Resident visits the grave of hero she once knew

NEWS PHOTOS • LINDA WAN
  Isabel Reade recently traveled to England for the groundbreaking of the American Air Museum and visited the grave of an American war hero who was her one-time dance partner during World War II. 

  A photo of Maj. Joe Shaffer, World War II fighter pilot.

Resident visits the grave of hero she once knew

By WILLIAM B. TREML
NEWS STAFF REPORTER

Isabel Reade, a longtime Ann Arbor resident and a retired professor of Spanish at Eastern Michigan University, recently returned from a bittersweet-journey to England where she visited a hero’s grave and witnessed the ground-breaking for a $17 museum honoring American airmen.

The museum, to be built at Duxford, 50 miles north of London, will house a collection of historic U.S. aircraft and record the role American air power played both in Europe and in other areas during air combat.

“It was very impressive and appropriate,” Reade said of the ground-breaking. “When the museum is completed in two years, it will be a fitting tribute to all the airmen who flew from England during the war.”

Reade is a founding member of the international campaign to raise funds for the museum. More than 50,000 Americans have contributed to the campaign, and the Lottery Fund of the United Kingdom’s National Heritage Memorial Fund has donated more than $10 million toward construction costs.

Following the ceremony, Reade visited the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial, a massive burial ground. It is here that more than 3,000 U.S. war dead are buried, including Maj. Joe Shaffer, who in 1942 became the first American pilot to shoot down a German aircraft.

When Reade was Shaffer’s blind date at the wedding of a cousin more than 50 years ago, she had no way of knowing that her dance partner that night was tied to a scrap of World War II history. Reade was maid of honor at the ceremony, performed near Westover Field in western Massachusetts.

“Joe turned up as my escort at the wedding reception,” Reade recalls. “It was a typical blind date. We had never met. But Joe was charming, articulate, a handsome Californian. And a fighter pilot to boot. I remember we went dancing. We had a good time.”

The conversation never turned to war, and Shaffer did not mention that a year earlier he had shot down a German bomber off Iceland.

“It wasn’t that great a thing,” Shaffer said later. “There were two planes in the air. It was me or the German. I was just lucky to get in the first burst.”

On Aug. 14, 1942, ironically, the day and date when World War II would end three years later, Shaffer was on his first combat patrol off Reykjavik, Iceland, when he fired at a four-engine Focke Wulf, apparently on a reconnaissance flight. Lt. Elza Shahan, a member of Shaffer’s fighter squadron, piloting a P-38, joined the attack, and the heavy aircraft plunged into the sea.

The kill was recorded as the first by American pilots in the European Theater in World War II. Shaffer and Shahan were awarded the Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross for their action.

All this was unknown to 20-year-old Isabel Reade that night when she went dancing with Joe Shaffer.

“It was wartime, and no one, particularly the pilots, talked about anything like that,’’she says. “It was a matter of national security.”

Reade discovered Shaffer’s heroism almost by accident two years ago. Her cousin, the former Sally Weadock, and her husband, John Gaff, were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary at their home in Idaho. Reade was to be a guest at the celebration. En route, she stopped off in Colorado Springs to visit the Mike Ingelido family. Ingelido, a retired brigadier general who had made the Air Force his career, also had been a member of the Gaff wedding party in 1943.

“Mike started talking about the wedding, and Joe’s name came up,” Reade says. “It was then that he told me the story of Joe shooting down the German bomber, of it being a secret all these years. And he told me about how Joe was killed in a crash in England.”

After participating in the groundbreaking ceremony for the American Air Museum in England, Reade visited the grave of her long-ago dance partner.

After shooting down the German bomber, Shaffer flew numerous combat missions.

But he never made it home. On May 30,1944, at a U.S. air base near Salisbury, he was assigned to test a P-38 that had been redesigned because of flight problems.

“We’re told Joe went through the regular routine of maneuvers with the P-38 with the final move a straight-in dive and a pull-out at low altitude,” Reade said. “But he never came out of the dive. He died in the cockpit.”

Researchers later said Shaffer’s crash might have been caused by the controls of the aircraft becoming inoperable from massive compression generated by the diving speed of the plane during the power dive. That problem was later solved through studies by aircraft engineers.

Shaffer’s burial site is not far from the World War II Air Corps base where he plunged to his death a half-century ago.