Sixty-eight years later, Ronan hero is lost but not forgotten

For Tom Needham, this time of year marks a somber time of reflection, as he and his family remember a local war hero very close to their hearts.

Sixty-eight years ago, on July 5, 1944, Needham’s older brother Robert, a Ronan native, was lost at sea while serving with the Air Force – then called the Air Corps – in World War II.

Born and raised in Ronan, Robert enlisted in the Air Corps in 1943, when he was just 21 years old. After training in the United States, Robert was deployed to Europe in March of 1944, where he flew with the 409th bomb group.

Needham saw action in the D-Day invasion during June of that year, where he was wounded and earned a Purple Heart. Despite his injury, he returned to duty only three weeks later, and went missing shortly thereafter. He was later awarded another Purple Heart posthumously.

On the night that he was lost, Robert was the gunner on an A-20 dive bomber returning to England after completing a bombing run over France. Robert was part of the four-man crew manning the mission’s lead plane, which came under enemy fire as they soared across the English Channel and were exposed by an unfortunate break in the clouds.

The bomber sustained a glancing blow from a German howlitzer artillery shell, igniting a fire in the back of the plane, where Needham and the flight’s navigator were stationed. The pair did what they could to control the blaze, but eventually had to bail out. The commander and co-pilot remained in the cockpit, and successfully managed to get the damaged aircraft safely back to London.

The parachutes of Needham and the crew’s navigator were seen to have opened by a trailing pilot in the squadron. However, amid the stormy seas of the channel below, only the navigator was saved in the ensuing rescue effort that lasted into the night.

For the Needham family, details regarding Robert’s fate were merely speculative.

“We always presumed either he didn’t open his chute in time, didn’t get the raft inflated, or couldn’t get into the raft,” Tom says.

One year after his disappearance, Robert was declared legally dead, and with every passing year his family received an annual report indicating that there was no change to his status. For a long time, that was the only interaction that the Needham family had with the armed forces.

The years passed, and finally Tom was faced with the difficult decision of what to do with Robert’s war memorabilia, which he elected to donate to the Miracle of America Museum.

“[Donating Robert’s memorabilia] was a hard choice to make, because I didn’t want to give it up, but I thought ‘I gotta share it’ and it opened up the doors to revealing all of [my brother’s] history.”

In 1990, by a stroke of good fortune, one of Tom’s sisters was at the museum and overheard a veteran express familiarity with an A-20 plane pictured with Robert. The two struck up a conversation, and the veteran, who had served with the 410th bomb group, revealed that reunions of the 409th and 410th bomb groups had been happening for 20 years. Robert’s family had been out of the loop because his death was never finalized – he was just designated as “M.I.A.”

The Needhams became regular attendees of subsequent reunions, which have taken Tom and his sisters to Nashville, Colorado Springs, Traverse City, Mich., and numerous other cities scattered across the country. Tom has become deeply involved with the events, and now serves as the non-veteran president of the association.

The reunions have provided a great chance for the Needhams to meet Robert’s friends, keep his memory alive and gather new details about his past from those who knew him all those years ago.

Fifty-nine years later, they were even able to shed a little more light on his disappearance.

At a 2005 reunion, the commander who had flown with Robert that night talked with Tom, and regaled him with the unheard tale of the navigator’s account from the stormy ocean waters.

He reported that after four hours in the water, and only one hour before his eventual rescue, he had seen Robert afloat in his life raft, atop a giant wave, but the two were hopelessly separated by the unrelenting waves, fog, and rain. Besides the navigator’s fleeting glimpse, no trace of Robert was ever found.

Tom says it has been invaluable to have someone “visually corroborate” the details of Robert’s disappearance in the channel.

Though his family has long since come to terms with Robert’s disappearance in combat, Tom still wants to give his brother the recognition he is due. Although he received honors such as Purple Hearts and oak leaf clusters for his service, Robert was never directly recognized for the heroic sacrifice he made by staying with the plane until the last possible instant on the night he was lost.

Moreover, Tom wants his brother’s story to be remembered.

The entire Robert Needham story can be seen on display at the Miracle of America Museum’s Live History Days next weekend, July 21 and 22.