In October of 1941, Elmer Probst Jr. began college courses at the University of Missouri in Columbia but only two months into his studies, on Dec 7, the Pearl Harbor attack made it apparent that military service would determine the direction of his life He volunteered into the Army Air Corps Reserve program. Visualizing an air war, the authorities advised him to continue in college awaiting development of an aircraft training program.
Junior had enrolled for his second semester in January 1942 when he was called into active duty and reported to Jefferson Barracks for initial training.following which he and hundreds of other classification center pre-cadet trainees received five months of college training detachment, including flight training in Piper Cub airplanes. During this time he met and fell in love with a coed at MU, Miss Virginia Stuttman.
His group of cadets were sent to San Antonio to determine the air duty for which they would be trained and he was selected for radio training at Scott Field, Illinois. On Christmas Eve, he and Virginia were married, knowing deployment was imminent.
Upon graduation from radio school in the spring of 1943 he entered gunnery school near Yuma, Arizona, receiving the rank of corporal and the title Radio Operator Mechanic. He would be receiving flight crew training for heavy bomber planes, B17 or B24. He was assigned to a B24 crew which was flown to Florida to await deployment, destination unknown.
On Thanksgiving 1943, the crew was in flight when the pilot-commander opened their orders. They would be stationed at an airbase near Calcutta, India. Their B24 was equipped with guns and turrets for protection and the bomb bay loaded with stretchers for transporting wounded or downed flyers on missions from the Philippines that were rescued on China’s mainland. Their crew would return them to the Philippine Island headquarters for debriefing and then ferry them to their home bases. In between these missions they served as passenger or cargo carriers over what was then India and Nationalist China.
The European axis had been conquered by Allied forces by then but the Japanese/China/Burma/India theatre would require years to conclude using conventional war tactics. President Truman therefore resorted to atomic bombs and within weeks Juniors crew was landing in parts of China which had been held by Japanese forces. They would carry officers in on their missions to make demobilization arrangements with Japanese commanders, accepting surrender of the enemy forces.
When this mission was completed, When Junior was promoted to sergeant and crew returned to the States in a war-torn transport craft by way of Northern Africa and Brazil, north toward Florida, landing for lunch on the island of Jamaica on Thanksgiving Day, exactly a year from having stopped there on the way overseas.
Junior returned to his wife of a year in Columbia, where he resumed his studies and completed his bachelor's degree in 1948 and accepted a contract to teach vocational agriculture in Ellsinore. The couple had been blessed with the birth of their only child, Virginia Marilyn, and they made their home in Ellsinore for the next three years.
I would love to hear from any of their friends or Elmer Junior’s former students! Email me at maggie.adair@icloud.com.
Maggie Adair is a native of Handy near the Oregon-Ripley County line, about eight miles east of Wilderness. Eighth in the family of Elmer and Catherine Probst, she left at 17 for college in Kansas City where she married, raised a family and pursued a varied career. Always maintaining her roots in Handy, she is now retired and manages to reside in both places.
