Seized by the Sun Read online

  “Obedience was the norm,” said Elizabeth. Gertrude loved her father so much she just couldn’t let him down. Gertrude understood that the engagement was not to be taken lightly. “She had made a promise, and that was her word,” said Laura Whittall-Scherfee, Elizabeth’s granddaughter and Gertrude’s grandniece.

  The next day guests gathered for the wedding ceremony on Long Island. Gertrude and Henry were presented a wedding gift of two adjoining acres in Bridgehampton. Standing in their uniforms, they took their vows before an Episcopal priest. But Elizabeth noticed that Gertrude’s thoughts seemed far away, perhaps with her lost first love, Mike Kolendorski.

  “I do,” Gertrude said. And a moment later she was being kissed by her new husband, Henry Silver.

  She was to report back for duty in three days, but in another 60 days she would be through with the WASPs when they disbanded.

  After her marriage, Gertrude wrote two letters that mention Henry. One was dated October 18, 1944, and was sent to his older sister, Helen. In this letter she first mentions delivering a P-51 to New York. In a reference to Henry, she wrote, “It won’t be long until we are a happily united family.” In a letter to Elizabeth dated October 20, 1944, she writes about remaining overnight at the Raleigh-Durham airfield and hitchhiking into town, only to get the last cot available at the YWCA. In this letter she tells Elizabeth that “Henry was very much pleased that you asked him out to B-hampton but he said the transportation from the northern part of [Long Island] is too difficult.”

  From left: Vreeland Tompkins, Gertrude Tompkins, and Henry Silver on the day of the wedding in Bridgehampton, Long Island. Photo courtesy of the Whittall family

  These brief references are all that exist regarding Gertrude’s thoughts about Henry Silver after their marriage. Elizabeth was adamant that her sister was unhappy at this time.

  14

  SEIZED BY THE SUN

  A month had passed since the wedding, and on October 26, 1944, Gertrude sat in the cockpit of the new P-51D at Mines Field in Los Angeles as a North American Aviation repairman tinkered with the canopy glide. The repairs would mean a late departure. Other WASPs in her P-51 group had already lifted off and were zooming east.

  Gertrude Tompkins was anxious to be in the air.

  She looked out at the gauzy orange sun that peered through the haze over the bay. Since now her takeoff was not going to happen until after 3:18 PM, she had been ordered to fly only as far as the air force base in Palm Springs, roughly 100 miles away. She would RON there. The next day she would fly another five hours to Newark, adding to her existing flying time of 350.05 hours.

  The mechanic completed his work on the cockpit. Gertrude cranked the handle to bring the Plexiglas canopy forward. Apparently she was satisfied.

  “Tower, this is Mustang 669. Request clearance for takeoff.”

  These were the last words she was ever heard to speak.

  She taxied toward the south runway, weaving an S as she’d been taught. She braked. She turned the ship to face into the nearly imperceptible breeze off the ocean. After taking off and looping around, she would soon have the wind behind her as she raced east.

  The weather was good, they had told her in the briefing—68 degrees. There was a marine layer this day over Santa Monica Bay. A marine layer is warm air that is cooled by the temperature of the sea, forming a haze. She would climb out of it in seconds. The tower gave her a time check. It was 3:42 PM when Gertrude began rolling, the ringing thunder of the powerful Mustang pulling her toward the misty, orange sun.

  It was four days before anyone noticed that Gertrude Tompkins was missing. At Love Field, in Dallas, her base of record, somebody saw she had not filed the required remain-overnight telegram from October 26. With 80 of its women pilots coming and going across the country every day, the Fifth Ferry Group headquarters in Dallas was hard-pressed to keep track of all of them.

  A call was placed to the Long Beach WASP coordinating center. Was Gertrude Tompkins still there?

  No.

  The official was told to call the control tower at Mines Field, where she’d taken off, and see what information they had. There was confusion over the number of the plane she flew. The records said she was in number 662, not 669.

  Number 662? Mustang 662 had been delivered, someone noted, but it had been flown by WASP Dorothy Hopkins, not by Gertrude Tompkins.

  What about tower clearance? Paperwork problems, came the response. Check Palm Springs and Arizona. Wasn’t she supposed to make it to Albuquerque?

  She was not in any of the other possible locations.

  The war had created an enormous number of flights, and every day was chaotic with aircraft coming and going at what would become Los Angeles International Airport. The common practice for WASPs at the time was to file a flight plan covering all of the day’s pilots ferrying P-51s from Mines Field. There were no individual flight plans, so it was impossible to know who left at what time. (One of the changes in procedure after Gertrude’s disappearance was that individual flight plans would be filed for each pilot.)

  On October 30, 1944, Gertrude Tompkins was declared missing. Clerical oversights and errors resulted in a late start in looking for her. The next morning a search began.

  Gertrude Tompkins, 1944. Courtesy WASP Archive, Texas Woman’s University Libraries

  15

  SEARCHING

  It was assumed that Gertrude had flown east. A search of the mountainous area east of Los Angeles began. It concentrated along an area known as Green Airway Five, a flight path that heads east from Los Angeles. Planes from the army air forces and Civil Air Patrol then spread over southern California and western Arizona, but they concentrated their search patterns near Palm Springs, where she had been instructed to stay if she got a late start. The mechanic who fixed her canopy was interviewed and agreed she was headed for Palm Springs.

  The day the air force search began, the navy and the coast guard conducted sweeps of Santa Monica Bay and the nearby reaches of the Pacific, but if there were any signs of a crashed airplane, they had been washed away. An oil slick would have dissipated, and there wasn’t much on a P-51 that floated.

  On November 16, a Civil Air Patrol plane reported possible wreckage near Toro Peak in the Santa Rosa Mountains of Riverside County east of Los Angeles, but what appeared to be wreckage from the air turned out to be a formation of rocks.

  Her sister WASPs, flying daily on the route Gertrude was thought to have taken, kept a close eye on the desert and mountain terrain as they flew over it, hoping for a glimpse of reflective aluminum. There was a rumor that one WASP rented a plane and spent hours lingering over the presumed route.

  Henry Silver had been notified of Gertrude’s disappearance and had shown up in Los Angeles a few days after the search began. The WASPs flying out of Mines Field were surprised to learn their friend Gertrude had been married. She hadn’t told any of them. Henry rode along on some search flights and stayed close to the WASP message center in Long Beach. By November 18, three weeks after her disappearance, the search had involved 56 aircraft that had flown 1,067 hours. On that day a halt was called to the search, and Henry was informed of its termination.

  On November 22 a representative of the army knocked on the door of Vreeland and Laura Tompkins in Summit, New Jersey. Already informed by Henry of Gertrude’s missing plane, Vreeland seated the soldier and escorted his wife from the room. Nearly a month after Gertrude had lifted off the runway in Los Angeles, her father was told that his daughter was officially missing and presumed dead.

  Even in grief there were personal items that had to be dealt with. Henry wrote to the air force asking where Gertrude’s fur coats had been stored. One was found at Nieman Marcus in Dallas, the other at the Fishburn Oriental Dyeing and Dry Cleaning Company in Dallas. A total of 204 pounds of personal effects were mailed by the air force to Henry in three separate boxes. Three library books were charged to her account: Refugees; Thomas Jefferson, World Citizen; and Mother Russia. A let
ter from the law office of Clark, Sickels, and Barton, New York City, was sent on behalf of Henry Silver telling the air force that he was married to Gertrude on September 22, 1944. It inquired how many copies of Gertrude’s probated will would be needed by the air force.

  A letter was sent from a court officer to Duncan Miller, Gertrude’s P-51 pilot friend from Brownsville, reading, “Your letter to WASP Gertrude V. Tompkins was opened and is herewith returned to you,” and informing him she had been declared dead.

  In a letter to Henry Silver dated January 12, 1945, air force general Hap Arnold told how a plaque had been dedicated on December 7, 1944, to the “memory of those WASP who died while serving their country.” He sent Henry a photo of the plaque. He also told him that Henry would shortly receive a Certificate of Service and the Service Pin earned by Gertrude. “I hope you will always feel that you are yourself a member of the Air Forces family.”

  Questions remained for Henry, for Gertrude’s family, and for her friends and fellow WASPs: What happened? Was there a mechanical failure? Or pilot error? One dark possibility was that she flew away from her marriage in the airplane that meant so much to her, expressing her displeasure and despondency over her future in a deliberate crash.

  These questions have never been answered. Gertrude Tompkins had almost become a forgotten footnote to the sprawling history of the war. But in 1997 the family’s interest was reignited when Ken Whittall-Scherfee, married to Gertrude’s grandniece Laura, ran across a book by Pat Macha, an aviation accident historian, titled Aircraft Wrecks in the Mountains and Deserts of California. The book was dedicated to Gertrude Tompkins, and one of the entries about a wreck sounded like it could have been about Gertrude.

  Macha, a retired Huntington Beach, California, schoolteacher whose father worked in the aviation industry, began his love affair with aircraft at an early age. He became interested in plane crashes in 1963 when he was leading a youth group hike and stumbled across a plane wreck at the 11,000-foot level on San Gorgonio Peak, the highest point in the San Bernardino Mountains. Macha began building a database of crashed aircraft. Since then he has researched and found hundreds of crash sites in California and the West, some dating back to the early 20th century.

  Laura and Ken Whittall-Scherfee credit Macha with being the cornerstone of the continued search for Gertrude. After reading Macha’s book, said Ken, “We contacted him to find that he was familiar with Gertrude’s story. In fact, he said he wondered when someone from her family was going to contact him. He was very interested in helping us try to locate her. Macha had a theory about where the wreck could be found. It made more sense to us than anything we’d heard.”

  Macha believed the plane’s wreckage lay a half mile or less off busy Dockweiler State Beach on Santa Monica Bay. In 1944 Gertrude’s takeoff runway ended at Sepulveda Boulevard, about two miles from the beach. Her normal flight path would have been to lift off over the bay and then come left, swinging around from a western heading to an eastern heading.

  By 2002 Macha had studied the reports and reasoned that Gertrude might have gotten into trouble on takeoff. Perhaps her balky canopy had come loose, distracting her as she flew in the ocean haze, causing her to take her eyes off her instruments just long enough to become disoriented.

  “The 51 is a very hot plane, and you have to stay with it at all times,” said Macha. “She was low and moving fast and perhaps the plane smacked into the water, maybe even cartwheeled on impact.”

  In 1944 Santa Monica Bay was without any housing or commercial development. There were strict wartime laws against straying into sensitive areas, including airports. It was unlikely that anybody was walking the beach that day who would have witnessed a crash, said Macha.

  One of the other difficulties was that the wreckage, if in the bay, might be covered by sand, sediment, and sewage. In the years since Gertrude’s disappearance, Ballona Creek had carried tons of earth-rich runoff and detritus from the Los Angeles Basin into the sea near Dockweiler. During strong storms it has carried a huge volume—more than 71,000 cubic feet of water per second at times. Hyperion Treatment Plant was another source of sediment. Established in 1894, Hyperion is the oldest sewage treatment plant in Los Angeles. A thick layer of treated sludge had built up in the bay from years of operations at Hyperion.

  Laura Whittall-Scherfee wrote a letter to the air force requesting information related to her great-aunt and months later received a package an inch-and-a-half thick containing copies of the military’s investigation of Gertrude’s disappearance, transcripts of flight training, and more, including a list of items reclaimed from a suitcase and from Gertrude’s personal locker at Love Field in Dallas. She gave copies to Macha.

  With the family’s encouragement, Macha hooked up with Jim Blunt, an ex-police diver. With only rudimentary sonar equipment, Blunt and a team of family, friends, and volunteers from the San Bernardino Coroner’s office (who had helped Macha in the past) boarded a boat and scanned an area three miles long and a mile wide off the end of LAX’s runways. A dozen dives over several days turned up nothing in the murky water.

  Meanwhile, Laura contacted Huntington Beach congressional representative Dana Rohrabacher to get the military involved. The navy wrote Laura saying a search would cost too much, $2 million in taxpayers’ money. The responding admiral said that any wreckage older than 50 years falls under the jurisdiction of the National Historic Preservation Act, which would pose potential legal barriers to doing anything with the wreckage even if it were found.

  Undeterred, the Whittall-Scherfees, Macha, Blunt, and volunteers returned to the site. Using a sophisticated magnetometer capable of locating certain metals buried on the ocean bottom, in five days they turned up 300 toilets that enterprising fishermen had dumped into the ocean as hotels for lobsters. The next summer they were back, this time with more powerful sonar equipment.

  Hopes rose when they saw a series of unusual lines on the sounding recorder, a device that inks a profile of the sea-floor. They were in about 18 feet of water. To Jim Blunt, it was definitely the profile of an airplane. “It is metal, all right.” He and other divers poked probes at least four feet into the seafloor and turned up nothing. Coming to the surface, Blunt estimated that the plane, if there was one, was under 15 or 20 feet of sediment and sand. The water was so algae-loaded and warm that the group now waited for colder weather, when the clarity of the water would improve.

  They conducted more searches and succeeded in eliminating some possibilities. But as the searching continued, Macha and the Whittall-Scherfees found no wreckage that would indicate it was Gertrude’s P-51D.

  In 1999 Gary Fabian, another Huntington Beach resident, had become fascinated by seafloor research conducted by the US Geological Survey (USGS). As a recreational fisherman, he knew that structures on the ocean floor attracted fish. And the USGS had perfected a technology for finding such structures. It was called multibeam sonar (MBS), and it was being used to map the coastal waters around America. The shapes of sunken ships and airplanes stand out vividly on many of the USGS images.

  Using MBS, in 2001 Fabian and his partner Ray Arntz made a major discovery in Santa Monica Bay: the UB88, the only German submarine ever sunk off the Pacific Coast. It was considered the most elusive shipwreck in California waters. A World War I trophy, it had been used as target practice and sunk by the US Navy in 1921.

  On August 19, 2003, at his home in Huntington Beach, Gary Fabian read a story about Macha finding a World War II navy torpedo bomber in the water off San Diego. Fabian contacted Macha immediately. In 2005 the combined Fabian-Macha team renewed the search for Gertrude’s P-51 in Santa Monica Bay. In the meantime, Macha had found a man he believed was an eyewitness to the crash of Gertrude’s P-51.

  The eyewitness was Frank Jacobs, a retired aerospace engineer from Redondo Beach, California. Jacobs had read a newspaper account of Macha’s search for Gertrude and notified him that in the month of October 1944, when he was 12 years old, he was fishing off the M
anhattan Beach Pier. The pier is 3.8 miles south of the western end of the runway from which Gertrude lifted off.

  He said he had just arrived at the pier on a cloudy day when a loud engine noise prompted him to look north. He watched a fighter plane climb after taking off from the airport’s southern runway. Suddenly there was a sharp drop in the noise level and the plane’s engine began sputtering. He said the plane angled over into a shallow dive that became steeper before it disappeared in the fog bank hanging offshore.

  Jacobs remembers two nearby adults saying something about a P-51 Mustang.

  “This event left a very strong, vivid impression on me as a 12-year-old boy,” Jacobs said. “I sensed that someone must have died.” He said he was surprised when nothing appeared in the next day’s papers.

  “It was definitely that year, that month,” insisted Jacobs.

  Macha is certain that Jacobs saw Gertrude’s plane go down. He’d been looking for an eyewitness and he finally had one. The Fabian-Macha team met Jacobs on the pier, and he pointed to where he had seen the plane falter.

  “We took a heading on it and began to search,” said Macha. “We were crossing targets off our list when we thought we’d found her plane. It turned out we had found a T-33 Shooting Star jet trainer, missing since 1950 with two men aboard.” They found no trace of Gertrude’s P-51.

  Undaunted, in 2009 they began the most ambitious and thorough search they had yet undertaken in the quest for Gertrude’s plane. Fabian flew in from Texas, joining Pat Macha and a group called the Missing Aircraft Search Team. Fabian had identified more than 70 targets they would investigate. Divers came from as far away as the East Coast. During an intensive week they found lots of junk, including more toilets, small boats, a washer and dryer, and piles of rock, probably dropped by barges carrying them from quarries on Catalina Island.

  The most exciting find was a missing Cessna 210, previously unlocated. But there was not a hint of Gertrude Tompkins’s P-51. The search continues even today, and the mystery remains unsolved. It is possible that Gertrude and her plane will be lost to history.