Leon R. Vance Jr.

Leon Robert Vance Jr. left Enid, Oklahoma, for the Army Air Forces and a heavy-bombardment cockpit. On June 5, 1944, as a lieutenant colonel and command pilot with the 489th Bombardment Group, he led a formation against coastal positions near Wimereaux, France. Antiaircraft fire wrecked the airplane, killed the pilot, and nearly took his right foot. The Medal of Honor citation is the public record of that run, the order to bail out, and the ditching in the Channel. Air-sea rescue pulled him from the water. That morning is a closed combat file.

The unfinished file is the flight home. On July 26, 1944, still wounded, he boarded an Air Transport Command C-54 at Keflavík, Iceland, bound for Stephenville, Newfoundland, and then the United States. The transport did not arrive. Missing Air Crew Report 15544 is the Army Air Forces paper. Radio contact stopped over the North Atlantic. Searches found no accepted wreckage and no identified remains.

He is named on the Tablets of the Missing at Cambridge American Cemetery. An Oklahoma airfield later took the name. Those are public honors. They are not a grave. This page will not print Atlantic rumors or invent a last conversation in the cabin. It will say a Medal of Honor command pilot was put on a transport that did not come in, and that an administrative finding of death is not a recovery.

No rights-safe official portrait is hosted here. The documentation is a missing C-54, a named passenger list, and an ocean that did not give him back.