Warbird Information Exchange

Dog tags, ring of downed WWII pilot make their way home to Torrance — 70 years later

By Donna Littlejohn, The Daily Breeze

Posted: 01/23/15, 8:40 PM PST | Updated: 2 mins ago

A gold flight-school ring, Army dog tags and two faded snapshots — the recovered belongings of World War II pilot Capt. James W. “Bill” Underwood, whose plane crashed in January 1945 — finally made their way home to his bride this week.

“I remember the ring,” said an emotional Barbara Robinson, 92, after slipping the heavy piece with a red stone onto her hand. “He was wonderful.”

• PHOTOS: Barbara Robinson receives late husband’s WWII effects - 70 years later

The special delivery from the distant past drew wonder and strong emotions for Underwood’s family, which gathered Thursday afternoon in Robinson’s condominium near the ocean in Torrance. When the B-25 Mitchell bomber Underwood was piloting crashed on Jan. 9, 1945, Robinson was anticipating her young husband’s return from the war before long. She was eight months pregnant with the couple’s second child, a boy. Their first, a girl, was still a toddler.

That toddler, now Carol Turner of Chico, grew up to be an attorney and was there for the unveiling of her father’s personal effects.

“I was having a hard time not crying,” she said.

It was Carol as a small child — she wasn’t yet 2 when her father was killed — who was pictured with her mother in the photographs that Underwood carried around with him in the war and that were among the items returned to the family.

• VIDEO: WWII artifacts returned to soldier’s widow

For Robinson, the moment brought a flood of memories.

Sweethearts from the time they met on the sands of Hermosa Beach (at 16th Street, she recalled), the couple knew it was “meant to be,” said Robinson, who at the time was an usherette at the theater on Hermosa Avenue (where uniforms were gold satin slacks and tops and the cost of admission was a dime).

Underwood was a student at USC.

When he enlisted and left for flight school in San Antonio, he proposed and she followed him to Texas. The two were married on July 11, 1941, in a chapel on base. He was 26 and wore his U.S. Army Air Corps uniform; she was 19 and wore a stylish suit.

Looking back now, Robinson said she never really got over her first love.

He was “the best,” she said.

For her children, getting to know their lost dad has been a matter of poring over some of the hand-printed letters his parents saved and later passed on to them.

His good nature, kindness and concern for others always stood out to her from those long-ago letters home, Turner said.

“We were assigned flight instructors yesterday and I got a fellow who has been through the same course as we are now starting and I guess he really knows his stuff,” Underwood wrote his parents from Hemet Field in California in 1940. “Nice fellow, too.”

He suggested they come for a visit, but cautioned: “You probably won’t want to look at me twice. I got a dodo haircut and is it ghastly. Cost me 40 cents too. ... It sticks straight up.”

The tale of what happened to the young pilot — who was featured in a local newspaper (“Flyer finally meets his baby daughter” on a brief trip home) — always seemed to have gaps.

Underwood initially was listed as missing, although witnesses in a plane following behind reported seeing a flash of light after Underwood’s plane vanished into a cloud bank. It was believed — and officially reported — that the plane, with a crew of six, flew into a 6,500-foot mountain peak on Sibuyan Island in the Philippines.

It wasn’t until the war ended a few months later that Robinson began to accept the fact that her husband had perished, even though a crash site hadn’t been found.

“I kept waiting for Bill to come home,” she said. “I was painting the kitchen and listening to the radio when they said the war was over. That’s when it hit me.”

She became a widow at 22.

• VIDEO: Return of soldier’s effects stir WWII widow’s memories

When a year had passed, the government, following protocol, formally declared Underwood dead.

In 1947, Robinson remarried and gave birth to another baby girl. Her two children by Underwood were adopted by her second husband, R.B. Briggs.

And life moved on.

The children grew up hearing occasional stories about their dad, but he wasn’t talked about a lot, said Underwood’s son, Jim Briggs, 70. (Robinson, Turner and Briggs all attended Redondo Union High School.)

“There was a sensitivity about bringing up a father who was killed in the war,” Briggs said.

Because the pilot’s remains were never identified and recovered, there was no funeral and no burial spot.

Underwood’s name is included among those missing on a memorial wall in Manila.

Still, questions persisted.

“For 57 years, my family only knew that his plane could not be found, despite three separate search attempts on Sibuyan Island in subsequent years,” said Briggs, whose career included 40 years with the CIA.

In 2002, Briggs joined an organization called World War II Orphans Network and learned that obtaining a copy of his father’s Individual Deceased Personnel File from the Army might provide some answers.

The document provided a surprise, as well.

A Feb. 8, 1965, memo indicated that Underwood’s plane and crash site were discovered in May 1963 — but “on a completely different island (Mindoro Island) than originally assumed,” Briggs said.

Mindoro is about 100 to 150 miles northwest of Sibuyan Island.

A note indicated that search teams found the wreckage of the plane’s tail boom with the number 36012, which matched the plane Underwood had been flying.

And there were more surprises.

The 1963 search team also found his father’s ID tag and “five incomplete bones.”

“Near the wreckage of the crashed plane, (a local resident told investigators) he found a skeleton of a person ... with a ring in which these words are engraved: ‘Air Corps Flying School, U.S. Army 1941.’ ... He happened to find also a picture of a wife with a child and an identification tag” that displayed Underwood’s name, serial number and name and address of Barbara, his wife, on Bayview Drive in Hermosa Beach.

Briggs continued to look for any other records he could find, learning that the bones that had been found were cremated in October 1964 since they could not be identified. In the 1960s, DNA technology was still decades into the future.

Other records, he discovered, were likely lost in a July 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.

And then, for the most part the trail went cold. Briggs never was able to find out what may have happened to his father’s recovered ID tag, ring or photographs.

Until last month when, “completely out of the blue,” he said, his phone rang.

The caller from the Army Past Conflict Repatriation Branch at Fort Knox, Ky., said he was looking for the Jim Briggs, who would be the son of Capt. James Underwood.

His father’s personal items that were recovered in 1963 turned up in a government office in Hawaii and had been sent to Fort Knox with instructions that they should be forwarded to Underwood’s family, if a relative could be found.

Briggs had been searching for the items for 12 years.

“I could find no one who could locate those items, I had given up the search,” he said in a written account of his research into what happened to his father.

On Thursday, immediate and extended family members, including Turner and Briggs and his wife, had gathered for the presentation of the items, held in black velvet jewelry bags, by Sgt. 1st Class Devin Sorensen.

One by one, family members took the keepsakes, turning them over in their hands.

“I’ve wondered about him over the years,” Briggs said of the father he never met.

The family agreed that he should receive his father’s ring, which he said he plans to wear.

Donna Littlejohn

Reach the author at Donna.Littlejohn@dailybreeze.com .

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