Shelby  County  Indiana

Davis  Family  Album




Navy PB4Y-2 'Privateer' patrol bombers.
Seaman 1st class  Harold Raymond Davis  of Boggstown, Indiana - serial number 293 12 64
was part of this group.

The 1930 census of Shelby County, Indiana (Sugar Creek Twp, Sheet 4-B) shows Harold at age 4 yrs, 5 mos. with his parents, Chester and Pearl Davis and sister, Mary H. and brother, Maurice E.  The enumeration was done on 9 April 1930; therefore, extrapolating from his reported age, he would probably have been born in November, 1925.           Davis was not a member of my dad's squadron (VPB-119), he was with the Combat Aircraft Service Unit Fifty-Seven (CASU 57);  he would have probably been a mechanic's apprentice or ordnance technician working with the ground crews which repair and maintain the squadron's patrol bombers.  As I mentioned in my first email, Davis was flying in place of the bomber crew's usual tail gunner; the plane was commanded by Lt (jg) Walter Vogelsang.           Davis' enlistment serial number is listed in the casualty reports as 293 12 64.  If his birth date is as I estimated above then he would have been have only been 19 years old on 19 May 1945, when the plane was lost.           Attached is a 9 page pdf  file of documents by the American Graves Registration Service - China Zone (AGRS-CS) which I [DD] found at the national archives that describe the discovery of the plane crash site, interviews with witnesses, and the eventual recovery of the crew remains.           I have posted several photos about squadron VPB-119 on my Flickr photo sharing account on the Internet.  [Please contact Dave Deatherage, satx_dave@flash.net,  if you would like to view these pictures.]  Davis' unit, CASU 57, reported to it's controlling unit, ACORN 34;  within the ACORN 34 set there are a couple of document scans which describe how his unit was associated with the overall war effort out of Clark AirField in the Philippines.

Contributed by Dave Deatherage

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