in February 1946 and was honorably discharged a few weeks later at Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, pocketing a Good Conduct Medal for three years of active duty. He and his brothers made it through the war unharmed, except for Sam. A noncombat brain injury on Bora Bora Island in French Polynesia got him a disability discharge in the spring of 1943. Blackouts dogged him for seven more years, until he had one and never came to.

As Uncle Louie and I talked after his sister’s funeral, he nodded toward Ernie Beam, Josie’s husband. Uncle Ernie was a bear-size man who served in North Africa during the war as an Army military policeman. He was chatting with mourners outside his home and making sure there was plenty to eat and drink.

“Look at him,” Louie said. “He’s all right now, surrounded by all these people, keeping busy. But just wait until tonight when he’s alone in the dark and thinking on his pillow. That’s when it’ll really hit him.”

He turned to me, his eyes moistening.

“I know what that’s like. I’ve known that ever since I lost my son.”

Nicky Venditti, twenty years old, was an Army helicopter pilot. He died July 15, 1969, his eleventh day in Vietnam, as a result of a training accident involving a grenade. His dad’s anecdote about the doomed fighter pilot is in my book about Nicky and the accident, Tragedy at Chu Lai.

Louie’s heart failed in 1996. He lies at the foot of Nicky’s grave.

You might remember my blog about an ancestor of mine, James Hannum, a fighter in the Texas Revolution who’s on the official list of Alamo defenders.

Seven months after the post, I now have solid evidence he didn’t sacrifice his life in the fabled stand against Mexican troops near San Antonio. The truth is that he died almost three months earlier, a hundred miles from the old Spanish fortress.

The proof is an 1835 document recently uncovered in Austin, Texas.

In my blog last July, I wrote about the findings of a former Army military policeman and criminal investigator, Thomas Ricks Lindley, who spent many years researching the Alamo battle. In his 2003 book Alamo Traces: New Evidence and New Conclusions, he made the case that some men on the list of Alamo heroes didn’t die there. Hannum was among them.

Lindley cited a record noting Hannum died December 14, 1835, at a frontier fort in Goliad, Texas, commanded by Captain Philip Dimitt, or Dimmitt. The notation appears on a morning report, a daily accounting of personnel.

Where did Lindley find the report? He gave the source as the Philip Dimitt Papers at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.

Eager to see for myself, I emailed the Briscoe Center asking for Dimitt’s morning reports, but it was closed because of COVID-19.

“At this time we are unable to access any of our physical, onsite materials and services, including the Philip Dimitt Papers,” reference intern Marisa Jefferson wrote on June 23. “However, I was able to access a more comprehensive listing of the items in this collection.”

That offered hope, but then she followed up with this: “I do not see any suggestion in this finding aid that the morning reports you are looking for would be in the collection.”

What? Could Lindley, a ferocious fact-hunter, have made a mistake?

Six months passed. Then out of the blue, in mid-December, I got another email from Jefferson. She said the Briscoe Center had reopened to staff on a limited basis. I could put in a request to have materials in the Philip Dimitt collection scanned and emailed. To give her a handle on what to look for, I sent the link to my July 2020 blog.

A breakthrough came in January, when she looked in the designated box of Dimitt papers and, to her surprise, found several morning reports. I wanted to see them all. She arranged it, and a staffer in Duplication Services sent me the scans of two morning reports. Again, no luck. They were from December 24 and 26, 1835, and don’t mention Hannum.

“Nice try, though,” I wrote to Jefferson. “Thank you for that.”

She offered to take another look at the collection. This time, she found the December 14 report mentioning Hannum, just as Lindley had described it in his book. A part of the one-page document labeled “Remarks” says: “DIED – This Morning James Hanum [sic], Private.” The name is underlined.

An image of the barely legible line is below.

This morning report is definitive, a primary source. It confirms that Hannum, twenty or twenty-one years old, was a soldier in Texas’ struggle for independence, but that he didn’t die with William B. Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett at the Alamo on March 6, 1836.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t say how Hannum died.

Also still unanswered is why, eighteen years after Lindley found fault with the list of Alamo defenders, Hannum’s name is still on it.

Since my blog last year, I’ve had email contact with Stephen Harrigan, author of the best-seller The Gates of the Alamo, who wrote the foreword to Lindley’s book.  Harrigan put me in touch with historical consultant Richard B. Winders, former historian at the Alamo.

“The defenders list is an interesting subject,” Winders emailed last September. “The general opinion is it is some certified list kept by some organization or agency, but in reality it is just a list of names that has been printed over and over.”

He said Lindley pressed for a revision of the record, but after his death in 2007, the issue faded away.

Still, while Winders was historian at the Alamo, he assigned a member of the staff to work on the defenders list. “Specifically, I was interested in how many lists there were and what were their origins,” he said. “My hope was that the Alamo and GLO would cooperate in evaluating and establishing the veracity of the list together.”

GLO is the Texas General Land Office, which the Texas Legislature put in charge of the Alamo’s care in 2011.

It’s unclear where the research stands. Winders heard that after he left, the Alamo allowed the staffer to keep working on the list. Winders gave me the email address of the shrine’s curator. I wrote to him but got no response.

A story I wrote about two Pennsylvanians whose fathers were prisoners of the Japanese ran in Sunday’s edition of The Morning Call of Allentown, my former employer.

Dawne Clay and Rick Szczepanski are retirees who belong to the American Defenders of Bataan and Corregidor Memorial Society. They’ve spent many years trying to understand what troubled their fathers, both now deceased.

Dawne’s dad, Wayne Miller, grew up on a Berks County farm. Rick’s dad, Joe Szczepanski, was from coal country, Luzerne County. Both joined the Army Air Corps, which became the Army Air Forces. They were captured in 1942 in the Philippines and held until the end of the war — Wayne in Manchuria, Joe in Japan. Their experiences haunted them.

Last year, Dawne and Rick went to Japan as guests of its government through the Japan POW Friendship Program, which strives for reconciliation and healing.

I’d written about Rick before, in 2009, several years after he got deeply interested in his father’s life. I ended that piece by saying Rick hoped to go to the Far East someday to follow his dad’s path. Ten years later, he called and said, “I’m going to Japan.” I told him that when he came back, I could do a follow-up for the newspaper.

After Rick returned, he told me that a woman who lives in the area was also on the trip, and he put me in touch with her. That was Dawne. I decided to interview both for a story that would run around the time of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Japanese surrender ending World War II. That’s how it played out.

Here’s the link: https://bit.ly/347H7E3

I hope you like the story.

Mom was strolling on the Alamo grounds when a stone bearing a familiar name stopped her cold.

She turned to a friend and exclaimed, “What’s he doing here?”

The name was James Hannum. It’s on the stone for his sacrifice in the battle that became a rallying cry in Texas’ war for independence. He’s one of 189 men hailed for their heroic stand against thousands of Mexican troops.

My mom is a Hannum. Her ancestors settled in southeastern Pennsylvania way back in the 17th century. She couldn’t imagine how a Hannum had ended up 1,700 miles from home.

“I was surprised that one of us had made it all the way down there,” she told me recently.

Mom and her friend visited the revered site in San Antonio years ago. From time to time, she’s mentioned seeing the name. I thought it was worth looking into and made a note of it. After all, how many folks can claim that an ancestor fought at the Alamo? But I never did anything about it until this year, when the coronavirus lockdown gave me the time.

In my first search online, I saw that James Hannum is on the Alamo shrine’s official list of defenders. He was born August 8, 1815, in Pennsylvania to Washington Lee and Martha Hannum. A member of the Alamo garrison, he was twenty-one years old when he died in the battle on March 6, 1836. (Actually, if his birth date is correct, he would have been twenty.)

Now I needed to know how, or whether, we were related. I turned to Ancestry.com and a century-old Hannum family history my older brother lent me. The oversize book, A Record of the Descendants of John Hannum since 1686, takes up 696 pages. It was compiled by a Curtis H. Hannum, who worked on it for twenty-seven years before having it published in 1911.

The answer is yes, I’m related to James, but indirectly and very, very distantly. My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather and James’ great-grandfather were brothers. Their father was the John Hannum in the book’s title. He lived in a part of Chester County, Pennsylvania, that’s now in Delaware County, and ran a tavern.

The against-all-odds fighting spirit that put James in the thick of the Texas Revolution might have come from his grandfather, John Hannum III. He was a Chester County leader and Revolutionary War colonel who served with George Washington at the Battle of Brandywine.

It seemed that everything about James was falling into place, but the book’s entry on him raised a yellow flag.

For starters, there are no specific birth and death dates, only that he was born in 1816 – not the year before, as the Alamo site and Ancestry.com put it – and died in 1836. It doesn’t say exactly where he was born, but points to Tennessee, not Pennsylvania. He was the fifth-born of seven children, and several of his younger and older siblings are listed as having been born in Nashville. That’s where their father, a lawyer, had met and married Martha “Patsey” Robertson.

The book answers Mom’s question of how James got to Texas. His father was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania, and, soon after being admitted to the Chester County Bar in 1797, moved to Tennessee. According to James’ sister Elizabeth, the family moved from Nashville to Somerville and then to Memphis. Patsey died in 1833, and in 1835 or ’36, the family left for Mexican Texas.

They arrived by boat near Matagorda, on the Gulf Coast, and traveled some sixty miles northwest to Texana, which disintegrated into a ghost town years later and now lies under a reservoir. Washington Lee Hannum left three of his children with a local family and went to New Orleans on business. While he was gone, the family and Texana’s other white settlers fled as a Mexican army bore down on the town. The Hannum kids camped out in a woods. Their father found them when he returned, but only after a long and arduous search.

Elizabeth said her brother Lucian “had no saddle – his father went to the town of Columbus, which was almost entirely abandoned, to get a saddle, and while there he was captured by the Mexicans a few days before the battle of San Jacinto took place [on April 21, 1836]; soon after this he returned to Matagorda and died. His library and family records were burned by the Mexicans.”

A paragraph that starts with “It is also said that …” gives a further account of Washington Lee’s fate. It says a son was captured with him, “that they made their escape, and were several days without food except the fruit of the cactus, when they came upon a pecan tree full of nuts, of which they ate freely; they succeeded in getting within the American lines, but soon died from the exposure and improper diet.”

Washington Lee Hannum was fifty-nine when he died on October 6, 1836, according to Ancestry.com, and was buried in Matagorda. If the escape tale has a ring of truth, it’s unclear which of his sons made the final journey with him. None is listed as dying in 1836 except James, who died well before the Mexicans seized his father.

And not, according to the family history, at the Alamo.

The one sentence the book has on James Lee Hannum casts doubt on whether he was with William B. Travis, James Bowie and Davy Crockett. It says Hannum “was a soldier in Fannin’s company during the Mexican War, when Texas became an independent State, and died at Goliad, Texas.”

A quick note: Curtis Hannum’s tome confuses two wars a decade apart. In the Texas Revolution of 1835-36, colonists from America and Texas Mexicans, called Tejanos, rebelled against the centralist government of Mexico. In the Mexican-American War, from 1846-48, the United States and Mexico fought over a disputed border after the U.S. annexed the Republic of Texas.

That aside, who was Fannin and where was Goliad?

James W. Fannin Jr. was a Texas army commander who led his men to battle against the Mexicans near Coleto Creek in Goliad County, some 100 miles southeast of San Antonio. The clash took place two weeks after the Alamo fell to General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna.

On an open prairie, Colonel Fannin’s troops formed a square and beat back several charges. But they were low on ammunition, desperate for water and unable to care for their wounded. They surrendered the next day, March 20. A week later, in what’s known as the Goliad Massacre, the Mexicans executed Fannin and about 350 of his men. They had been unaware of what was in store for them.

If the Hannum book is right in saying James was with Fannin and died at Goliad, it could mean he was among the prisoners who were shot, bayoneted or lanced to death.

There’s reason to be skeptical. Family histories tend to be the work of well-meaning amateurs and aren’t always reliable. It’s not clear where Curtis Hannum got his information on James, because he doesn’t list a source. It might have been Elizabeth, but how would she have known what company her brother was with and where he died?

Then again, if the book has it right, it would mean James doesn’t belong on the Alamo’s list of defenders.

I pressed on and found a stunning, third version of what happened to James. This one, from a primary source, has the weight of authority.

In 2003, a former Army military policeman and criminal investigator came out with an Alamo book that capped fifteen years of intensive research. His name was Thomas Ricks Lindley, and his book is Alamo Traces: New Evidence and New Conclusions.

Historians were impressed with his detective work. One of them, Stephen Harrigan, author of The Gates of the Alamo, wrote the foreword. He says Alamo Traces “burrows deep into the historical record, shovels away deposits of myth and folklore and faulty assumptions that are generations deep, and never wavers in its search for a bedrock level of fact.”

One of the facts Lindley uncovered is that the official Alamo honor roll is “flawed” as a result of a 1931 doctoral dissertation that became the bible of reference works on the thirteen-day siege. He found that the list of Alamo heroes contains the names of some men who didn’t die there, or whose deaths aren’t backed up by the sources given. He gives the names of ten.

James Hannum is among them.

Lindley blamed Amelia W. Williams, who wrote “A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and of the Personnel of its Defenders” for her Ph.D. at the University of Texas. Though some historians pecked at her scholarship, the paper became the definitive academic work on the battle. In 1936, when Texas celebrated its 100th birthday, Williams’ research was the basis for determining the Alamo defenders who would be memorialized in bronze and stone.

But her study was rife with errors, probable fabrications and unfounded conclusions, Lindley says. In a section of his book called “Incorrect Alamo Defenders,” he shows how Williams wrongly identified James Hannum as a slain hero of the battle.

Lindley wrote that “the name ‘Hannum’ or a variant is not found on any of the Alamo lists that Williams investigated. Just how Williams came up with this name remains a mystery.”

Still, he says, Williams asserted that Private James Hannum, twenty-one years old, died at the Alamo. Her sources weren’t muster rolls but land-grant certificates in the Texas General Land Office. Land grants were issued to the estates of Alamo defenders and others. The certificates Williams cited for James bear the names of places in Texas and a file number: Milam, 1212; Refugio, 154; I Milam, 53 and 202.

Lindley examined the documents. The Milam 202 grant was issued to Lucian Hannum, not James. Lucian, a single man, is identified as deceased, but the file doesn’t say he was an Alamo defender. The Hannum history lists two Lucians as brothers of James. One died as an infant in Nashville. The other died in 1838 when he was nineteen or twenty years old and was buried in Milam County, Texas.

James’ heirs did receive Milam 1212 and Refugio 154. According to the Milam grant, James died in the service of Texas and was a private in Captain Philip Dimmitt’s company, based in Goliad. The Refugio grant and Milam 53 don’t indicate that James was killed at the Alamo.

Lindley says James’ age isn’t on any of the land-grant certificates. Where did Williams get it?

Finally, hard evidence that James wasn’t at the Alamo – and couldn’t have been there – exists in papers Lindley found at the Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. These are Captain Dimmitt’s morning reports, which are daily notes on personnel.

Dimmitt’s morning report for December 14, 1835, says: “REMARK – DIED – This Morning James Hanum [sic], Private.”

That was almost three months before the Alamo.

Dimmitt, a trader and merchant, commanded a frontier garrison at Goliad starting in mid-October 1835. According to the Texas State Historical Association, on December 6, Dimmitt led a small force to join a siege against a Mexican army at Presidio de Bexar, a San Antonio fort near the Alamo. He returned to Goliad about December 14, the day James’ death was recorded.

Had James gone to San Antonio with Dimmitt? Was he badly hurt storming the fort, and did he die when the troops returned to Goliad?

That’s unlikely, from what Lindley says. He contends that Dimmitt didn’t go to San Antonio and that he sent a Tejano company to participate in the final, successful assault on Bexar.

I wanted to see Dimmitt’s morning report for myself, so I emailed the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. Working remotely because of the coronavirus, a reference intern accessed a list of what’s in the Dimmitt papers and sent it to me with this note: “I do not see any suggestion in this finding aid that the morning reports you are looking for would be in the collection.”

Neither did I. That means there’s more work to do.

I would have liked to speak with Lindley, but he died in 2007 at age sixty-four. He was buried in the town where he was born and lived – Nixon, Texas, about fifty-five miles from San Antonio. You can see him on a C-SPAN video of an Alamo panel discussion held November 9, 2003, in Austin.

How Private James Hannum died remains in question. Unless some long-dusty record rises from obscurity, we won’t ever know whether it was homicide, suicide, illness, injury or battle wounds.

But it’s clear from Dimmitt’s morning report that the Alamo roster of heroes has at least one mistake, and the Hannum family history book is wrong, too. James wasn’t with the volunteers who bravely faced Santa Anna’s men at an old Spanish fortress, and he wasn’t with Fannin’s troops when the Mexicans murdered them at Goliad. He was already gone. He didn’t make it to 1836.

It’s unclear why, seventeen years after publication of Lindley’s book, the Texas nonprofit corporation that runs the Alamo hasn’t corrected its defenders list. I haven’t been able to ask about it, because the shrine has been closed during the pandemic.

Certainly, our record of the past should rest on solid ground. The faulty narrative of James’ fate originated with Amelia Williams’ doctoral dissertation. Ten years later, she admitted she wasn’t sure that all of the names on her list were accurate. It’s an example of how easily mistakes can distort the truth, proliferate and go unchallenged for generations, or even forever.

Years ago, I wrote a couple of blogs about a young Pennsylvanian who ran off to join the Royal Canadian Air Force before the U.S. entered World War II. Bob Riedy, a 1938 Allentown High School grad, became a pilot and was killed on a training flight in England.

Bob Riedy of Allentown, Pennsylvania, with the Royal Canadian Air Force in England, 1942

Flight Sgt. Robert Harvey Riedy was co-piloting a Wellington medium bomber that crashed moments after taking off from a Royal Air Force base near Oxford. He and the pilot were killed on impact. The only other crewman, a gunner, survived with serious injuries.

This was Sgt. William John Donald Carter of the RAF Volunteer Reserve. His job was to man one of the Wellington’s .303 Browning machine guns.

I always wondered what became of Carter. Now, thanks to a reader in the U.K., I know more about him.

The accident happened at 1:25 p.m. March 18, 1942, at Mount Farm in Oxfordshire, a satellite base for No. 15 Operational Training Unit. Flight Sgt. C.G. Wiley of the RCAF was the captain/pilot of the twin-engine Wellington Mk. 1. During takeoff, the plane hit a stationary Hudson light bomber on the edge of the fire track, climbed 200 feet, stalled and crashed.

Wellington Mk. 1 medium bombers

Carter would have been seated close to the wing root, the part of the wing nearest the fuselage. He was pulled from the wreckage and taken to Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford, with serious but unspecified injuries. After that, the paper trail falls off. I tried in vain to find him or a relative, and in my blog three years ago, I said his fate was a mystery.

Enter Andrew Radgick, who lives in the town of Bracknell in Berkshire, England. He was trying to identify a Canadian airman killed in a plane crash there during the war. When he saw Riedy was listed on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website, he searched for him on Google and saw my blog about the Carter “mystery.” He took up my case on his own.

Using his U.K. subscription to Ancestry.com, Radgick found Carter. (That’ll teach me. I only have the U.S. subscription.) He was born December 11, 1921, in Southampton, making him 20 years old at the time of the Wellington crash. There were two possible marriages, one in 1943 and the other in 1956, and no children from either. He died in July 1997 in Southampton – a few years before I started looking for him.

Radgick sent me this information via my blog site, and when I got back to him, he offered to look for Carter’s siblings and see if there are any other relatives still alive. He wrote back saying he’d compiled Carter’s family tree. “Fortunately they continue to live in the Southampton area as the name Carter would otherwise be difficult to trace as it is so common.” There are two nephews, one born in 1945 and other in 1950.

With that, I searched Facebook and found two Carters who live in Southampton and seem to be the right ages. I sent Facebook messages to both, but it appears to be a dead-end. Weeks have passed, and neither has gotten back to me.

I knew that Carter survived the war, because the Commonwealth War Graves Commission doesn’t list him as a casualty. I still don’t know whether he got fit again and continued to fly with the RAF, or whether he was permanently grounded because of his injuries.

But thanks to Radgick, at least I know there was a postwar life for Carter, and he lived into his mid-70s.

My brother sent me a yellowed, flaking copy of Time magazine’s Pacific Pony Edition from July 10, 1944. He found it while helping his widowed mother-in-law move out of her home in Florida. Her husband had been in the service during World War II and apparently brought it back from Hawaii, where it was printed.

I’d never seen a pony edition and can’t imagine how anyone ever read it without a magnifying glass, which I ended up having to use. The type is miniature and crowds pages a mere 5½ by 7½ inches.

But once your naked eye has help, you can get a snapshot of the day. In its 34 pages, there are stories on Tom Dewey’s getting the presidential nomination at the Republican Convention in Chicago, white antagonism toward black troops training in the South, the Allies’ having the “ragtag” German army on the run in France. In the Milestones section, there’s a blurb about a daughter born to “red-haired, hazel-eyed cinema eyeful” Maureen O’Hara.

A piece that caught my eye is an anecdote about Life photographer Robert Capa, an American who was born in Hungary and had lived in Berlin and Paris. He’s perhaps best known for eleven photos he took at Omaha Beach on D-Day.

Capa was among reporters and cameramen at the U.S. 9th Infantry Division headquarters during the German surrender of Cherbourg, France. Among the captured defenders were Lt. Gen. Karl Wilhelm Dietrich von Schlieben and Rear Adm. Walther Hennecke.

As the 9th Division’s commander, Maj. Gen. Manton S. Eddy, walked von Schlieben and Hennecke to the door, camera bulbs flashed. The Germans grumbled. Eddy explained that America has a free press, and he couldn’t and wouldn’t stop the photojournalists from doing their job. Von Schlieben huffed that the idea of a free press bored him.

Capa answered in German, “And I am bored with photographing defeated generals.”