William W. Caldwell - Veteran's Day 2012

W.W. Caldwell, 2nd Lt, US Army Air Corps In October, 1930, two US Army pilots (in separate aircraft) left Victoria, BC with signed copies of the 1930 London Naval Treaty.   2nd Lieutenant William W. Caldwell, an Army Air Corps reserve pilot with the 95th Pursuit Squadron, was escorting the second courier plane which was transporting Japan's ratification document for the treaty.  There was a deadline to meet; if the document was not filed in London within a certain time frame, the entire treaty would be nullified before it ever got ratified. The treaty papers had been brought across the Pacific by sea, and the two pilots were to deliver them to New York City where they would be put back aboard another ship and dispatched to London.   Experienced, journeyman fliers have a term for that kind of pressure. They call it “get-there-it is" and it's an often fatal disease. Time pressure (hurry and impatience) has been a killer of pilots and a destroyer of airplanes ever since Orville made that first flight; 1930 was only 27 years after the Wright brothers and none of the advances of the 1930s and WWII years in all-weather flying had yet been accomplished on any wide scale.  These two pilots were lucky to even have enclosed cockpits, if in fact they even did. The Fleetster came in many versions and some were open cockpit, some not.  Knowing the War Department, the 1930 U.S. Army probably had the most primitive and cheapest model of the aircraft that could be obtained.  A 1930s Fleetster Somewhere in central-southern Wyoming, the two ships and pilots ran into winter weather, a nasty blizzard that forced them down to tree-top level trying to get through (and unfortunately, even below that).  Forward-visibility was effectively zero. In mid-afternoon about 70 miles northwest of Cheyenne and 1.5 miles from a point on the railroad called Rock River, Caldwell’s parasol-winged monoplane found a fence post.  Death was no doubt instantaneous.  Searchers were led to the remains of the plane and pilot the next morning by a crusty old railroad worker who was stationed nearby and had heard the crash. The other airplane eventually continued on and delivered the treaty papers to the outbound ship in New York. William Caldwell, of California, died in service to his country. He was survived by his father who saw him buried at the national cemetery at the Presidio of San Francisco, where I stumbled across his marker while looking for another soldier's grave. Today is Veteran’s Day, or Armistice Day, as it was originally named in honor of the end of WW-1 and the soldiers and sailors who fought in it.  Today, I am thinking of all the Lt. Caldwells; those who have served, those who are serving, those who served and survived – and those who did not... and their often overlooked families who share their service and often their fate.  We owe them a debt that can never be satisfied; we have to live with it, unsettled.  It is a heavy load – but never heavier than the price they pay. Information about the death of Lt.William Caldwell was obtained from the New York Times newspaper, published on Oct 17, 1930.