Shared by Joseph and Ruby’s daughter, 2026.
Joseph Clair Van Slyke, called Jacy, was Dodie’s son and Joseph’s nephew. Like his mother he was very small, and that is how he came to be a tail gunner.
When the United States entered the Second World War there was a great rush to build bombers, and, as so often happens when things are done in a hurry, mistakes were made. On the B-17, the tail gunner’s position at the back of the plane turned out to be too small for a man of average size. So the Army Air Corps put out notices around the country looking for men of small stature to serve as B-17 tail gunners. Jacy applied and was accepted.
In January 1945 his plane was hit by enemy fire over a body of water in the Philippines. The pilots parachuted to safety, but the rest of the men aboard, Jacy among them, were killed. He is buried in a U.S. military cemetery in the Philippines.
What the records show
Military and cemetery records add detail, and differ in places from the story as the family remembers it.
Joseph C. Van Slyke was born in Washington, D.C., on January 17, 1921, and enlisted on April 27, 1943, at Fort Myer, Virginia, when he was working as a lineman. He served as a corporal and engineer/gunner with the 866th Bomb Squadron of the 494th Bomb Group (Heavy), which flew B-24 Liberators, not B-17s, from Angaur in the Palau Islands. The B-24’s tail position was famously cramped too.
On January 25, 1945, his B-24M, serial 44-40355, set out with a crew of ten to bomb Batangas in the Philippines and crashed in shallow water off Biliran Island. Nine of the ten were killed. The only survivor was a second lieutenant who bailed out before the crash; the pilot was among the dead. The crew list compiled by a volunteer researcher names another man as tail gunner, so Jacy may have been flying in a different gun position that day.
He was 24. He was awarded the Purple Heart and is buried in the Manila American Cemetery, Plot D, Row 12, Grave 142.
His sister Gretchen was delighted when a son in the next generation of the family was named Jacy after him.
Read on: Dodie and Her Little Brother · Gretchen and the Mail Boy
