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Deane O. Birckelbaw, a guy from Normal

/ Marc Lancaster / Leave a comment

The aspect of World War II that contributes the most to the endless well of stories about the conflict that is part of this site’s reason for being is its universality. Regular people, from all walks of life, from nearly every corner of the earth, were pushed to the limits of human tolerance during every one of the 2,194 days of the war. Today we spotlight the epitome of such an everyman.

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Deane O. Birckelbaw

Pvt. Deane O. Birckelbaw was born and raised in the area around Normal, Illinois, and never lived anywhere else until the war pulled him away for good. He graduated from Normal Community High School and what was then called Illinois State Normal University, a music major who played the trombone.

Viewed from decades later, nothing in his background suggests an inclination toward military service. But then, there were no such prerequisites as the United States found itself embroiled in a conflict whose scope reached far beyond anything it had experienced before.

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Robert Parker took a Zero with him when he went

/ Marc Lancaster / Leave a comment

Robert Parker couldn’t be certain when he enlisted in the Army in November of 1941 that the war that had raged around the world for more than two years would touch the United States. But he knew what he wanted to be doing if it did.

The allure of joining the air corps was enough to persuade him to leave the business administration program at Michigan State College (now University) after two years and get ahead of the draft board. He and three friends from Lansing all set their sights on pilot training, and a month after Pearl Harbor they were doing exactly that.

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Lt. Robert Parker

Parker, Bruce Boylan, H.H. Holloway and Clarice Randall found themselves at Kelly Field, near San Antonio, as the Army Air Forces rushed to get as many new pilots into the air as it could in the months following the December 7 attack. After five weeks of basic military training at Kelly, the newly minted aviation cadets of Class 42-F moved on to flight training. Parker was sent to Corsicana, Texas, the week before Christmas and finally got his chance to take to the air.

Pilot training wasn’t all that occupied the 22-year-old Parker’s mind in the early months of 1942. That February, as noted in the Lansing State Journal, he played host in Corsicana to Miss Margaret Ellen Davies, a former classmate at Central High School who now worked as a typist at the Reo Motor Car Company office in Lansing. By the following summer, the pair would announce their engagement.

Her departure allowed Parker to return to the task at hand, and by July he had earned his wings, finishing pilot training alongside Boylan at Foster Field in Victoria, Texas. Holloway and Randall also graduated with their class and all were commissioned into the Army Air Forces.

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