U.S. military pilots endured hardship before being murdered

Editor’s note: U.S. Air Force veteran and author Craig A. Thorson of Fort Worth, Texas wrote a feature called “A Turn for the Worse” about the harrowing events surrounding the disappearance and death of Frederick Waterhouse and Cecil W. Connolly for the March 2019 issue of Aviation History on the 100-year anniversary of their deaths. The bulk of the information for this story comes from Thorson’s account.

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 “Huh, I wonder who he was,” pondered an unidentified boy as he stood above a small, not particularly remarkable granite headstone.

 The kid, maybe 9 or 10, was part of a large group of volunteers who gathered at Hillcrest Cemetery in Weiser on Friday, May 27 to place flags on the graves of U.S. military servicemembers in observance of Memorial Day.

 “Yeah, I don’t know,” said a girl, about the same age, as she stopped to take a look.

 The boy gently pushed a small flag into the ground, its dimensions almost perfectly proportional in relation to the headstone. The two kids, who probably have never known starvation or dehydration or fear of death, moved on slowly, their gaze still fixed curiously on the site as they walked away.

The men

 Frederick B. Waterhouse, 22, was born on Oct. 1, 1896 in Weiser, Idaho. In early 1917, during World War I, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and became a private at the Signal Corps Aviation School in Rockwell Field near Coronado, Calif.

 After completing flight training and being commissioned a second lieutenant, Waterhouse joined the 36th Aero Squadron at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas, while it trained for deployment to France. 

 On Sept. 19, 1917, the 36th joined the American Expeditionary Forces in France, where advanced training continued at the AEF base at Issoudun. It is unknown if Waterhouse deployed with the squadron, and the war ended before it ever saw combat. He was transferred back to Rockwell Field in December 1918.

 Born in Oklahoma on Nov. 8, 1897, Cecil W. Connolly was an Army brat whose father was a career military musician. Like Waterhouse, Connolly joined or was drafted into the Army and trained as a pilot, earning his commission as a second lieutenant on April 3, 1918. 

 In October 1918, he was sent to New York to attend radio operators’ school at Columbia University and was likely there when World War I ended on Nov. 11, 1918. He was stationed at Penn Field near Austin in February 1919, and the following month joined Waterhouse and other avia¬tors as members of the 9th Corps Observation Squadron at Rockwell Field under the command of Major Henry “Hap” Arnold, future general of both the Army and the Air Force. Their mission was to patrol the U.S. border with Mexico.

The plane

 The airmen flew surplus DH-4s and Curtiss JN-4s, both bi-planes, while patrolling the border with Mexico, a country that had been embroiled by a violent revolution since 1910. Radios could only transmit code. Compasses were unreliable, maps were sketchy, and the border country was dry, rugged, bleak, and sparsely populated.

They got lost

 On Aug. 18, 1919, Waterhouse and Connelly took off from San Diego after a stop in Yuma, Ariz. in their DH-4 and made it as far as Calexico, Calif. before the spark plugs in their plane began to foul due to rain showers they experienced while in Arizona.

 They were forced to land in a field, which damaged both wheels. A mechanic and two wheels were dispatched from Rockwell by car and two days later they began their journey back to San Diego and were never seen again.

 A witness later reported seeing an airplane enter a rainstorm near Jacumba, Calif., and emerge flying roughly southeast. 

 Upon entering the storm, it is evident the westbound aviators slowly and inadvertently turned southeast. After exiting the rain, they either chose not to believe their compass or the instrument had already failed. Among the messages the pair would later scrawl into the fuselage of their aircraft was one by Waterhouse stating: “Hit rainstorm, got lost. Hit coast in 1 hr. 30 min. Turned to our right [and] flew up coast for 2 hrs. 35 min. Didn’t see a sign of civilization all the way.”

 The pair clearly believed they were flying north along the coast. After flying two and a half hours in the wrong direction, their fuel ran out and were forced to land on a deserted stretch of white sand beach about 20 miles north of the coastal settlement of Bahia de los Angeles.

 Now overdue and missing, Maj. Arnold immediately launched air patrols in addition to ground expeditions in cooperation with Mexican authorities.

 Meanwhile, at Connolly and Waterhouse’s encampment, conditions were bleak.