CAPTAIN WILLIAM A. KELLEY
An Irishman Whose Luck 
Finally Ran Out

He was called a hero.  He was a hero.  He was supposed to be Irish. After all, his name was Kelley.  He was supposed to be lucky.  His luck finally ran out. This is the story of Captain William Arlington Kelley, United States Army Air Force.  Kelley was a Dublin High School coach and teacher, the son of a Methodist minister, and a B-29 pilot in the 20th Air Force.  His story was one of a pillar of good luck. However, in one dark, ironic, and uncharacteristically errant moment, he was snatched into a watery grave in the depths of the Pacific Ocean by the tentacles of fate, which didn't want him and most of his crew to come home.

The story of Captain William A. Kelley is one of the most intriguing  I have found in the history of our county.  It could have been made into a movie.  It should be made into a movie.  I wish that I could sit down with Capt. Kelley and have him tell me his full story.  If not for that one fateful moment on a dark moonless night on Kwajalein Atoll, Kelley and his crew of the Lucky Irish would have been national heroes.  Whoever said "all's fair in love and war" was wrong. 

Coach Kelley was an outstanding athlete in his day.  He was the quarterback of a good Duke team from 1933 to 1935 and lettered twelve times in five sports. He was great coach, Curtis Beall remembered.  "He once managed to get me a pair of shoes for a basketball game when I didn't have any," Beall said.  "They were too big and came off during the game," Beall fondly remembered.  Kelley's last year of coaching  in Dublin was in 1939.   He  lived in Dublin where his father was the District Superintendent of the Methodist Church.  At the beginning of World War II, Coach Kelley was coaching at Parker High School in Greenville, S.C. 

When the war broke out, Kelly joined the Army Air Corps.  He began his training in January of 1942 at Maxwell Air Force Base, where he spent five months before moving to Napier Field, Alabama. Kelley spent sixteen months at Walnut Ridge, Arkansas before his final training at Smyrna,  Tennessee.   Captain Kelley was given command of a B-29 bomber.  The B-29 was a long range bomber designed especially for the thousand mile plus bombing runs from the American held Pacific Islands to the mainland of Japan.  The bomber's captain was given the honor of naming his plane.  Kelley chose the name "Lucky Irish."  A popular feature of the B-29 was the nose art.  Each plane carried an image, usually of a beautiful woman.  The crew of the Lucky Irish chose a design of a well endowed woman wearing a bonnet and a towel across her lap posed kneeling in front of a four leaf clover.  Near the end of the war, these images were replaced with more military-like symbols, mainly at the behest of the wives of some of the commanding officers.

Kelley was assigned to the 497th Bomb Group of the 73rd Bomb Wing, which was attached to the 20th Air Force.  By the end of October, 1944,  the stage was set at Saipan for the first B-29 bombing runs over Japan.  The first raids began in November over Iwo Jima.  On November 24, 1944, Brig. Gen. Rosey O'Donnell led the first B-29 strike over Tokyo aboard the flag ship of the 20th Air Force, "The Dauntless Dotty."  Flying the "Dotty" was a former B-17 pilot whose crew had been the first in the European Theater to complete twenty five  missions and earn a ticket home.  That man was Col. Robert Morgan, (above left)  who was the pilot of the famed, "Memphis Belle."  Kelley and his crew flew on the second mission three days later.

  

Nearly every other day or so, the bombers of the 20th Air Force pounded military targets in Japan.  By the end of March, 1945, the bombers were dropping bombs that ignited rapidly spreading fires and incinerated large residential areas.  The Lucky Irish was right in the middle of the more famous of these attacks on April 7, 1945.    It was the first mission in which the B-29s were escorted by fighters.  On their run to the Mushashino plant, the Irish's gunner shot down seven Japanese fighters.  John Neville, the co-pilot, commented simply, "Yeah, that was a bad one."

The bombing runs continued.  One by one the crew of the Lucky Irish was getting closer to getting their thirtieth mission and returning home.  Kelley and his crew flew twenty three missions on the Lucky Irish.  The remaining seven were flown on other planes.  The last flight of the "Lucky Irish" took place on May 24, 1945.  Captain Kelley had already flown his thirtieth and took the night off.  Lt. Neville and most of the crew flew toward Japan.  

Lt. Neville remembered, "Bill (Kelley) sat this one out since he had already completed his thirtieth mission flying one with another crew.  Our plane had never had any bullet or flak holes.  We were hit pretty bad.  Our two right engines were shot out.  I was the pilot on this mission.  I had to fly several hundred miles back on the return trip with my foot on the right rudder to keep the plane flying.  Every twenty minutes, one of the crew would have to come up to the cockpit to keep their foot or hands on the rudder while I rested my right foot because it was start to tremble and ache after every twenty minutes.  We crashed landed at Iwo Jima.  Some of the men made an inspection and found seventy six flak holes in the plane."

Top row: Lt. William Kovach, navigator, Lt. John F. Neville, Co-Pilot, Lt. William A. Kelley, pilot, Lt. Karl Stammerjohn, engineer, Lt. Roy E. Shanklin, Jr., bombardier.  Bottom row: SSgt. Thurman Wailing, right gunner, SSgt Al Desimone, radio operator; TSgt. Glenn W. Jones, CFC gunner, SSgt. Charles S. McMurry, left gunner; SSgt. Glenn F. Gregory, tail gunner, and SSgt. Otto Pence, radar operator. 

They made it.  The men of the Lucky Irish were coming home, but their plane wasn't.  It was shot up too badly to ever fly again.  Captain Kelley got an order to ferry home the plane that started it all, "The Dauntless Dotty."  They were the first crew, or second depending on how you score it, to complete their tour of duty in the South Pacific.  Kelley and the crew, who were extremely close friends, were chosen to headline the Seventh War Bond Drive in the last summer of the war.

On the afternoon of June 5th, 1945,  Kelley and crew took off from the cliff side airport at Saipan. Their first destination was the atoll island of Kwajalein.  The weary crew arrived just after midnight.  Capt. Kelley reported to the operations office an hour later.  Kelley told the officer in charge that he and the crew would rest for a few hours and take off for Hawaii.  Capt. Leon Jacobson noticed how tired Kelley looked, but Kelley assured him that he had a relief crew aboard and that an overnight stay was not necessary.

Top Row L-R - Charles McMurry, Karl Stammerjohn, Glenn F. Gregory, Glenn W. Jones, Thurman Walling, Roy Shanklin. Bottom Row: Al Desimone, John Neville, William A. Kelley, William Kovach, Otto B. Pence.

A little after 3:00 a.m.,  Kelley began his run down the runway.  A witness noticed that he had taken up all of the available space, more than usual.  During his thirty missions from Saipan, Kelley had been used to taking off from a cliff.  Kwajalein was an atoll, only five or six feet above sea level.  Kelley was used to dropping the plane down to allow the engines to cool.  In an instant just a few hundred yards off the shore the "Dotty" struck the ocean, bounced once and struck the ocean hard as it broke apart.  Kelley, seven of his crew, and two passengers were killed instantly.  Lt. Neville (left) was thrown forward two hundred yards out the nose of the plane and managed to survive despite severe injuries to his back.  Two rear gunners managed to get out of the plane alive.

Here is where the ironies begin.  Just a week before the accident, Jane Kelley gave birth to a daughter, the couple's only child.  Kelley never knew that his daughter had been born.  About a month later,  a new B-29 pilot attached to the 497th Bomb Group arrived in Saipan in command of the "Lucky Lynn."  When asked where he was from by the man in charge of parking assignments, he was told that he could park his plane where Captain Kelley's plane's was stationed.  That man was McGrath Keen, Sr., who graduated from Dublin High School the year Captain Kelley taught school and coached in Dublin.  Now tell me it is not a small world.