RICHMOND —
Anna Etherington of Richmond was a seventh-grader living in Irvine when her family received a telegram with the news that her brother’s plane was last heard from April 9, 1943.
She remembers the date vividly and even knows her brother’s service number by heart.
Five years later, what was then known as the War Department, informed the family that H.C. Jones Jr., 22,the flight engineer on a C-87 transport and his five crewmates flying “over the hump” from India to China were presumed dead.
A memorial stone was placed in the family’s Irvine Cemetery plot, Etherington said. He also is listed on the WWII Memorial in Washington, D.C., and in the University of Kentucky’s Memorial Coliseum, she said.
Etherington, the last survivor of Jones’ five siblings, just recently was informed by John Trowbridge, command historian of the Kentucky National Guard, that the wreckage of her brother’s plane had been discovered by an American mountain climber named Clayton Klues.
The plane had crashed into a jungle-covered mountain slope at an altitude of nearly 9,000 feet, said Trowbridge, who came to Richmond on Thursday to visit Etherington and her family.
The Guard historian brought copies of photographs of the wreckage that had been scattered over a wide area, he said.
The aircraft’s identification number was confirmed, but no human remains were found, Trowbridge said. However, the scattered debris is evidence of a hard impact that no one could have survived.
Etherington said the military told her parents that her brother’s plane reported by radio it was in “a monsoon storm” and had needed directions. The crew did not respond when a flight controller supplied the information.
“Another boy from Irvine,” who was a clerk at the base from which Jones’ plane flew but not part of his crew, had asked to be a passenger on the ill-fated flight, Etherington said. “He had one foot in the plane, when he was called back because he had work today.”
Much of the family’s information came from him.
Klues, who lives in Arizona, came, upon the wreckage in 2006. The site is a four-day trek from the nearest village, Trowbridge said. The climber visited the site again in 2008 and passed the information to a man in North Carolina, Gary Azetz, who collects information about WWII aircraft lost while flying “the hump.” He had an uncle who flew the route.
Now, the Hawaii-based U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command will take responsibility for reaching the crash site and excavating for human remains, Trowbridge said. The agency had asked him to locate Jones’ nearest living relative.
“The United States always brings its people home,” said Etherington’s son Tom, a Navy veteran who remains in the naval reserve and has served in Afghanistan.
(Etherington’s husband, also named Tom, retired after many years as the U.S. Soil Conservation Service agent for Madison County.)
Etherington and her son both will be sent kits so they can supply DNA samples the military can to help identify any human remains found at the crash site, Trowbridge said.
Sending a military search crew to the crash site will be complicated, Trowbridge said, because it lies in remote territory claimed by both India and China.
Trowbridge’s location of Etherington also was a bit complicated. He had attended the funeral of her sister, Lelia Jones Busler, a WWII nurse, in the early 1980s, but had misplaced Etherington’s contact information.
He called the Richmond Register, which asked local funeral homes to check their records for Busler. However, Busler’s final arrangements were handled by a funeral home in Irvine, where she is buried. Trowbridge obtained Etherington’s contact information from the Irvine funeral home.
H.C. Jones Jr., the second oldest of five children, volunteered for what was then known as the Army Air Corps in 1940, well before the U.S. entered WWII late the next year.
“He had wanted to fly,” said Etherington, his youngest sibling.
Jones’ plane was a C-87, the transport version of the four engine B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. It was used for the “hump” flights over the Himalayas because it could carry heavier payloads and operate at higher altitudes than the military’s twin-engine C-47 that was the “work horse” transport of World War II.
Jones trained at Wright-Patterson Field near Dayton, Ohio. The day before departing for his overseas assignment, he married a woman he had met there, his sister said. Her maiden name was Katherine Holycross. The Jones family lost contact with her in the early 1950s, Etherington said. The military also will try to locate her or her survivors, Trowbridge said.
Bill Robinson can be reached at brobinson@
richmondregister.com or by calling 624-6622.
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