Remembering Uncle Clare on Memorial Day

I was looking through some old letters that were returned to the family and found this clipping about Uncle Clare's funeral in a thank you note my grandmother had written to my mother's friend Arlene. The enlistment date isn't correct as I think he enlisted in 1942, but September 1944 was when his unit joined with 40th Photographic Reconaissance Squadron, which is probably where that date mix-up came. Also my aunt's name is Dickson, not Dicks. Clare came home in October 1947, three years after his death, on the Honda Knot, a huge funeral ship bearing over 3,000 coffins. I don't think my grandparents were ever the same. I'm not sure why they chose this photo, except he looks like the farm boy he was, who had perhaps just removed his cap to squint at the growing crops, instead of handsome and suave in his Air Corps uniform.

"A navy launch approached the Honda Knot and offered another massive wreath from President Truman. Dignitaries in the audience included Army General Mark Clark, who had led American troops in Italy during the war, and the Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan, who honored these fallen heroes, many of whom had passed under the Golden Gate Bridge on ships bound for the Pacific war. Six of the 3,012 flag-draped coffins aboard the Honda Knot were removed the next day to lie in state in the rotunda of San Francisco’s city hall, where ordinary citizens of a sorrowful nation paid their last respects. The six dead represented servicemen from the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, and the Coast Guard, along with a civilian, all killed in the war. From the early morning until late that night, thousands of mourners filed by the coffins of knelt in prayer by their sides. The arrival of the Honda Knot and the Joseph V. Connolly officially initiated what one observer called the “most melancholy immigration movement in the history of man,” the return to the United States of 233,181 American dead after the end of World War II. America’s army of fallen warriors was coming home from the four corners of the earth, from Guadalcanal and Australia, from New Guinea, Japan, China, and Burma in the Pacific theater. From the Mediterranean theater men were returned from Libya, Sicily, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Romania. The bodies of men who had died in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Germany also came home. Most had been killed in action or had died of wounds from direct combat against the enemy." From the book Safely Rest, by David P. Colley