During a busy November afternoon in Miami, Oklahoma, Mrs. Lorean Blaine took a break from preparing for Thanksgiving, which was two days away, to check her mailbox. In it she found an unexpected letter from her brother Staff Sergeant Charles Bluejacket who was serving in Europe as a B-24 gunner in the 376th Bomb Group, nicknamed “The Liberandos”. In the letter, which was written October 26 1943 and post marked for mailing two days later, Charles was careful not to upset his family with the details of his recent aerial combat and wrote that he was “still in training”. With Charles’ brother Chester, half-brothers Earl and Carl Blair also in the service, there was no shortage of apprehension for the family during the war. Little did Mrs. Blaine know that the letter she read would turn out to be a cruel reminder of the hell that war is, and that her family’s worst fears had already been realized.
Charles E Bluejacket was a fourth generation descendent of Chief Blue Jacket, who was the last War Chief of the Shawnee Indians and signer of the Treaty of Greenville, Ohio. His ancestors moved to Oklahoma with most of the other Shawnees in 1869. Bluejacket, Oklahoma is named after Charles’ decedents and it is just 80 miles from Tulsa where Charles E. Bluejacket, serial number 38127243 entered into the Army on April 9, 1942. He was a native of Oklahoma and his enlistment records state that he was an American Indian, citizen born in 1912. At the time of Bluejacket’s service he was married, had a grammar school education and his civilian occupation was listed as semiskilled chauffeurs and drivers, bus, taxi, truck and tractor.
On November 2, 1943, High above Austria, as the five-hour-mark mark of the mission approached, Charles’ hands began to cramp from hours of holding the grips of his Browning .50 caliber machine gun. His current situation couldn’t have been farther from the words he wrote in the letter to his sister a mere two weeks earlier. Bluejacket scanned the skies for German fighters looking to jump his B-24, serial number 42-73084 “Ropes McGonigle”. Peering through the thick plexiglass windows it was reassuring to see the P-38 Lightening escorts for this mission that targeted the Messerschmitt factory at Weiner Neustadt, Austria, about twenty miles from the German border. This was the Fifteenth Air Force’s first crack at this important target and they looked forward to enjoying the immediate dividends of the diminished the number of fighters the Luftwaffe could put in the air.
As they neared the target, they hit what was the German’s first line of defense when a large group of Luftwaffe fighters appeared. The fighters immediately went to work picking at the bomber formations as the American crewmen anxiously called out their “o’clock” positions over the interphone. Bluejacket and the other gunners fired hundreds of .50 caliber rounds from their guns at the enemy as they made pass after pass. Empty shells danced all around in the bowels of the bombers. The sound of the empty brass hitting the aluminum skin of the plane could have been mistaken for coins falling into a tray of a casino slot machine. As the bomber force approached their target, the German attackers disappeared as quickly as they appeared and that could only mean that the flak would soon follow.
The heavy volume of anti-aircraft fire was indicative of a high-value target below. Before long the sky was filled with black clouds of smoke and the smell of high explosives filled the air. Each explosion materialized at the center and stretched outward in an attempt to pull down the lumbering bombers. From a distance, the puffs of smoke seemed completely harmless but shells that exploded nearby peppered the sides of the bombers with shrapnel and rocked the airships like a wobbly carnival ride. On this mission, the German batteries succeeded at knocking two B-24s out of the sky and one of them was Bluejacket’s. “Ropes McGonigle was last seen in flames, spiraling toward s the ground with several parachutes emerging from her and Bluejacket was never seen again. A member of the 376th Bomb Group, Pat Walling, wrote in his diary notes for this mission, “Take off 6:30, landed 17:15. Bomb load 6 -1000#. Total hrs. -11 hours. Target was a 109 factory. Had P-38s for escort but not over target. Heavy ack ack and about 60 fighters. Rough mission.”
“Ropes McGonigle” crashed near Bocksdorf, Austria taking the lives of seven of the eleven men on board including Staff Sgt. Bluejacket. A normal crew for the B-24 was ten but on this mission there was a combat photographer on-board. On January 23, 1945 the Tuesday evening edition of the Emporia Gazette reported, “Emporia Gunner is Presumed Dead, Staff Sgt. Charles Bluejacket, son of Mrs. E.C. Blair, 102 Rural, is presumed to have died in action over Austria on November 3, 1943, according to a war department letter received by his mother. He was reported missing in action a year ago. Charles Bluejacket, who was a gunner on a Liberator bomber, was born at Wyandotte, Okla., April 8, 1912. He was of Indian descent and was graduated from the Haskell Institute at Lawrence. He entered the service in 1942 at Fort Sill, Okla., and went overseas in September 1943. Several members of the sergeant’s air crew have been reported as German prisoners, members of the Blair family report.”
As far as Bluejacket’s story goes, the trail went cold at this point but then it picked up again four and a half years later. At some point Staff Sgt. Bluejacket’s remains must have been identified and processed for repatriation. On August 28, 1949, the following story ran in the local newspaper, “Funeral Rites for Sgt. Bluejacket Planned Tuesday.” The article read, “The body of Sgt. Charles E. Bluejacket, reported missing in action in Tunisia at the age of 31 years on Nov. 2, 1943, will arrive in Miami at 1:25 p.m. today. Funeral services will be held in the Cooper chapel here at 2 o’clock Tuesday afternoon. The Rev. M. R. Dareing, pastor of the Second Baptist church, will officiate. Members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars post will act as pallbearers and conduct military rites at the grave in GAR Cemetery.” GAR Cemetery is the Grand Army of the Republic in Miami, Oklahoma. The story went on to say, “Survivors include the deceased soldier’s wife, Mrs. Annabelle Bluejacket of Baxter Springs, Kas., a stepson, Johnny Bluejacket of the home, his mother, Mrs. E.C. Blair of Emporia, Kas., his father Edward Bluejacket of Springfield, Mo., three sisters. Mrs. Flora B. Beaty of Miami, Mrs. Dorothy Poupart of Lac du Flambeau, Wis., and Mrs. Lorean Blaine of Miami, a brother Chester Blair of Miami, and five half-brothers, Earl Blair of Miami, Carl Blair of Pittsburg, Kas., Robert Blair of Greensburg, Kas., and Richard and Arthur Blair, both of Emporia, Kas.”
I stumbled onto this story after findings a group burial with five of Bluejacket’s crew members at the Long Island National Cemetery in Farmingdale, NY. These men were originally buried in Belgium and then re-interred in New York on February 7, 1950. Charles Bluejacket rests in peace in the southeast corner of the rectangular shaped, 86 acre GAR Cemetery in Miami, Oklahoma. Although the names like the Navajo Code Talkers and Ira Hayes are well known, Bluejacket’s story is an example of the individual contributions of Native Americans during World War II that have been all but forgotten.
