Heralded at Last : 50 Years Passed Before Friends Knew the Heroism in Don Rowley’s Death

That Don Rowley had died in the war, that much his old classmates knew. But how? They hadn’t a clue.

And that he had been a hero in his final moments of life--well, it would take them half a century to learn the details.

Don Rowley had been a campus leader at Hamilton High. He was the kind of boy who didn’t smoke or drink or curse--a straight arrow who was president of Boys League and treasurer of the Service Club and whose near straight-A grade average qualified him to graduate in 1940 as a Sealbearer.

Rowley was a star athlete, too. He played on the basketball team at the West Los Angeles school, wrestled and excelled in gymnastics. His brawny arms were so tough, in fact, that he could stay on the horizontal bars long after other athletes dropped from exhaustion.

But then World War II intervened. Like so many of his buddies, Rowley quickly married his high school sweetheart, kissed her goodby and marched off to war.

He was an Army Air Force navigator based in England when his B-17 Flying Fortress, nicknamed the Lazy Baby, was shot down by Nazi fighters. Second Lt. Donald Rowley died in the attack--that’s all that filtered back to the hometown crowd.

But that was before this month, when a Swiss manufacturing executive named Jean-Pierre Wilhelm got involved.

As an 11-year-old schoolboy living in the tiny village of Ettingen, Switzerland, Wilhelm had seen the last moments of the Lazy Baby as it crashed to the ground.

But as he grew up, he all but forgot the incident. Until 1988, that is, when his mother died and he found himself searching through her attic. There he found a scrapbook with local stories of the crash.

He began to research the lives of the Lazy Baby’s 10 American crewmen, getting American military records and tracking down the survivors. Soon he was lecturing to his countrymen about the crash he had witnessed on the sunny Thursday afternoon of Oct. 14, 1943. Then he began writing articles about it for aviation magazines.

This month, an excerpt of one of Wilhelm’s articles appeared in Reader’s Digest. Donald Rowley’s buddies were astounded by what they read:

The 22-year-old had been at his navigator’s post in the nose of the Lazy Baby when the front of the plane was blasted apart by Nazi fire, which also knocked out three of the bomber’s four engines.

Both of Rowley’s muscular arms were virtually blown off. But despite his injuries, he struggled up into the co-pilot’s seat in the cockpit. And as he slowly bled to death, Rowley saved the rest of the crew by directing the pilot out of Germany. Flying at treetop level through Swiss mountain valleys, he found a flat place to put the Lazy Baby down.

“We never knew,” said Gordon Weatherly, 71, of Culver City.

“I just assumed that everybody in the plane had been killed,” said Bill Skelley, 69, of Temple City.

Rowley’s friends gathered Thursday at the lobby of Hamilton High to commemorate their classmate’s heroism. They were also launching a scholarship drive in the hero’s memory.

Although half a century in coming, the account of Rowley’s death still stirred emotions in the crowd of 45 who watched as a wreath of blue irises was placed in the lobby.

“You could have knocked me over with a feather,” said John Mason, 69, of Palos Verdes Estates. “Who’d have thought this would come to light after all this time?”

Mildred Skelley, 69, was a bridesmaid at Rowley’s wedding to Jerrie Dunham and was with her when she received a telegram telling of his death. Although Rowley’s widow got a Silver Star in his name, no one knew if she realized the extent of his heroism. She died several years ago, Skelley said.

Brian Bumpas, 72, of West Los Angeles displayed photos of the crash site and a map tracing Rowley’s zigzagging final flight through a series of valleys. Wilhelm had sent them for the ceremony.

Wilhelm was unable to attend. The 61-year-old was in Ettingen, placing his own blue-blossomed wreath on a tree branch at the crash site.

On Thursday night, he told the story of Lazy Baby and Donald Rowley to 300 people who gathered at the village hall there.

His wife, Barbara Wilhelm, said Rowley will forever hold a place in the heart of the Swiss if Jean-Pierre Wilhelm has his way.

“He represented the best of the young men of that time,” she said by phone from her home near Geneva.

“Donald Rowley helped the world get out of that mess that it was in.”