Renovo native writes WWII book from great-uncle’s letters, journals
By Christopher Miller
Former Renovo resident Heath White has a story to tell – a story 78 years in the making.
“My job requires me to write a lot, so I am constantly pushing to write and explore…I am a history buff, but I did not want this to become work,” he told The Record in an interview last week. “World War II veterans are rapidly leaving us and sometime over the next few years we might be saying goodbye to the last of them, so now is the time to preserve (this) story for my family, and for history.
The family that Heath is referring to is his own, and the veteran was his Great Uncle 2nd Lt. Arthur “Bud” Pierson.
“He was my fathers, mothers, brother,” Heath stated, or his paternal grandmother’s brother, if you’re keeping track.
Prior to going to war, Bud worked for the family business. Old records show that Pierson’s Hardware was located at 616 Erie Avenue, about a block away from Maxwell’s Furniture store and the current site of the Greater Renovo Area Heritage Park headquarters.
“It was important to the family, it was their livelihood, it was their baby,” Heath chimed in during the interview. “In his letters home he would constantly ask about the business wondering if it was hard to get certain items due to war rations…in reality, if he would have survived the war, the business probably would have been handed down to him.”
Bud Pierson entered World War II in 1942 on the heels of the tragedy at Pearl Harbor. According to his obituary which ran in The Renovo Daily Record on July 7, 1943, he received his silver wings in California Aviation Cadet School and successfully completed an advanced flying school training course at Luke Field, Arizona.
“The training element that he undertook to be a pilot were astronomical, even by today’s standards,” Heath said. “The pace and what you were asked to do would blow your mind…in fact, there are 3 chapters of the book devoted to training alone!”
“Fifty percent of the men who entered into the Air Corps would become Air Cadets, which had 3 phases of training: Primary, Basic, and Advanced, each of which trained on different styles of aircraft,” Heath explained. “If you made it to Advanced like Uncle Bud did, it was incredibly stressful for the men who were already worried about “wash out,” which meant the person would fail out of training for any reason…they did not want to be a wash out.”
As Heath told it, “Uncle Bud was preparing for it (washing out) to happen…he ran into issues where he changed instructors late in training, they were all different and each had a different style of flying, they would all get more and more harder on the guys training, and if they did not like the way you learned or handled things, they would fail you right out.”
Thankfully for Bud, he earned his wings after Advanced training in Phoenix, Arizona, but that was not the end of his training. “He then went into transition training, to transition from learning how to fly and operate the small aircraft, to the big bombers which handled and flew much differently,” Heath explained. “People today do not understand that planes at the time were only 40 years old at the time – and bombing was at its infancy, bombers during World War I could only carry 1 at a time, so the strategy and how to fly these modern planes properly was something completely brand new to everybody.”
During the course of Bud’s time in the service, he kept journals and sent letters of his travels. One of the many interesting stories is how they ended up in Heath’s hands some 70+ years later.
“As a kid we lived in North Bend, and for a time we lived with my grandparents who had Uncle Bud’s personal effects tucked away in an old chest in the basement,” Heath explained. “My father used to tell me about Bud but he didn’t have all of the information, so we would go through the chest and filtered through old papers, pictures, letters, and journals – my dad knew that I had a lot of interest in it, but he always told me not to ask my grandmother about it because it was a touchy subject.”
The chest that Heath described was comparable to a treasure chest; the treasure being the family history that resided inside.
“I based this book off of the contents in the trunk and the little that my dad knew about him – after my dad died in 2006, I received all of this stuff, so I read letters, spread them all out on the floor and pieced it all out chronologically – it was therapeutic to me at the time,” said Heath. “Some of the letters were censored by the government, so I only had some of the story Uncle Bud was trying to tell, but luckily I also had 2 of his journals which filled some big gaps in the stories…I hit major breakthroughs when government information was declassified and I learned how to access it.”
When asked what the hardest thing was for Heath to find out, he replied instantly with, “trying to figure out what bomb group Bud was a part of, and what other groups and squads he was with.” After that, for Heath, the rest of the stories just started to fall into place.
“They would take off in B-24s to remote islands 8 or 10 hours away from Hawaii from their launch points, where here they would pick up fuel and bombs to get Bud close enough to enemy territory,” Heath said. “He died during the war, and his parents went to their graves not knowing what happened, or what he was doing.”
The obituary stated that the telegram received from The Adjutant General cited Bud’s death, “in the Pacific area as a result of an accident.” What happened to Uncle Bud is best left for the reader to find out in the book.
Learning about the man that Uncle Bud was through his service in the war has impacted Heath to a great extent.
“Bud was always seen almost as a celebrity of the family, he was always someone that I looked up to based on the sacrifices he made…it really makes you want to be a better person, and that’s what I hope people get out of reading this book,” Heath said. “There is so much we can learn from them (veterans) like the solidarity that our country had with World War II, it was admirable, but Bud gave up his life – there are several notations in this book where he was writing that he knew that he may not return alive.”
Oddly enough Heath had a short story to share about Bud’s death announcement which was shared in the 1943 Renovo Daily Record with another Renovo area native who also perished in the Pacific around the time of Bud’s death.
“Ironically enough, Bud ran into someone from Renovo, the gentleman (Cpl. Harry K. Stiner) who shares a page with him in the newspaper – as the story goes, they ran into each other on a refueling island in the Pacific which was probably about 3 blocks long, in the middle of the ocean, right before they perished.”
For additional information on Uncle Bud, Heath was able to turn to someone local in North Bend who knew him first-hand and personally. “I paid John Curcio a visit, he knew Bud, he spent time with him as a teenager in the pool halls in Renovo, so I was able to get John’s perspective on what Bud was like which filled in some gaps.”
“I still have a million questions for Uncle Bud if I could talk to him today,” said Heath. “But if I could ask him 1 thing, I would ask him if he could see into 2021 today, was what you did in the 1940s worth it?”
This article is running consecutively with what would have been Uncle Arthur “Bud” Pierson’s 100th birthday on Tuesday, September 28.
Air Corps Days: The Journey of a World War II Flyboy is available for purchase online at https://aircorpsdays.godaddysites.com/ by clicking the “Order Here” link. The book comes in paperback form for $19.95.
Book description from the website:
In the far-flung reaches of the Central Pacific during World War II, the odds were slim for the young and brazen American flyboys battling Japan. Among them was Renovo, Pennsylvania native Lt. Arthur “Bud” Pierson, a 21-year-old co-pilot and member of a B-24 Liberator bomber crew with the Seventh Air Force. In the spring of 1943, Pierson entered a desperate and dangerous struggle where distance, the elements, and blind chance were as deadly as the enemy.
Pulling from his personal journal and letters home, Air Corps Days, chronicles Pierson’s transformation from fledgling air cadet to combat pilot. A narrative blending his first-hand account with meticulous research, Air Corps Days is a comprehensive telling that takes readers inside the action as Pierson endures the doubts and trials of training before being thrust into enemy skies rife with fear, excitement, confusion and violence. All of this came at a time when a bomber boy’s chance of survival stood at just fifty percent.
Author Heath White is a native of Renovo, Pennsylvania, who holds a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication. He has worked in the public relations field for over a decade. An avid aficionado of all things history, Air Corps Days began as a research project to bring closure to a mysterious family tragedy from World War II that evolved into his first book. Heath resides near Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife, daughter and Chiweenie.
