Visit the National Genealogy Trails Site

McLean County Home

Visit the Illinois Genealogy Trails Site

WWI
The Genii of the Air
McLean County, Illinois
(Transcribed by: Teri Moncelle Colglazier)

Deeds which for sheer courage and daring, having stood out even against a background of man 's ceaseless heroism, marked the world 's greatest and most dreadful war. They have been those of the aviators, waging a warfare that was terrible and strange; rushing through the air at a hundred miles an hour, thousands of feet above the earth; menaced by bursting shells or the hawklike attacks of hostile craft; tossed about by the winds; in danger, always of some breakdown that might send them earthward inside the enemy's lines; yet braving each peril with a smile and joking even when in the presence of death. War has brought its heroes always but what can one say of these? Men who for hours at a stretch and in a plane that might be swaying in half a gale, ran a nerve racking gauntlet of shell fire, death that the enemy guns sends into the sky; a fate that creeps nearer daily as the gunners skill improves; that means first a crash and then a drop through a thousand feet or more of empty air, a crumpling of wings and a fluttering, helpless fall, leaving the sodden wreckage of a craft. When the hero paid the price of his heroism; when he flew out at dawn and failed to return, it was his friends and fellow airmen who remembered with the lingering affection of comradeship, the one who was gone. But though they have been shot at ceaselessly from the earth and attacked viciously by hostile planes, the airmen in the late war, did their work accurately and well. Not one of these men, flying over the enemy with death at his elbow, risked or lost his life in vain. And it is a satisfaction to those of McLean County to know that the contribution made of air men, led all the other counties of the state excepting Cook. Some made the Supreme sacrifice and met their fate fearlessly. The list of air heroes from McLean County is as follows: Nyle Balbach, Chenoa Halsey Bingham John Brokaw Edward Burtis, Hudson Jack Daniels *Louis E. Davis Claude Ferguson Mortimer Flynn Omar Gregory Archie Hansen Iredell Harrison Harold Heafer Denny E. Henderson, Towanda Reed B. Homey, Colfax Don Jones, Leroy Roy Lawson, Leroy David Lutz Harold Plummer Edward Powers Harry Riddle *Lee Roebuck Chester Twaddle Earl Vanordstrand Wm. Wise *Killed in fall of plane. [McLean County, Illinois, in the World War, 1917-1918; by Edward E. Pierson & Jacob Louis Hasbrouck c 1921]

HOME