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British town to honor pilot who crash-landed

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. — Stanley Jones recalls standing outside his home in Stafford, England, that July afternoon in 1944, watching open-mouthed as an American jet fighter streaming smoke arced toward the ground, its engine sputtering, then roaring.

It passed out of sight seconds before an explosion shook the town, and Jones, his older brother, and many others from the town ran toward the plume of smoke rising from a wheat field, where smoking pieces of the plane were strewn about.

“I was kind of in awe,” said Jones, now 70 and living in Oregon. “I had never seen anything like that before. Of course, it being wartime, nothing was reported of the crash.”

Watching a fire engine plow through the waist-high wheat stalks on its way to hose down the wreckage, Jones wondered: Who was that pilot? What happened to him? Why didn’t he parachute to safety?

“Years went by and every now and again we’d talk about it, my brothers and I and family and neighbors, but basically it was forgotten,” Jones said. “But it stayed in me.”

It would be decades before the full story of what happened that day became known — a story of wartime heroism and sacrifice.

On July 4, 63 years after the crash that killed U.S. Air Force Capt. John Pershing Perrin, the Atlantic City native will be honored in Stafford for giving up his own life to save the town below by staying with his doomed plane and attempting a crash landing in a field rather than parachuting out and leaving a fuel-laden jet to crash into homes and schools.

Back home in Atlantic City, where John Perrin had lived with his parents before enlisting in what was then called the U.S. Army Air Corps, it was Independence Day. But over in England, there would be no backyard barbecues, and the fireworks were the real thing — bombs bursting in air as the Allied forces battled Germany.

Perrin, who at age 25 was already certified as an ace pilot with at least five enemy aircraft destroyed, was assigned to fly a new Mustang P-51-D fighter from an air base in Warton, Lancashire, to another one in Steeple Morden, Cambridgeshire, about 160 miles away.

Although he was an experienced pilot who had received the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters, Perrin had never before flown a Mustang P-51-D, with the extra 85-gallon fuel tank that could make it tricky to maneuver.

Born on Nov. 5, 1918, Perrin attended three different high schools, graduating from Toms River High School, where he was a standout baseball player. He studied for one semester at Rutgers University, earning awards in track and field, and studying journalism before dropping out to help support the family.

He worked as a busboy and bellhop at beachfront hotels along the Jersey shore while going to night school in Philadelphia, and later landed jobs as a billboard salesman, and a budget manager with Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.

On March 11, 1941, he was drafted. After basic training at Fort Dix, he moved about among several Army posts before taking the Flying Cadet Exam at Craig Field, in Selma, Ala. In a February 1942 letter to his aunt and uncle, Perrin wrote of the hazards of wartime flying.

“I’m quartered with three fellows who are really tops,” Perrin wrote. “This field is an advance school for R.A.F. pilots. On the whole, they’re regular eggs. They had to dig a friend of ours up the other day. He tangled with another plane and didn’t have enough altitude for his chute to crack after bailing out.”

Bailing out was something Perrin had ample time to do once his plane developed a problem on what should have been an uneventful 40-minute flight. According to Air Force crash reconstruction reports obtained by The Associated Press, the plane began leaking fuel from the pump-primer area on the right side of the engine, in front of the cockpit.

The cockpit began to fill with smoke and fuel vapor. Stanley Jones recalled looking up at the crippled fighter and seeing the pilot inside the cockpit, slightly above and to the right of the distinctive white star marking it as an American plane.

He did not see any motion in the cockpit but said he heard the engine alternately racing and decelerating. Jones theorized that the pilot was trying to control the damaged plane’s descent with intermittent bursts of the throttle.

He wondered if the pilot had been able to look down from about 1,000 feet to see Jones and his brother looking up at them.

From that height, there was still plenty of time to bail out of the flight and parachute to safety. But Perrin apparently chose to stay with the crippled plane and try to either get it to the nearest landing strip, or crash-land it in a field, Jones and Air Force officials agreed.

“Certainly, Capt. Perrin had an in-flight emergency, and he had ample time to get out,” said Air Force Lt. Col. Jeff Price, the assistant Air Attache at the U.S. Embassy in London and a veteran pilot who will speak at Perrin’s memorial service. “But the initial inclination of an aviator is to stay with the aircraft. If you still think it’s in landable shape, that’s what you try to do.

“In a P-51, you can crank back that canopy and jump out. It was a fairly commonplace event in that day,” Price said. “He was struggling to keep it aloft and find a place to set it down.”

What finally doomed Perrin and his plane was an explosion of fuel vapor that blew the cockpit canopy to pieces, either killing him immediately or knocking him unconscious before the plane crashed a few moments later, the investigation revealed.

“It was a very courageous decision to stay with his craft, to accept the worsening risk of an explosion in the cockpit rather than bail out,” Jones said. “He was skimming over houses and schools, people — untold others in the town, going about their daily business, kids walking home from school, and this then-pilotless plane, fuel-laden, would be crashing among them.

“I think it was a true moment of valor,” Jones said. “He was very brave and heroic in achieving that.”

John Pershing Perrin’s story became known in and around Stafford in the years after the war but was never widely publicized. Years passed, and the countryside around the crash site was developed into homes, businesses and industrial parks.

“It was not good for public morale to publicize accidents like this,” said Tom Doubtfire, 67, administrator of the local government in Creswell, the section of Stafford where Perrin’s plane crashed. “After the war, the British were reeling on their knees, and wanted to get up and get on with their lives, and events like this tended to be forgotten.”

It wasn’t until recently that Jones, who wrote an account of Pershing’s final flight for the BBC in 2005, and local officials in Stafford contacted the current owners of the crash site, Denver-based ProLogis and asked about establishing a memorial there. The real estate investment trust recently finished a 1 million-square-foot warehousing operation at the crash site, where remnants of the plane are buried.

And so, on July 4, representatives of the British and American governments, as well as several of Perrin’s relatives, will gather to dedicate the memorial.

The five-ton, 8-foot-tall monument will have the image of a Mustang etched into blue slate. On one side of the image will be an outline of the United States and an American flag; on the other, an outline of the U.K. and the Union Jack.

Helen Perrin of Brownwood, Texas, whose late husband, Donald, was Jack Perrin’s first cousin, will be among those in attendance.

“The heroes we kids had growing up during World War II were politicians and soldiers, people like Jack, who in a split second decided to give his own life and save that town,” she said. “Courage and sacrifice were the ideal. We’re all proud of him.”