Rex Loyal Pond had been home from his mission for only a few months when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps in January 1942. His country was at war, and it was his duty to serve. But he was conflicted in his change of assignments.
"I have spent two years carrying a Bible, preaching to save souls. How can I go now to fight and destroy souls?" he asked, as quoted in a Pond family history.
Three years later, Lt. Rex Pond lost his life — one of tens of thousands of Americans during World War II. But it wasn't while dropping bombs on German cities or in an aerial dog fight. On May 23, 1945 — 15 days after the German surrender — the 26-year-old died while piloting a C-46 flying wounded soldiers to Paris en route to going home. Outside the village of Taillefontaine, near Paris, the plane went down, killing everyone aboard.
Back home in Lewiston, Utah, his sister, 28-year-old Ruth Pond Lloyd, was the one who accepted the telegram at her parents' home. "I was pacing the floor wondering how in the world I was going to tell [my mother]. He had come home off his mission and she was so happy to have him home. I knew it was going to break her heart."
Fifty-seven years later, on June 22, 2002, Sister Lloyd, now 84 years old, stood in the French village near where her brother died, remembering him and 43 others on a flight some today call the "Forgotten Crash." Sister Lloyd, 84, of the Little Cottonwood 5th Ward, Salt Lake Little Cottonwood Stake, gathered with some 200 others, including villagers who for almost six decades have placed flowers at the crash site — the crater is still visible. With the French and American flags flying in the breeze, a stone monument was unveiled which bears the names of the four officers in the flight crew — Lt. Rex Pond, Lt. Claude Weid, Sgt. Herbert Hill and Sgt. Edward Vermillion. The tall monument, on which is engraven the image of a C-46 transport plane and honors the memory of the 40 wounded men who also died, stands alongside the village's monument to its own war dead and is about a mile from the actual crash site.
"I often wondered what it would be like to be there," Sister Lloyd said, while sitting in her home in Salt Lake City, Utah, having returned just days before from France. "This to me was just wonderful, that I could have that experience. I feel so much closer now [to Rex]. There were so many questions about where, how and when. All that was cleared up. It made me feel very good."
Sister Lloyd, whose husband, Liberty R. Lloyd, is retired from the U.S. Air Force and who had assignments throughout Southeast Asia, added she thought it was wonderful the village was "going to this extent. I was so appreciative of what they were doing."
Indeed, the villagers and others in local government and civic organizations went the extra mile to honor these Americans who helped liberate their country from Nazi occupation. According to correspondence to Sister Lloyd from U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Lowell H. Barnett (retired), who offered the prayer and spoke at the unveiling ceremony, the French Veterans Affairs helped finance the monument, and the president of the organization, a Mr. Massiti, acquired the native stone from a local quarry.
Attending the ceremony and offering remarks were French and American dignitaries, including a representative from the U.S. Embassy. Villagers took part, including a group of young people singing the French and United States National Anthems.
Sister Lloyd was accompanied to France by several members of the Pond extended family. During her stay in Taillefontaine, she thought of her brother, and of her mother, who, in dealing with her grief,"threw herself into being a Gold Star mother," Sister Lloyd said.
The mother of Lt. Rex Pond even helped organize the Cache Valley Gold Star Mothers chapter. In 1949, her son's body was transferred from a ceremetery in France to his Utah hometown.
Sister Lloyd said she adored her brother and knew him to have been a faithful Latter-day Saint. He served from 1939 to 1941 in the Northern States Mission, including 14 months as a branch president. A highlight of his mission was singing with a missionary chorus on the "National Church of the Air" broadcast from Detroit, Mich.
After enlisting in the Air Corps, he participated as a C-46 pilot in the invasion of the European Continent by Allied forces, flying troops and supplies to the front lines, and flying the wounded back. His last flight was doing the latter. A letter to his parents from one of Lt. Pond's friends in England, dated Aug. 11, 1945, said an engine caught fire and, as a result, a wing broke off, sending the plane into a nosedive. The letter added: "I admired Rex for his honest, good clean living, and was proud to have him as my close friend."
Today, his sister is grateful for the efforts of such researchers as Daniel Cartigny, a World War II French veteran living in France, and Jacquaeline Pailthorp, who was born in France but now lives in California, for their efforts in researching the "Forgotten Crash."
"Now I don't have to wonder and make pictures in my mind about what it might have been like," Sister Lloyd said.
