By Andrew C. Martel
Staff writer
HIGH FALLS - Donna Moore only knew her uncle, Robert Hoyle Upchurch, from a photograph in the hallway of her parent's home.
After his plane went missing somewhere over China on Oct. 6, 1944, "Uncle Hoyle" was mentioned only at the occasional family reunion or holiday gathering. He was a mystery to the younger generations, Moore said.
On Saturday, Moore watched as 2nd Lt. Robert Hoyle Upchurch, the family legend, was laid to rest beside his parents in the cemetery behind High Falls United Methodist Church.
Through the service and her family, Moore finally got to meet Uncle Hoyle the prankster, the doting older brother and the selfless soldier.
"It's made him so much more real to us," Moore said. "He's not just a picture anymore."
About 300 people packed the sanctuary or sat outside listening to the service over a speaker system. The mourners included dozens of relatives who never knew Upchurch personally, delegates from the Chinese Embassy, fellow World War II veterans and members of the 23rd Fighting Group, the Flying Tigers, Upchurch's unit.
The Flying Tigers later saluted Upchurch with a four-plane flyover, screeching across the gray sky in a missing man formation. The copper and bronze urn containing his remains stood on a table before a tombstone that read "Home at Last."
Upchurch's body was found last year in a grave in a Chinese park. The tombstone there simply read "American Pilot." A POW-MIA task force identified his remains by comparing them to DNA samples collected from Upchurch family members.
When the match was made, nephew Dale Upchurch said, he started contacting the family to plan a homecoming for a hero they had missed for 61 years.
Hoyle had 10 brothers and sisters, all of whom are deceased. Over the years, family members have moved all over the country, and many had never met each other.
But Dale Upchurch knew that a funeral could provide closure that his grandparents, Charity Bessie and Charles Upchurch, had desperately wanted. Long after Hoyle disappeared, his mother wrote letters to Army officials seeking some reassurance that her son might be alive. Both parents died within four months of each other in 1954 and 1955.
Dale knows what that feels like. Nine years ago this week, he and his wife lost a daughter.
This week, members of the Upchurch family flew in from California, Michigan and Florida. They wore name tags at the funeral to recognize each other.
"I'm just so proud," Dale Upchurch said later. "There probably never would have been the likelihood of us all being able to get together again."
A few rows behind the family, members of the Flying Tigers sat wearing their olive green uniforms. As fellow fighter pilots, they felt a bond with Upchurch, said Col. Warren Henderson, the group commander.
Upchurch's funeral reminded today's Flying Tigers that their unit's history and legacy is greater than any single war or career, Henderson said. The group followed the same principles when it was in Afghanistan earlier this year as it did when Upchurch was in China, Henderson said.
Upchurch loved the rush of flying, but he was also realistic about the dangers. His great-niece, Jody Gollan, read a selection of his letters home, in which he often worried about upsetting his mother with bad news. He wouldn't spare his younger sister, Elma, though.
"Elma...if I'm shipped oversees as a pilot or a gunner, I'm going to live six months," he wrote in 1943. He added that the typical unit of 25 or 30 pilots saw a complete turnover within a year, with almost all the original men either wounded, captured or killed.
The sentiments were familiar to Max Noftsger, who sat a row behind Henderson and the rest of the Flying Tigers. Noftsger, 86, was a fighter pilot in China during World War II, though he didn't know Upchurch. He was shot down once over China and still has a scar on his head to remind him of the day.
Though the Upchurch family has little more than a tombstone and some pictures to remind them of Uncle Hoyle, Moore said she can see many of his characteristics in her relatives.
Ashley Upchurch agreed. The 16-year-old plays soccer, and her great-uncle's descriptions of the exhilaration of flight is just how she feels in the heat of competition.
Ashley said she didn't realize how important the news was that her uncle had been rediscovered.
"I didn't grasp how big a situation it was," she said.
She looked around at the crowds, the young soldiers chatting with the old veterans, and the relatives she had never met.
"Today has made me understand how awesome it is."
Staff writer Andrew C. Martel can be reached at martela@fayettevillenc.com or at 323-4848, ext. 372.
© 2006 The Fayetteville (NC) Observer
WWII pilotÕs body returned after 61 years
Chinese villagers recovered remains of U.S. flyer in 1944
HIGH FALLS - The funeral service for Lt. Robert Hoyle Upchurch on Saturday will carry more significance than a World War II Flying Tiger being brought home to rest after his plane crashed into a mountain in China on Oct. 6, 1944.
To the pilotÕs descendants, the deeper meaning is one of international significance.
"I cannot honestly think of another situation between two governmentÕs people that transcends so much goodwill from the common people all the way up to the highest levels of governmentsÕ relations with each other, that can be more rewarding than the willingness of one country to return anotherÕs son," Dale Upchurch, Hoyle UpchurchÕs nephew, wrote to Lian Xie, executive director of the North Carolina China Center.
Lian Xie, a professor at North Carolina State University, and several other Chinese-American community leaders will represent ChinaÕs Hunan Province at the service. Hoyle Upchurch has been buried in the province and his grave tended since 1944.
People held funeral
Last May, in the village of Guidong, Hunan Province, a team from the POW/MIA Accounting Command learned of the grave, marked with a cross on which was engraved in Chinese, "American Pilot." There they met Huang, now 79 years old, who was a little boy in October 1944 but remembers that the villagers walked a long distance to recover the body of an American pilot whose plane had crashed into a mountain.
Huang told them the badly damaged body was wrapped in red cloth and buried in a wooden coffin. The people said prayers and drank rice wine in a ceremonial funeral service. The grave was kept up, and in 1990, the area around the Santi Mountain where Upchurch was buried was turned into a park.
Dale Upchurch, who lives in Jacksonville, Fla., and his aunt, Lola Upchurch, who lives in Greensboro, have said the family will find a way to thank the village of Guidong for their respect and kindness.
ItÕs a big family. Upchurch, who was 21 when he died, had 10 brothers and sisters. He was the second youngest. The Upchurch family grew up in the High Falls community in Moore County, but the nieces and nephews and their children are scattered all over the world now. When the word came that Uncle Hoyle may have been found, the word spread by telephone and e-mail. For six anxious months, they waited for the results of DNA testing of female family members to confirm positively that the remains were Uncle Hoyle.
In a telephone interview, Dale Upchurch said two older cousins will be the only people at the funeral who knew Uncle Hoyle.
"To us younger cousins who were born after the war, Uncle Hoyle was this mythical uncle that we all knew about Š that he was a pilot who crashed in China and was never found. He was very much a part of every family gathering," he said.
Hoyle UpchurchÕs parents died in the mid 1950s. Lola Upchurch, who married the youngest son, Charles, said her mother-in-law never accepted the fact that he was dead.
In his letters to his family, UpchurchÕs love of flying was obvious, but he was also aware of his chances of survival. In one letter, he matter-of-factly commented on the high turnover of pilots and asked the siblings to protect his mother from knowing just how dangerous his job was, but he said he was proud to be in the 23rd Fighter Group.
He wrote: "ItÕs the best outfit over here. It was the one I was hoping for all the time and was lucky enough to get in. I was never happier in my life . . . Goodnight all, Hoyle."
When he learned his first overseas assignment would be to India, he wrote a sibling, "Remember, donÕt tell mom anything about it . . . I will write Mom after I get across."
In a surviving letter fragment to his sister, he wrote in a steady, neat hand, "Tell her (mother) not to get too scared because my job is big enough now flying a hot pursuit ship. The Major told us yesterday that we were God-chosen boys . . ."
While only a couple of cousins actually remember Hoyle Upchurch, the dozens of others who have kept his memory alive see his return as the end of one chapter in their lives and the beginning of a relationship with a village far away.
Expressed gratitude
Dale Upchurch said he has spoken to Hu Lihua at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., to express his familyÕs gratitude and respect for the dignity, respect and moral embrace the people gave his uncle. The family would like to meet Huang and thank him in person.
High Falls United Methodist Church will seat 125 people. ThatÕs barely enough seats for the relatives and dignitaries who will include Xie and his delegation, Rep. Howard Coble, Sen. Harris Blake and Col. Warren Henderson from Fort Bragg. For the private family service inside the church, Coble and Blake will present citations from Moore County and the state Legislature. Dale Upchurch will read a letter from Gov. Mike Easley. There will be special music and speakers.
The service will conclude with taps, a 21-gun salute and a Missing Man Formation fly-over by UpchurchÕs 23rd Fighter Group, the Flying Tigers, now stationed at Pope Air Force Base.
Dale Upchurch said the family has been touched by the response from everyone who has heard the story of his uncle. His homecoming has brought them all into closer touch with each other and set their sights on a fitting thank-you for the village of Guidong.
A family at rest
After 60 years of painful wondering, relatives can hold a funeral for their World War II hero.
By TOM BERG
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
HUNTINGTON BEACH - It's been one of those weeks for retiree Barbara Rowland, 67, what with a trip back East, a funeral to attend and a host of relatives to meet for the first time.
She keeps misplacing paperwork, forgetting what she was about to say, and apologizing over and over - though there is no need. You'd be confused too if the person you were burying died 61 years ago. And for all those years, you had no idea what happened to him.
"Shock," she said Wednesday, describing the moment she heard the news about Uncle Hoyle. "It took a while to actually comprehend it. It was just, 'OK, tell me something else,' because everyone had come to terms with it and moved on with our lives, then out of left field comes this shocking news."
The news? Uncle Hoyle's remains were found. In a remote region of China. And flown home in an urn this week to the small mill town of High Falls, N.C.
Though questions remain about his death - and discovery - the small-town boy who died at 21 will be given a hero's burial today.
He'll be lauded by a governor, a member of Congress and Chinese dignitaries; given a military flyover and a 21-gun salute, and he will unite some 40 long-lost relatives who have never before gathered in one place.
All this for a man who once wrote home that should he die, "It won't be bad because no one is depending on me. I will be just a thing of the past in a year or so if I am bumped off."
Little did he know. How could he?
THE SCHOOLBOY
This much is known about the death of 2nd Lt. Robert Hoyle Upchurch: His P-40N Warhawk crashed into the side of mountain in China, probably on June 6, 1944.
It was his first mission flying with the 23rd Fighter Group, more famously known as the Flying Tigers, whose mission was to protect China from Japanese air attacks during World War II.
It's unclear whether Upchurch got into a dogfight or simply got disoriented in bad weather.
The rest of the 74th fighter squadron turned back. The last time Upchurch was seen alive, he was climbing through clouds close to a mountain 90 miles west of his base in Kanchow.
He was listed as missing in action and presumed dead for nearly six decades. His parents died without knowing. His 10 brothers and sisters died without knowing. And presumably his nephews, nieces and their children would've died, too, without knowing the outcome of Upchurch's crash if it wasn't for a 10-year-old Chinese schoolboy who grew up remembering something about the summer of 1944. If it wasn't for Huang.
LAST IN LINE
The old snapshot is ripped and taped now. There's a big sky, a white fence and a goldilocked little girl who looks antsy beside her uncle, who stares at the camera with a look both cocky and casual. The stare of a fighter pilot.
The little girl is Barbara Rowland, one of two surviving relatives of Hoyle Upchurch's who met him. She was 4 in the photo and just 6 when Uncle Hoyle's plane crashed. But she vividly recalls the day her mother - Hoyle's sister, Marie - got the news.
"There was a knock on the door," Rowland said. "I remember her opening the door and receiving the telegram, and then she just starting bawling hysterically."
The rest of her life, Marie Rowland would cry every time she heard Bing Crosby sing "I'll Be Home for Christmas."
"I don't think my mother was ever the same after that," Rowland said.
For years, family members were left to wonder: Could he have somehow survived? Might he still be alive? Somehow? Somewhere?
"You assume he's dead, but there's that little, tiny thing telling you, 'Well, maybe there a small possibility that he did have amnesia or he did get taken somewhere,'" Rowland said. "You just really don't want to believe he's dead."
After a while, however, what you want most is to know the truth. And that's what Rowland got last June when Aunt Irene Upchurch called saying the Army had found something.
They'd found what they thought were the remains of Uncle Hoyle.
COLD CASE RESOLVED
There are 88,000 cold cases on file in the Pearl Harbor office where analyst Aaron Lehl works - all veterans missing in action, from German farm fields, Vietnamese rice paddies, the remotest regions of Papua, New Guinea. Lehl works on as many as 100 cases at a time for the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.
In late 2003, he received an e-mail from an American serviceman who'd returned to China and learned of a Flying Tiger pilot possibly buried in Hunan province. Lehl also received a Beijing Today newspaper article describing the same thing with a photograph of what looked like a few nuts and bolts. Lehl scanned a photo and sent it to the curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.
The curator replied: One of those pieces of wreckage was an elevator trim wheel from a P-40.
"We're looking at a P-40 pilot," Lehl said.
He built a spreadsheet of more than 80 possible pilots, took out a map of China, and started reading military reports until one matched. His top candidate? A young pilot by the name of Robert Upchurch.
BUTTONS AND BONES
Yunjun Huang has lived for 79 years in the Bamian Mountain region of Guidong County in the Hunan Province.
When members of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command arrived in May 2005, Huang told them about the summer of 1944. Men from his village had carried a young pilot down from the mountains, wrapped him in red cloth and buried him beside the Wenfeng Pagoda - an ancient, 115-foot umbrella-shaped tower from the Ming Dynasty. The funeral, which included prayers and rice wine, stuck with Huang over the years, as he would occasionally visit the site.
He led investigators to the grave, where they unearthed a casket bearing several bone fragments, buttons, coins and other small parachute pieces.
Lehl could now close one of 88,000 cold cases on the command's list. If he could find the family.
HOME AT LAST
An e-mail arrived at High Falls United Methodist Church in High Falls, N.C., last year, asking the new pastor if he knew the family of Robert Hoyle Upchurch. The pastor didn't - until an elderly parishioner walked him down to the fellowship hall and directed his gaze.
"There was my uncle's picture hanging on the wall," said Dale Upchurch, 48, of Jacksonville, Fla., whose father was a brother to Uncle Hoyle.
In a small town, news travels fast. Nieces called other nieces who called cousins who called brothers and wives until all 12 nephews and nieces of Uncle Hoyle were beside themselves.
"He grew to be this mythical hero in our family," said Dale Upchurch. "He was talked about at every gathering."
He wishes that even one of Uncle Hoyle's siblings or parents could've heard this news. "They all passed away without ever having known anything."
Today's funeral, however, won't be so much a goodbye as a homecoming, Rowland said before flying east from Orange County. Uncle Hoyle's gravestone at the old family plot already has been re-engraved, from "Missing in Action" to "Home at Last."
"A friend said, 'It's so sad,'" Rowland said. "I said, no it was sad when he was reported missing in action, and nobody knew what happened to him. I feel this is almost a celebration because he's finally home."
© 2005 The Orange County Register