JOSEPH F. MEYERS

      Joseph F. Meyers was born on December 30, 1920, in New York. He moved with his family to 71 North Chatsworth Avenue between 1935 and 1940. He graduated from Valley Forge Military Academy in 1939 and, after graduation, attended New York University and Syracuse University. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in Syracuse in 1942 as an aviation cadet shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
      As a pilot of B25s, he participated in the raids on Wewak and Rabaul, Japanese strongholds, in Papua New Guinea. “After listening to a broadcast by political commentator George Putnam in which Putnam described the Japanese atrocities perpetuated on American soldiers, his mother, Bertha Meyers, wrote a letter to Mr. Putnam. Harassed and indignant, she said in substance, ‘We mothers always think the worst, do we have to hear it too?’ The following week Putnam replied over the radio to the anxious mother’s query by stating that in The Daily News of that day, Lt. Meyers was named as one of a group of pilots participating in the attack on Rabaul. (Larchmont Times, January, 1944). Meyers was in the 823^rd Bomber Squadron, 38^th Bomber Group, Medium.
     On January 21, 1944, he boarded a plane in the 822^nd Bomber Squadron, #42-64807, as a passenger for an administrative flight to Dobodura Airfield, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea. The plane was believed to have crashed, for an unknown reason, near Lake Myola, Central Province, Papua New Guinea. The wreckage was never found.

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