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This Week in History
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West Palm Beach
World War II
Last week, we told you about Harold E. Watson of North Palm Beach, who died in 1994. Near the end of World War II, “Watson’s Whizzers” spirited several German jet planes out of Europe, advancing America’s understanding by years and keeping the items from the Japanese and the Soviet Union.
“People would meet us at places and ask us questions,” said widow Ruth, who lives at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens. “He was a great talker and loved storytelling.”
Watson worked for NATO in Europe in the 1950s, at one point overseeing atomic planning.
In 1953, he became head of the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. Watson retired as a major general in 1962. Among his honors: the Bronze Star and the Distinguished Flying Cross. Two years earlier, he’d created a foundation that raised $350,000 to rebuild Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Center in Virginia, where his disabled son was treated. The center’s student activities building was named for him in 1967.
Watson moved in the late 1970s to North Palm Beach’s Old Port Cove.
He got involved in several technologies, including solar heating. He also took a year off in 1978 to pilot his 44-foot yacht in the Caribbean.
“He was very humble and didn’t want to talk much about his experience,” pal Gordon Gaster, a semi-retired Merrill Lynch executive, said last month. “Tom Brokaw called it the greatest generation,” Gaster said from his home in Jupiter. “This is a fellow that I think deserved to be recognized in that group.”
Update: Our June 10 column on military bases prompted a call from Roger St. Martin of Lake Worth. He noted, correctly, that we omitted the Biltmore Hotel in Palm Beach. In 1943 and 1944, the U.S. Coast Guard used it as a training base for the SPARs, its women’s reserve. In 1945, it was the Navy Convalescent Hospital, with about 700 patients.
Harold E. Watson (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Toward the end of World War II, ‘Watson’s Whizzers’ went through Germany, Austria, Denmark and France and got at least a sample of nearly every German plane out of Europe so the parts could be scrutinized. The prime trophy: the Messerschmitt 262, the world’s first working fighter jet (above). In all, Watson’s group ferried 40 German planes, including nine Me-262s. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: World War II
Our recent column on David Mc-Campbell of Lake Worth, the Navy’s “Ace of Aces,” prompted a call from Gordon Gaster of Jupiter, about his friend Hal Watson.
When Harold E. Watson of Palm Beach Gardens died at 82 on Jan. 5, 1994, his passing went mostly unnoticed in this publication, if not elsewhere.
Such as in the halls of the U.S. Air Force, where all he did was sneak the world’s first fighter jet out of conquered Nazi Germany, out from under the nosy noses of the Soviet Union.
He was born in Connecticut in 1911. In 1933, in a bit of geographical irony, he joined that state’s famed Pratt & Whitney aircraft firm, now an institution in Palm Beach County. He later joined the Army Air Corps, which became the Air Force.
In April 1945, Germany’s surrender was imminent. The Allies feared the Third Reich had given Axis partner Japan secrets about its nascent jet and rocket technology.
Famed Army Gen. Hap Arnold turned to Watson.
In the next five months, “Watson’s Whizzers” went through Germany, Austria, Denmark, Austria and France. It got at least one sample of nearly every German plane, engine and part out of Europe and to Indiana, where parts were torn apart and scrutinized.
That “moved our research and development ahead rapidly four to five years,” Watson said in an October 1983 Palm Beach Post article.
The prime trophy: the Messerschmitt 262. Watson didn’t even have a pilot in Europe who could fly it. He had to set up a school with seven pilots and 10 mechanics who trained under two German pilots.
And he wrangled Willy Messerschmitt himself a trip to America.
In all, Watson’s group ferried 40 German planes, including nine Me-262s along with FW190s and Junker Ju88s. They were planes that didn’t go to Japan — which surrendered weeks later. And they didn’t go to the Russians.
One plane is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.
Next week: Retirement.
Harold Watson in 1983.
Tags: World War II
We’re continuing our military theme of the past few weeks. G. Paul Baker of suburban Lantana wrote May 10 to ask if we’ve written about the area’s military bases. Of course, we’ve described them extensively through the years. But it’s been a while, so let’s revisit a 2000 column:
America’s entry into World War II brought terror to South Florida; German U-Boats, unimpeded by an inadequate U.S. defense net, sank 24 ships, 16 of them from Cocoa Beach to Boca Raton between February and May 1942.
The Florida attacks killed hundreds of men and sent millions of dollars in cargo and oil to the bottom of the Atlantic. They also brought fear to civilians who worried about shells landing on them.
But the attacks helped lead to a buildup that was a boon to the state, still reeling from the real estate crash and the Depression. The number of military bases in Florida increased from eight in 1940 to 172 in 1943; the influx of soldiers who later returned to live contributed to the increase in Florida’s population from about 2 million in 1940 to nearly 3 million a decade later.
Boca Raton Army Air Field was a giant radar training base, with more than 100 bombers and about 16,000 troops. After it was returned to the state, part became Boca Raton Airport and the rest Florida Atlantic University; the school’s unusually wide parking lots are former runways.
A large part of Palm Beach International Airport was Morrison Army Air Field; about 45,000 fliers trained at or left from the field, and about 6,000 planes passed through in the eight months before D-Day.The Breakers in Palm Beach became Ream General Hospital. Germans worked in sugar fields at prisoner-of-war camps in Belle Glade and Clewiston. In southern Martin County, tens of thousands received secret radar training at the Southern Signal Corps School at Camp Murphy; the land later became Jonathan Dickinson State Park. Farther north, the Stuart and Fort Pierce municipal airports were used as military facilities, and the military established Hutchinson Island Navy Base and the Fort Pierce Amphibious Training Base.
Patients are entertained on Nov. 26, 1943, at Ream General Hospital at the Breakers in Palm Beach. The resort was used as an Army hospital from December 1942 to mid-1944, according to the state Department of Veteran’s Affairs. (Palm Beach Post file photo)
Tags: airports, hospitals, World War II
Last week we honored our area’s military dead. That gives us a natural transition to this week’s column. David McCampbell, considered the top Navy fighter pilot ever, spent most of his life in Palm Beach County.
McCampbell died in 1996. The terminal at Palm Beach International Airport is named for him.
During seven months in 1944, he notched 34 kills and destroyed 24 planes on the ground in the battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf.
His nine kills in 90 minutes at Leyte Gulf set a record in aerial warfare history for a single mission that is believed to stand today. He is the nation’s top Navy ace and fourth-leading ace, behind three Army Air Force pilots.
About a decade before his death, in July 1987, a staff historian for the Naval Institute came from Annapolis, to record a series of interviews covering his entire life and background.
The raw transcript runs 650 pages, according to Sue Sweeney, of the Naval Institute Foundation:
“McCampbell’s is one of nearly 70 histories currently in varying stages of completion. Our first priority is to record the interviews, capturing the story for posterity.
“In a perfect world, we would then be able to line up funding to finish all the labor-intensive follow-up work — transcribing, proofreading, footnoting, adding an annotated index, copying, and binding the volume — while the interviewee is still alive to see the completed history.
“To our regret, we were not able to accomplish this before we lost Captain McCampbell.
“If, as we hope, the Naval Institute can line up the necessary support in the next few months, we believe we can finish the work and release the McCampbell history by year’s end.
“Because the Naval Institute is a nonprofit organization, our 41-year-old history program must rely on gift income to accomplish projects.”
If you want to honor McCampbell by helping the Naval Institute finish the work of telling his story, contact Sweeney at ssweeney@usni.org or (410) 295-1054.
David McCampbell recorded 34 kills and destroyed 24 more planes on the ground in seven months in 1944. (Navy photo)
Tags: airports, place names, World War II
Memorial Day is a time to honor the many brave Americans killed while serving in the military.
L.J. Parker, archivist at the Lake Park Historical Society and a frequent contributor to Post Time, points out two residents honored with road names: Ellison Wilson and Donald Ross.
Forgotten, Parker notes, was one more from Lake Park: Richard van Munster.
The Palm Beach High grad worked in his family’s construction firm before joining in March 1942 at Morrison Field, now Palm Beach International Airport.
He was a second lieutenant and a B-24 Liberator copilot with the 787th Bomber Squadron, 466th Bomber Group, when his plane went down in bad weather in the English Channel Aug. 12, 1944. He’d been in England all of two weeks.
Munster was seen, injured, sitting on the wing of the plane, but was not seen again.
His marker is at the American cemetery in Margraten, Netherlands. He received the Purple Heart and the Air Medal.
He never saw his son, Richard, born in March 1945.
Richard, a longtime Riviera Beach commercial fisherman, now lives in Panacea, in Florida’s Panhandle.
He suspects some city leaders might have wanted to name something for Richard but that his grandfather probably declined.
“I’d like to see it. I really would,” Richard said. “He was a fisherman, too.”
Lt. Munster’s brother, Walter, who also served in World War II, later lived in Coral Gables and died at 95 in December.
Ellison Wilson, a member of the family who founded Lake Park, was a gunner on a tank in the Third Armored Division in the Battle of the Bulge. He was killed when it struck a land mine.
Donald Alexander Ross, the first Lake Park resident killed in World War II, died on Dec. 18, 1944, in the Battle of the Bulge. He was the son of Marjorie Ross, a longtime principal of Lake Park Elementary School.
Many presume, wrongly, that the road was named for famed golf course architect Donald Ross, especially since it runs near Seminole Golf Club in North Palm Beach, one of Ross’ most famous courses.
Richard van Munster in a photo taken in April 1944. His plane went down in the English Channel on Aug. 12 that year. Munster’s marker is at the American cemetery in Margraten, Netherlands. (Special to The Palm Beach Post)
Tags: death, place names, World War II
