The average age of a World War II B-17 pilot was 22; gunners were around 18. These are B-17 G’s  from the 8th Air Force’s 96th Bomb Group, and an Arroyo Grande flier, Elliott Whitlock, was a 22-year-old co-pilot in a 96th squadron based at RAF Snetterton Heath in Norfolk.  His dad owned the Commercial Co. Market, in the building that now houses a cafe at the corner of Branch and North Mason.

Besides the visiting Yanks, another resident of the Heath was a small donkey that the squadron adopted and christened “Lady Moe, Queen of the Heath.” Her young admirers played baseball at the Lady Moe Ball Park and watched movies at the Lady Moe Theater. She had unlimited visiting privileges; some say she even flew a combat mission. She liked American cigarettes. Eating them.

Lady Moe reciprocated the affection lavished on her. She began to appear with the ground crews at the control tower, waiting with them as they anxiously counted B-17’s on the return of her boys from their missions.

Moe almost lost Elliott during the 24th of his 25 missions, after a March 1944 raid on Berlin. The “High ‘n’ Mitey” was on her return trip when the plane caught fire, and the pilot, Capt. Jim Lamb, was burned trying to put it out.

Lamb gave the order to bail out. Whitlock saw three chutes forward but, looking backward, he saw that the crew in the waist hadn’t responded. The fire had disabled the intercom: they never heard Lamb. Whitlock then saw how badly hurt Lamb was, saw that his chute was partly burned away, and he countermanded his skipper’s order.

Somehow a fire extinguisher appeared in Whitlock’s hands–he was unclear later as to how. He put out the cabin fire and took over the control yoke. Lamb’s hands were burned, and it took a young man’s strength to fly a B-17: pilots could lose ten pounds on a typical mission.

He would dive “High ‘n’ Mitey” to extinguish the remainder of the fires onboard, then, at painfully low altitude, bob and weave the ship through a gauntlet of German flak, back to the Channel—back, finally, to Lady Moe. His conduct that day earned Whitlock a Silver Star. He’d admit in a letter home that he, and his crew, had been terrified. In an arresting sentence, he told his parents that “your prayers are standing by me.”

A few weeks later, the same B-17, with a new crew, would be shot down over the Pas-de-Calais. The tail gunner was the only survivor.

Whitlock would survive the war to become an attorney in San Bernardino County. At the time of his death, more than sixty years after that 24th mission, a local bar journal praised his wisdom and his kindness; he was a mentor to many young lawyers. He had led a good life.

The British were sometimes dubious about the goodness of the young Yanks, including fliers like Whitlock, in their friendly invasion. We were boisterous, comparatively affluent in drab wartime England and, as one Arroyo Grande soldier wrote home, we thought “those English girls, with their accents, sure are cute.”

But there was something else the British felt, too. In 2005, they opened a little museum, in a Quonset hut near the old airfield, so that future generations could have the chance to know Whitlock and his comrades.

And, before that, there was the figure incorporated into a stained-glass window of the local parish church. It would be reasonable to expect a traditional image: an angel, for example, looking earthward to proclaim Christ’s birth.

There is, instead, an American in his flight suit, looking heavenward, toward a risen Christ. The window is a poignant reminder of the constancy of the people of Norfolk, who learned to love the young men who had made little Lady Moe their queen.

…In the spring of 1945, an Arroyo Grande sailor and a native of Luzon, Camilo Alarcio, would find himself fighting for his life and for the life of his ship off the Japanese coast in after-combat action that went beyond the dramatic: it was miraculous.

Alarcio, as Felix Estibal had been on the doomed destroyer Walke, was a mess attendant, assigned to the aircraft carrier Franklin. In March 1945, Franklin’s 100 aircraft were engaged in raids on Kagoshima, Kyushu—the seat of the prefecture from which most Arroyo Grande Japanese had emigrated—when the Japanese struck back on March 19.

It was a little after 7 a.m., and Alarcio likely was serving breakfast, which that day included the Navy’s infamous powdered eggs, to some of Franklin’s 3,000-man crew when a Japanese “Judy” bomber somehow penetrated the carrier’s defense screen and made direct hits with two 500-lb. bombs. More than thirty aircraft, their ordnance and their fuel lines were packed on the main deck: Franklin seemed likely to share the fate of Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s Pearl Harbor striking force when, at Midway in June 1942, American fliers had discovered four of his carriers, their flight decks laden with bombs, gasoline lines and aircraft, and sent them to the bottom in flames.

The bomb forward flipped a 32-ton elevator high into the air. like a flapjack, in a pall of smoke, instantly killing hundreds of crewmen. Twelve of the 13 pilots in the famed Marine Corps “Black Sheep” Squadron, based, since the beginning of the year, in Goleta, died in their ready room. The concussion knocked survivors flat. The second bomb exploded belowdecks. These were, or appeared to be, two mortal wounds.

It wasn’t over. Secondary explosions shook the carrier as fires reached twenty more aircraft, fueled and ready for flight on the hangar deck; those fires continued, throughout the day, to set off stores of bombs, rockets, anti-aircraft ammunition and aviation gasoline. At one point, the violence inside Franklin made the 32,000–ton ship shudder and spun her, like the needle on a compass, hard to starboard, where she lay dead in the water. She then began to list ominously to starboard, threatening, as the hours passed, to founder under the weight of the thousands of tons of water used to fight the fires onboard. 

The explosions had killed or wounded a third of the carrier’s crew–the biggest single-ship toll since Arizona–but the survivors refused to give up on their ship and their home. Among them were Alarcio and a man, from shipboard Mass, well known to him: Father Joseph T. O’Callahan. Franklin’s chaplain was immortalized that day in a moment of combat footage that shows him, with immense tenderness, giving the last rites to a dying sailor. Survivors remembered him everywhere as the ship struggled to survive–he was easily identified because of the white cross he’d painted on his helmet–encouraging his boys, directing fire control parties, and leaning in close to hear the weakening voices of those who’d been wounded. He was constantly motion as were his lips, constantly in prayer.

O’Callahan would win the Congressional Medal of Honor.

While her crew worked to stabilize the ship, the cruiser Santa Fe was a constant companion alongside, fighting fires and evacuating the wounded.  Eventually, Franklin was taken under tow, but only until her boilers could be re-lit and she could begin to make for Ulithi, in the Caroline islands, for emergency repairs. Two admirals had recommended that the crew abandon ship. Instead, 24 hours after the bombs struck, Father O’Callahan had fallen asleep halfway down a ship’s ladder and Alarcio and his shipmates were able to return to the task of feeding the crew: they were making Spam and bacon sandwiches.

Franklin’s voyage would not end at Ulithi. She would put in at Pearl Harbor and then, on April 28, 1945, the “Big Ben.” her scars still visible and grievous, would return home, to New York harbor and the Brooklyn Naval Yard.  The carrier’s flight deck that day is shown below.

The ship would survive, and so would Camilo Alarcio, who would live to be 97. He became the much-beloved father and grandfather of a large, vital and attractive family; his children and grandchildren would make their mark in Arroyo Grande as superb athletes. 

A single adjective in his obituary and on his tombstone seems to summarize his character, and the characters of his brother Franklins, best: “Devoted.”

Our newest family member: Eight-week-old Irish Setter Brigid.