Swell Ships and Flying Coffins: The Letters of Lawrence Works

Background

One of the chapters in my upcoming book covers a midair collision between two Navy TBF Avengers off Anacapa Island on February 22, 1945. The planes were from Composite Squadron Five (VC-5) at Ventura and were practicing an “anvil attack,” a torpedo attack method in which torpedo bomber aircraft approach the target ship from opposite directions simultaneously. On the third practice run, one Avenger dipped unexpectedly and its propeller struck the other. Four of the six men aboard the two planes were killed. One of the planes, #47746, lies in 120 feet of water, and I dove it and built a photogrammetry model. The other, #23892, has never been found.

The turret gunner on #47746 was Lawrence E. Works Jr. He was 20 years old.

After I published that dive report, a comment showed up from Jeff Wheat. Lawrence was his great-uncle. Jeff had recently received the letters Lawrence wrote home, along with the personal effects that were sent home to his parents. “I have looked for years and never been able to find any information about the crash which took his life,” he wrote.

Jeff is a retired history teacher. Growing up, he’d been told that Lawrence died in a plane crash on his way home from the Pacific after the war ended. He received the letters from a family member and had been working through them when he found the blog post.

Jeff graciously shared 61 of the letters that Lawrence sent home, from his first week of boot camp in October 1943 to three days before the crash in 1945. That’s only about a fifth of what Jeff has but hasn’t electronically scanned yet; Lawrence wrote home a lot. I’ve quoted him exactly as he wrote, spelling and all. Only a small part of that fits in the book chapter. This post is a chance to use more of it.

Lawrence was a teenager from Dallas, likely away from home for an extended period for the first time, training for a war that was being fought on both sides of the world. His frequent letters home show what training in the Navy was like, and how he felt about it: sometimes excited, sometimes bored, sometimes scared, and often changing his mind. That’s especially true of the airplane he would eventually die in.

The Works Family

Lawrence Ecelder Works Jr. was born in Dallas on January 22, 1925. He was the middle of three children of Lawrence Sr. and Lessie Ruby Nelson Works. His older sister, Mary Louise, was born in 1923, and his younger brother, Marvin Leonard, in 1927.

Nearly every letter he wrote home starts with “Dear folks” and ends with “Son,” which is what the family called him. Everyone else had a nickname too, and once you know them, the letters are much easier to follow:

• Bud: Lawrence’s father. Jeff has no idea why Lawrence called him that.
• Nickey: Lawrence’s older sister Mary. She was Jeff’s grandmother, which makes Jeff Lawrence’s great-nephew. She married Tommy Wheat in 1942, and Tommy was stationed in England while Lawrence was in training.
• Bit or Bitty: Lawrence’s younger brother Marvin.
• Grandpaw: Lawrence’s grandfather on his father’s side, Ferdinand A. Works.
• Teen Teen: an aunt or cousin on his mother’s side.

Lawrence registered for the draft on the day of his 18th birthday, January 22, 1943. On the card he listed his occupation as “Student.” It describes him as 5’7″ and 139 pounds, with blue eyes and blonde hair. By October 1943, he had enlisted in the Navy.

Lawrence was close to his family and thought about them often. From one base or another, he sent home money, asked for everyone’s shoe sizes so he could buy shoes for Bit, Bud, and Grandpaw, mailed a set of pearls to his sister Nickey, and regularly asked for news about everyone back home.

Jeff has spent hours going through the letters from his great-uncle. He says he hears them in the voice of a young Ken Curtis, from films like The Horse Soldiers, before Curtis became famous as Festus on Gunsmoke.

“I Really Do Like the Navy”

Lawrence arrived at the Naval Training Station in San Diego just before midnight on Thursday, October 7, 1943. His first letter home, written the next day, covered the essentials. The train ride had been a good time (“There were boys shooting dice in every corner”), the desert was about 300 miles across, and the Navy had already given him four vaccinations and a burr haircut. “One old boy passed out while taking his shots,” he reported. Then: “I really do like the Navy.”

Boot camp kept him busy. He jumped off a 20-foot tower into 9 feet of water wearing a life jacket (“It sure did look deep from where we stood”), loaded 8-inch guns with shells that weighed about 75 pounds each, and went through a room filled with real tear gas. Lawrence passed his 100-yard swim test at Mission Beach and was “really petered out” when he finished. He thought his company commander was “the best man that I have ever known.”

On Thanksgiving Day he wrote home with the news that he was headed to aviation school in Norman, Oklahoma, about 180 miles from Dallas: “We are going there as Aviation Machinist Mate. That is the thing that I asked for.” Better still: “Just think! I will probably get to come home every week end.”

On the train to Oklahoma, he signed off a letter with a joke for the folks back home: “It is now 2010 in Navy time although it is 8:10 PM in you alls time.”

In his first week at Norman, he signed up for something extra: “I am also taking a course in gunnery. I don’t know what we are going to [do] in that, but it is really a swell course to take I heard.” Eight months later, he would be training as a gunner.

Aviation school was harder than boot camp. “My average went from 86 to 74,” he wrote in January 1944. “You see there are a lot of older men in here who have had college and also worked on planes so you see it is kinda hard to compete with them.” In February he came down with the mumps. “Well I have some really good news for you all. I have the dam mumps in both sides. Boy I sure do look cute with my big puffed jaws.”

By spring he was boxing every day, and he couldn’t wait to get in the air. “I just cant wait to start flying in those fast babies. It sure is a thrill to zoom through the air. Boy oh Boy!”

From “Flying Coffins” to “Swell Ships”

By May 1944, Lawrence was doing well at the Norman, Oklahoma training center. “I am still doing fine in school and I am getting where I like the Navy more every day,” he wrote. He was being called “No 1 gunner.” But he had heard where he might end up, and he didn’t like it:

“They say I am going to make a T.B.F. gunner they think. Listen they are not going to put me in one of those flying coffins. I am going to try to get in a B-24 squadron.”

That summer he went to Naval Air Gunners School in Purcell, Oklahoma. The physical training was tough. “Boy we all walk around like old 90 year old men,” he wrote after the first round. “Boy they sure do make a man out of you down here.” He also found out he liked the .50-caliber machine guns. “You know those fifties are kinda nice little guns. Boy I sure do like them.”

In July the class learned which aircraft they would fly in. On July 20 he wrote, “Most of the ordenance men got T.B.F. Avengers. Boy I hate that ship.” He was still hoping for anything but the Avenger. “I think that I am going either to P.B.Y. or B-24,” he wrote on July 26. “They are big ships or planes, whatever you call them.” Three days later it was settled: “I am going to a T.B.F. Squadron. I am not going to get in a B24 Squadron. A T.B.F. Squadron is a good plane anyway.”

On August 5 he arrived at Naval Air Station Fort Lauderdale. He wrote home that day on stationery printed with a picture of an Avenger. “I am going to be a gunner in a T.B.F. Avenger. That is the picture of one up above on this sheet of paper. They are usually located on aircraft carriers. Boy they are swell ships. I sure do like them.”

Five days later he wrote to his younger brother Marvin and told a different story. “I guess that they are good planes but I don’t like a dam thing about them, although that is the ship I am going to be a gunner on so I guess that I might as well like them whether I want to or not.” Then he added a P.S.: “I was just joking about the T.B.F. not being a good plane. Ya see that little ball turret in back of the cockpit well that is where I ride. It has a 50 caliber machine gun in it. Boy is it nice.”

Jeff has noticed the same pattern. He wonders whether Lawrence told his parents he liked the plane so they wouldn’t worry, and was more honest with his brother.

By the end of August, whatever he had told Marvin, he sounded like he meant it. “Boy I sure do like a T.B.F.,” he wrote home. “They are really good planes.”

“Just Tough Luck”

Fort Lauderdale was where training stopped being theoretical. Within days of arriving, Lawrence was made a plane captain, the enlisted crewman responsible for keeping one aircraft maintained and ready to fly. On August 24, 1944, he wrote a letter that was mostly about how easy things were. “This place is a swell place to stay if you like laying around,” he wrote. “Boy us plane captains really do have it easy here!” Then, a few lines later:

“Oh yes we had 2 planes go down in the sea or ocean today. Most of the guys got out of one of the planes but the other crew didn’t make it. That was just tough luck.”

Jeff has gone back and forth on the meaning behind that line. “I’m not sure how to interpret his words there,” he wrote to me. “It is kind of like trying to read sarcasm. Was he being almost flippant about it, as if that was just another thing to be expected when flying planes or was it a sad sort of statement; maybe like ‘those poor guys’. I wonder, did he worry about the planes he flew on going down. That would definitely not be something you shared with your mother and father.”

By December his letters were full of stories about the flying. “We have been flying every day from 0730 to 1700,” he wrote on December 3. “We have been doing a lot of glide bombing and also a lot of dive bombing. Today we went out over the ocean and done a little strafing.” And, as usual: “Boy we sure did have the fun.”

Eleven days later, it happened again:

“Oh yes we lost 3 more of our squadron the other day. They went down in the drink or ocean to you although they had an English pilot and I don’t think much of those guys.” Then, about his own pilot: “Boy I sure do have a good one he is from New York. I sure am glad that he isn’t a Limey or English.”

British student pilots had been training at Fort Lauderdale since early 1943. Lawrence’s pilot from New York was John Buckley, the same pilot he would be flying with off Anacapa Island two months later.

“Don’t Go and Enlist”

Lawrence wrote most of his letters to “Dear folks,” but some went straight to his younger brother. Marvin was two years younger and still in high school, and Lawrence spent a lot of ink telling “Bitty” what to do.

The advice started early. In January 1944, from Norman, he asked his parents to “Tell Bitty to stay in school and learn all he can about planes. Tell him to read everything that he can get his hands on.” That March he wrote to Bit directly: “Stick to that football if you can.” He also scolded him for burning his hand: “you know better than try to weld without a glove.”

In April he made a bigger pitch. Marvin should finish high school and apply for the Navy’s V-12 program, which trained college students to become officers:

“Listen Bitty, you had better go on and go to school & finish and then boy you can go in for V-12. That is an officers training school. Boy I sure do wish that I had the chance to finish school and try for it. It would mean everything in the world to me if I could. You know I sure would be glad to say that I had a brother training to be an officer.”

He added, “Boy if you don’t finish school you should be whipped.”

By summer he was still pressing the point. On July 15, from Purcell:

“Bit go ahead and finish that school. I imagine that this will be over before you have to sign up. Don’t go and enlist for petes sake. From the looks of things it will be over pretty soon. I doubt if I get to see actual combat fighting.”

A month later, Marvin had apparently told him he was thinking about quitting school. Lawrence tried again from Fort Lauderdale, and this time he offered a bribe. “Say you said something about not finishing school. Listen if you don’t you will be sorry I promise you. Bit this thing will be over in a matter of months so therefore don’t go and enlist.” Then: “Bit I hate to be bossing you around like this but you see I am doing it for my sake as well as yours.” And in a P.S.: “I am going to buy you a gunners flight jacket to wear to school this winter so don’t go quitting school. Boy they sure are pretty things.”

Nine days later the jacket was in the mail. “I mailed your little school gift today. It is really a hum dinger. Just wait till you get it. It is the kind of protection that we wear when we fly pretty high.”

“Lucky Me I Got Out O.K.”

As plane captain, Lawrence was responsible for keeping his assigned aircraft maintained and ready to fly, so he went wherever it went. That fall, the airplanes had to leave Florida twice.

On September 12, 1944, a major hurricane headed up the Atlantic coast, and NAS Fort Lauderdale evacuated its aircraft. “You see all the plane Captains had to go with their planes so therefore I had to go with mine,” he wrote afterward. “We flew to Jacksonville Florida and from there to Jackson Mississippi.” The base was boarded up and everything was tied down while they stayed away for two nights and two days. He described the trip as “a nice fly.”

Five weeks later, another hurricane sent the planes back to Mississippi. The base evacuated on October 18, and this time the trip didn’t go smoothly. In a letter dated October 22, he wrote:

“Boy what a trip we had. We sure did have the fun, although we had a little trouble with our plane. Our fourth time to take off our engine conked out on us when we were about 60 ft off the ground and so therefore we hit the ground. Lucky me I got out O.K. There wasn’t anyone hurt. Just the pilot and I were in the plane. The fifth time we took off we made it O.K.”

His future pilot, John Buckley, wouldn’t be assigned to him for another month.

At 60 feet, there was no chance or need to bail out. For the gunner in an Avenger, that would have been hard anyway: according to the Navy’s handbook, the turret gunner didn’t wear his parachute in flight. It was stowed in the compartment below the turret, and he had to climb down, put it on, and find a way out.

They flew about 3,000 miles in all. “I sure did enjoy the trip,” he wrote.

In May he had called the Avenger one of “those flying coffins.” Later, in August he told Marvin, “I don’t like a dam thing about them.” In October, after he hit the ground inside one: “Boy that T.B.F. will really take the punishment.”

“Boy What a Place”

October 27, 1944 was Navy Day, and Fort Lauderdale held a parade. “I flew in a formation of about 60 planes,” Lawrence wrote that night. “Some of the boys walked or rather I say marched down the streets with their flying things on. Parachute and all. Me I had heck lot rather fly.” Earlier that day he had flown a live torpedo run. Some of the men he’d gone through school with had started their final training phase, and he expected to follow in a day or two. “Boy I sure will be glad when I get through and get my wings. I am going to send a pair home to you and Nickey.”

There was also a girl. Starting that summer, his letters mention “Chick,” who wrote to him from time to time. In November she sent a photo. “Oh yes I got a big picture from Chick the other day and oh boy is she georgous. She still has that pretty black hair.” Her letters were coming from Indiana. “They are in Indiana at the present,” he wrote. “She said that she didn’t know where they were going next.”

Jeff believes Chick was Ernestine Tucker, who was born in Dallas in 1924. She and her two sisters sang as the Tucker Sisters and performed with the USO during the war, and the 1940 census shows the Tucker and Works families living near each other. “I just feel that he knew her pretty well,” Jeff says. Among the items Jeff received with the letters is a signed 8×10 portrait: “To Lawrence With Very Best Wishes, Ernestine.” It may be the “big picture” Lawrence wrote home about in November. The photo doesn’t include a last name, but it fits Jeff’s theory.

He spent Christmas 1944 at Fort Lauderdale. “Well we had a swell Christmas and I don’t mean maybe,” he wrote, and he mailed home the menu. “No yoking if we ate chow like that all the time I would have one fat stomach on me.”

On January 3, 1945, he wrote, “Well we graduate tomorrow morning after so long.” He hadn’t forgotten the promise he’d made on Navy Day: “Oh yes I am going to send you and the rest of the folks some wings. That is some Aircrewman wings.”

Before leaving Florida, the crews made practice landings on a carrier and flew night hops, which he called “very exciting.” Then he went home on leave. His mother wrote the dates in pencil on the back of an envelope: he came home on January 19 and left Monday night, January 22, “on his 20th Birthday.”

By early February he was at Oxnard, California, and bored. “Boy what a place and I don’t mean maybe. We haven’t done a thing since we have been here.” He asked to borrow Nickey’s radio and promised, “I will send it back just as soon as we leave the states.”

“Tell Everyone Hello for Me“

His last letter is dated Monday night, February 19, 1945. He had flown two gunnery hops that day. His radioman had come back from training in San Diego, “and boy was I glad to see him.” They had a navigation hop planned for the next day, “that is if they don’t change it.” Oxnard wasn’t much of a town, he wrote, but Ventura had “a pretty nice dance floor and also skating rink.”

He closed the way he usually did: “Tell Bud & Nickey not to work to[o] hard. Tell everyone hello for me.”

“Missing at Sea”

Three days after that letter, on the morning of Thursday, February 22, 1945, Lawrence flew as gunner in the aft turret of TBF Avenger #47746, with John Buckley as pilot and Vernon Bergen as radioman. Five Avengers from VC-5 flew out to Anacapa Island to practice the anvil attack.

On the third run, the lead plane, flown by Ensign Dennis Ruehle, dipped unexpectedly, and its propeller struck the left side and tail of Buckley’s aircraft. Ruehle’s Avenger went straight into the sea, and none of its three crewmen were ever found. Buckley’s plane could still fly, barely.

Coast Guard lookouts on Anacapa saw two parachutes come out of Buckley’s Avenger #47746. Lawrence had jumped at about 400 feet, which left almost no room for a parachute to open. As described earlier, he would have had to climb down out of the turret, put on his parachute, and get out of a damaged airplane. Lawrence made it out, but his parachute either opened only partway or never fully deployed.

Radioman Bergen was picked up by a Navy crash boat, and pilot Buckley landed the plane on the water and was rescued by a fishing boat. Both were uninjured. Lawrence’s body was never recovered.

Just after midnight on February 25, a Western Union telegram arrived at 922 Cameron Avenue in Dallas:

“Deeply regret to inform you that your son Lawrence Ecelder Works Jr AMM3C USNR is missing at sea following plane crash near Anacapa Island California. Sincere sympathy is extended to you in your great loss. Letter follows.”

Outro

The letter the telegram promised came two days later, from Lieutenant R. J. Koep, executive officer of Composite Squadron Five. “I realize how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to comfort you in the grief of the loss of your son,” he began. He told Lawrence’s mother that the search had continued until the next morning, and that “everything humanly possible was done to find your son.” Then: “Lawrence was engaged in a field of service which he enjoyed and he was an integral part of our organization.”

Lawrence’s younger brother Marvin did eventually join the military. He served in the Marine Corps during the Korean War, years after Lawrence’s death. What went into that decision isn’t known. According to Jeff, he also became his battalion’s boxing champion.

The book chapter covers the collision, the search, and the other five men in much more detail. Most of what gets written about World War II happens overseas. Lawrence never left the United States. His letters home, written over 17 months, cover a different side of the war: the training, the waiting, the accidents that rarely made the news, and a young man working out how he felt about all of it while thinking about the family back home. Thanks to Jeff Wheat’s dedication and preservation of these letters, we get a rare look at that side.

For eighty years, the family knew only that Son had died in a plane crash. Now they know where and when, and how it happened.

AI Transparency:

This post was drafted with Claude’s assistance from my research and the letters and family material Jeff Wheat provided. The facts, opinions, and research are my own; the AI helped with structure, transcription, editing, and prose refinement.