Teacher-student team discover story of 'silent hero' Tecumseh WWII pilot
Charles William Wilson is one of the silent heroes of World War II.
With humble beginnings in Ridgeway Township and Tecumseh, Wilson grew up to become a lieutenant fighter pilot who lost his life while flying a mission during the Battle of Okinawa.
Wilson’s story was recently uncovered by teacher/student pair Jan Klco, Whitehall District Schools National History Day coach, and Megan LeaTrea, 16, a sophomore at Whitehall High School, which is about 15 miles north of Muskegon.
National History Day, a nonprofit organization based in College Park, Maryland, that seeks to improve the teaching and learning of history, and the Pearl Harbor Historic Site Partners, which includes the Pearl Harbor Aviation Museum, Pacific Historic Parks, Battleship Missouri Memorial and the Pacific Fleet Submarine Museum at Pearl Harbor, selected 16 teacher/student high school teams to participate in the Sacrifice for Freedom: World War II in the Pacific Student & Teacher Institute, an all-expenses paid program that offers an opportunity to study World War II history on Oahu, Hawaii.
As part of the program, each team researches the context of World War II in the Pacific and, specifically, the life of a silent hero who died during World War II and is buried in or memorialized at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The duos select a silent hero from the same region they are from — a true hometown hero. The culmination of six months of research and preparation will lead the teams to Hawaii, where they will share their eulogies of their silent heroes graveside at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.
Klco and LeaTrea were selected among 68 teams that applied from all over the country and a number of the territories. The team was accepted into the program in December 2022 and began their research in mid-January.
One reason they applied for the program is because, "Meg has always done research on strong women in history, particularly women in science and in the military. She aspires to be a fighter pilot and attend the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs when she graduates,” Klco said.
Klco has been LeaTrea’s NHD coach since fourth grade.
“Each student/teacher pair was given a list of people who are memorialized or buried at the National Memorial Cemetery in Hawaii to choose from and were told to choose someone in their area to research, and that’s how we discovered Charles William Wilson,” Klco said.
It was funny how the teacher/student team came across Wilson from Tecumseh.
“We found the Charles W. Wilson that we were researching, and he was a pilot and so, just the idea that he was a pilot, we like to say that he chose us,” LeaTrea said.
They first started to cross reference with a list of names they found of service members from the Muskegon area. Then they connected one name with another because Charles W. Wilson appeared on both lists, LeaTrea said. It turned out that there were two Charles W. Wilsons.
“Both men were Charles William Wilson, and there was one from Muskegon County which is where Whitehall is, and that’s who we thought we had chosen, but we were into our research for a couple of weeks and kept coming up with information that Wilson from Muskegon County hadn’t died in WWII, even though he had served, and the connections were not matching,” Klco said. “He was in the Army, and our guy was in the Navy. So we backtracked and shifted our research, and that’s how we found out that our Lt. Wilson was from Tecumseh. We went to the adviser of the program and asked, ‘What do we do?’ because they emphasized researching someone local, and she said, ‘Well, I’m a firm believer that your subject chooses you, you don’t choose the subject.’”
The team first started with Wilson’s early life and on Ancestry.com found the census reports and various sources to piece together the early parts of his life.
Wilson was born March 11, 1915, in Ridgeway Township. He moved to Tecumseh and went to Tecumseh High School, graduating in 1933. He also met his wife, Maxine Estella Leighton, in Tecumseh.
Wilson went to Michigan State College where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in forestry in 1941. He was then appointed to the Navy Reserve as a Navy flying cadet and was married to Maxine in June 1942.
The couple moved to Corpus Christi, Texas, where Wilson was a flight instructor. A year after they were married, they had a daughter named Ann Elizabeth Wilson, who was born on June 9, 1943. During this time, Wilson was stationed in Logansport, Indiana, at Grissom Air Base, where he served as a flight instructor. At some point during this time, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant.
When Wilson left Grissom, he became a fighter pilot. On Nov. 30, 1944, he and his unit, Air Group 45, embarked the aircraft carrier USS San Jacinto at Guam, replacing Air Group 51, the air group in which future President Lt. George H.W. Bush served.
“Air Group 51 happened to be the squadron that President George H.W. Bush was in when he was shot down during a raid in Southeast Asia,” Klco said.
Air Group 45 participated in the Battle of Iwo Jima, providing air support. That group also attacked the airfields on Formosa, now Taiwan, and the Japanese shipping channels at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam.
On April 5, 1945, Wilson was providing air cover for the Battle of Okinawa when he went missing. Wilson’s son, Charles Edward Wilson, was born the day before he went missing, and Ann Elizabeth was just shy of 2 years old. Wilson was declared dead on April 6, 1946. His body and plane, an F6F Hellcat, were never found.
“His wife was a nurse at the time, and she had moved back to Tecumseh, probably for family support to help her to take care of her toddler and the upcoming baby,” Klco said. “By the 1950 census, she was in Tecumseh and on the death records for Lt. Wilson, it listed her in Tecumseh as well.”
Wilson was presented with the Distinguished Flying Cross, Air Medal with Two Gold Stars, and Purple Heart.
“We don’t know yet, but you can surmise that he was doing some pretty heroic things if he was flying over Iwo Jima and the Battle of Okinawa,” Klco said. “The Flying Cross is for outstanding valor in support of a mission. We don’t know exactly what Lt. Wilson did, but we will.”
Klco and LeaTrea recently learned that the National Archives have found Wilson’s records, and they will soon be getting more direct and specific information about when and where he served and how and why he received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Lenawee County in World War II
Lenawee County played a very important role on the home front in the war effort. Many companies increased their workforces to produce everything from bomber parts to brake lines and uniforms to powdered eggs and milk, LeaTrea said.
“A quarter of a million powered eggs a day were produced in Lenawee County. We were amazed at how Lenawee County was all in with their contributions,” Klco said.
A July 27, 2021, article in The Daily Telegram, “Lenawee County manufacturers helped bring victory in World War II,” by Bob Wessel, vice president of the Lenawee Historical Society, as well as interviews with Wessel, informed the team’s research about the home front.
In preparation for the war, many industries in Lenawee County were called upon to produce unfamiliar products in massive quantities. Many of these products were covered by an equally unfamiliar cloak of security and secrecy. These technical manufacturing challenges were compounded when the need to vastly increase the ranks of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps siphoned trained production employees from the labor force, either as volunteers or as inductees.
Many Lenawee County manufacturers retooled, expanded and even built new plants to produce items needed to assure victory on the battlefield and at sea. Companies that had been producing common household and industrial products — familiar to every resident — began providing products for use by combat forces.
Trained employees who were lost to the armed forces needed to be replaced, while increased industrial output required additional workers. People who were not typically employed in manufacturing — women, Mexican-Americans and migrants from the southern United States — stepped up to fill the void. The county's population went from just over 53,000 in 1940 to almost 65,000 in 1945, a 22% increase. The populations of Adrian and Tecumseh jumped by 30% and 37%, respectively.
The number of employees at the Tecumseh Products Co. doubled from 400 to 800 and included 60 women. They were engaged in producing anti-aircraft shells and engine parts for aircraft as well as armor-piercing ammunition and bomber components.
Blissfield had two prisoner of war camps for German soldiers.
“The idea that in Blissfield, which is if you blink, you miss it, similar to some of our towns here, they had not one but two POW camps, was surprising,” Klco said. “Many of the POWs were offered the opportunity and chose to work in the sugar beet fields and the other fields that were promoting the war-time effort."
LeaTrea added, "They were often welcomed into people’s homes and treated very humanely.”
At the culmination of the Sacrifice for Freedom program, the students will develop a silent hero profile to be published online during the 2023-24 academic year at NHDSilentHeroes.org.
The web pages go live in September. Klco and LeaTrea are preparing their eulogy to be delivered while they are in Hawaii from June 20-26. The eulogy will become part of their web page.
The experience also must be applied to the classroom and community. Klco and LeaTrea are working with the Whitehall High School history teachers and eighth grade English teachers to work what they have learned into their curricula. Because LeaTrea will be graduating in two years, they plan to record a piece to be used on a long-term basis.
They also will be working with their local historical society and have spoken with Wessel about coming to Tecumseh and Adrian to speak.
Bob Wessel contributed to this report.