Soul Survivor (27 page)

On the other hand, those families might welcome the other side: learning how their loved ones died. They seldom knew.

The dark-haired action figure on James’s pillow was a facsimile of Ensign Billie Peeler, a pilot on
Natoma Bay
who died on November 17, 1944. Bruce and Andrea were certain of that. But Billie Peeler was not on the master list of the
Natoma Bay
war dead.

And after some research, Bruce learned why: Billie Peeler wasn’t killed in combat. He died while joyriding with another crew
member, Lloyd Holton, on R & R. His plane lost power and spun out of control and plunged into the sea off the island of Pityliu
after the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Billie was a combat pilot—he won the Air Medal at Samar in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944—but because he died while
on R & R, he was not included on the official
Natoma Bay
plaque of war dead at the U.S.S.
Yorktown
Museum in Charleston, South Carolina.

Bruce had combed through the records and reports that he had assembled—reports from eyewitnesses from other ships and crews
that even men from
Natoma Bay
had not seen—and discovered Billie Peeler’s ironic fate.

And so, in their gritty, determined fashion, the Leiningers set out to establish a proper place for Billie Peeler on the master
list of
Natoma Bay
dead, and—perhaps less significantly—put him to proper rest on their son’s pillow.

Andrea found him on the nara.gov Web site: Billie Rufus Peeler. He came from Granite Quarry, North Carolina. Next of kin were
Carl Banks Peeler and Pearl. The 1930 census records listed four children born to the Peelers: Erdine “Virginia,” the eldest,
Billie, Carl Banks Jr., and Wallace.

Carl Jr. died in 1997.

There were three W. Peelers in North Carolina, and Andrea called them all, but none of them were related to Billie.

I went back to
whitepages.com
and typed in Wallace Peeler but didn’t specify a state. I only got one result for the entire country, which is unbelievable.
Wallace L. and Stella Peeler. They were living in Alexandria, Louisiana—that’s an hour from us. I didn’t think I could get
that lucky. I picked up the phone, and a pleasant-sounding gentleman answered. I went through the routine, then asked if he
was the brother of Billie Rufus Peeler.

He was friendly, talkative and the right guy. The younger brother of Billie Peeler.

It took a grand total of thirty minutes on the Internet and four phone calls to find him.

It was clear that Wallace had been very close to his big brother, Billie. His picture in his dress white uniform still hung
on the wall in Wallace’s den. And the man in the picture had a very close resemblance to the action figure that James had
named Billy.

Wallace was eager to talk. Their father, Carl Banks Peeler, was a semiprofessional baseball player, a pitcher. But in those
days, before World War II, a semiprofessional ball player still had to have a job to feed his family. So he became a car salesman.
During the war, when car sales were suspended, he repaired steam locomotives. After the war, he went back to selling cars
again. Carl and Wallace’s mother, Pearl, was a housewife. She thought about getting a sewing job when she was eighty, just
to see what it felt like to get a paycheck, but she never followed through.

Billie graduated from high school in 1940 and immediately entered the Navy’s V-5 pilot training program. He also got engaged,
but the name of the girl has been lost and forgotten.

In July 1944, Billie, who was twenty-one, became an FM-2 Wildcat pilot in VC-81 aboard
Natoma Bay.
During the Battle of Leyte Gulf, Billie flew his Wildcat through a hail of anti-aircraft fire to attack a Japanese battleship
and destroyer.

It was a heroic action and it won him a medal, but those were heroic moments in naval history, and the men in the fight were
less interested in winning medals than in getting a breather from the fire.

The men of
Natoma Bay
were taken to Pityliu Island, which was part of the Admiralty chain. There was a big aircraft repair yard on Pityliu, and
a pilot itching to fly could take a ride in any idle plane that was declared fit and was not assigned for a mission. Sometimes
the planes were not completely airworthy, having been shot up, but that didn’t bother a young, hot pilot who had already been
through some hard combat of his own. As long as they didn’t have to fly it through a torrent of flak, he was happy.

Billie and Lloyd Holton, the VC-81 engineering officer who didn’t get much chance to fly, went up in a war-weary Dauntless
dive-bomber and never returned. The crash and the deaths were witnessed and confirmed immediately, but it wasn’t until after
the war that the Navy revealed the details to his mother:

My Dear Mrs. Peeler,

… I did not know that you had not received all of the facts about Billie. There is no chance that he could have gotten out
of the crash. A pilot from another base saw the accident and circled the scene.

At the time we were temporarily living on Pityliu Island on the north side of Seeadler Harbor at Manus in the Admiralty Islands.
Several squadrons were brought there after the invasion of Leyte and the Battle for Leyte Gulf for a rest. We had a rough
two weeks of operations and all needed some relaxation.

We were doing very little flying. Our days were spent in swimming, playing a little baseball and general loafing.

One afternoon Bill and a good friend of his, Lloyd Holton, decided they would like to go flying. They went to another squadron
and borrowed a SBD [Ship Borne Dive-Bomber]. They took off for a flight in the local area. Just before dark we got a message
by radio saying that a report of a crash had come in. This report turned out to be Bill’s plane.

We sent a crash boat to the scene, about five miles north of Pityliu. The boat reached the spot after dark. There was nothing
there but some floating wreckage.

The next day I talked to the pilot who saw the accident. He said that he was flying along fairly high and looked down to see
the SBD spinning at an altitude of about 2,000 feet. He saw the plane recover from this spin and then go into another spin.
The recovery from this spin was just starting when the plane struck the water and sank almost immediately. No one came to
the surface. The pilot made the radio report and then remained to circle the spot and direct the crash boat.

There is no sure explanation for the cause.… All of us felt Bill’s loss very keenly….

It was signed by Lt. Commander Bill Morton of Billie’s squadron.

Wallace had the letter. His mother had saved it until she died in 2000. She never fully accepted or recovered from Billie’s
death. She kept his clothes in a trunk because she thought he would need them when he came home.

There was a sense of an incomplete story that haunted the entire family. It was not just the cruel accidental death, although
that was a factor.

“You know, I was in the Navy, too,” Wallace told Bruce and Andrea when they came to visit him. “I was nineteen years old and
a seaman first class on USS
Chester,
a cruiser, part of the same fleet as
Natoma Bay;
we were preparing to support the invasion of the Philippines. This was in October. Billie was an officer and had access to
all the ships in the fleet. He made arrangements to take a launch over to the
Chester
to see me on October twelfth. I was very excited because I hadn’t seen him in almost three years.”

But in the middle of the night, before they could meet, USS
Chester
sortied with the other ships of its task force and pulled out of Seeadler Harbor. They were headed to a raid on Formosa.

The two brothers kept missing each other as the fleet battled across the Pacific. Finally, USS
Chester
was near
Natoma Bay
at Iwo Jima, where many great fleets had assembled for the invasion. But by then Billie was dead, and the letters from his
parents in North Carolina telling Wallace about it were still crisscrossing the ocean.

Wallace remembered standing on the deck of
Chester
during the battle of Iwo Jima, looking out over the horizon, seeing hundreds of warships, thinking that his big brother was
out there on
Natoma Bay
and would come and visit him as soon as things calmed down.

James had named his GI Joe “Billy” after Billie Peeler. Bruce and Andrea finally had no doubt.

The final action figure had auburn, almost red hair. His name in real life had been Walter “Big Red” John Devlin. That was
what the Leiningers believed, although it was very hard to pin down.

Walter Devlin was born in 1921 in New York City, Ozone Park, Queens, an outer borough, suggesting a blue-collar background.

Unfortunately, his father was not listed in the 1930 census and remained unidentified. Walter’s mother, Mary, who was forty-six
in 1930, lived with her brother-in-law, Patrick Devlin, then forty-seven, a widowed plumber. There was another boarder, another
widower, sixty-seven-year-old Thomas F. Leese. He was listed in the same census as Mary’s father. Mary had three children:
James, born in 1920, Walter, born in 1921, and Gerard, born in 1923.