1942–1945
Rev William Richard Miessler had two sons, and both of them went into the Eighth Air Force.documented They were in England at the same time, in bomb groups forty miles apart. One of them flew. One of them cooked. The one who flew is still missing.
A distinction worth making
It is easy to read bomb group and picture everyone in an aeroplane. A heavy bomb group ran to roughly two thousand men and only a few hundred of them were aircrew. This page had that wrong at first — it put both brothers in the air — and the family corrected it. Richard Norbert was a cook. The distinction is not a demotion; it is most of what an air force actually is.
2LT Wilfred Eugene Miesslerdocumented
367th Bomber Squadron, 306th Bomb Group (Heavy)
- Born
- 20 June 1922, Mount Leonard, Saline County, Missouri
- Died
- 9 March 1945, At sea, aged 22
- Buried
- No grave. Tablets of the Missing, Cambridge American Cemetery, Coton, Cambridgeshire, England
- Memorial
- Find a Grave 56292486
Richard Norbert's younger brother, and the one of the two who actually flew. He was a commissioned officer with the 367th Bomber Squadron, 306th Bomb Group at Thurleigh; his brother was ground crew with the 303rd at Molesworth, forty miles away.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
He had earned the Air Medal with three Oak Leaf Clusters before he was lost. That award is given for meritorious achievement in aerial flight, so there was a long run of missions behind him.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
He died on 9 March 1945, two months before the war in Europe ended. The family account is that it was a training accident, and the official record agrees with it: the 1946 Army casualty list for Dickinson County, Kansas classifies him Died Non-Battle. Non-battle is what a training loss is called.<span class="tag med">family account, corroborated</span>
He was never recovered. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency still lists him unaccounted for; his position is recorded only as the North Sea or the Tyrrhenian. Training flights over open water were routine and so were losses on them.<span class="tag high">documented</span>
The brother who came back
Richard Norbert Miessler served on the ground with the 303rd Bomb Group at Molesworth — a cook, by the family's account. Around 8,900 men passed through that group during the war and close to 900 of them were killed; the ones who died were the ones who flew. He finished as a sergeant, married Althea Marie Finke, moved to California's Central Valley, and died in 2007 at eighty-nine. They share a plot at the San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery.documented
The card
The most ordinary document in this whole record is the most affecting one. Wilfred's 1942 draft registration has him living at the YMCA in Beloit, Wisconsin, working for the Fairbanks-Morse company. In the box for a contact person he wrote his father's name and the town of the church:
Reverend William R. Miessler, Deshler, Nebraska.
US WWII Draft Cards, Young Men, 1940–1947
That line is also the hardest evidence in this record. It confirms both the father–son link and the Deshler posting from a completely different class of document than the congregational history that says the same thing. Two independent sources, no overlap.
How the family account closed a gap
This record originally flagged Wilfred's classification as a loose end. The 1946 Army casualty list for Dickinson County, Kansas puts him down as Died Non-Battle, and that looked strange against a decorated airman lost at sea two months before the end of the war — if you assume he was on a combat mission.
He wasn't. The family account is that he died in a training accident, and that is precisely what the non-battle classification means. The document and the family memory were never in conflict; the reading was wrong.family account, corroborated
It is worth saying what that means about him. He had flown enough missions to earn the Air Medal three times over, survived those, and was killed on a flight that wasn't one.documented