![]() He believed that he and Rusty could make a go of it on what appeared to be good, arable land in a place called the Kenai Peninsula. He rekindled his interest in Alaska and began studying farming and homesteading opportunities there. “But the only satisfaction I got out of what I was doing,” Larry told a magazine writer in 1954, “was that of making more money than some of my acquaintances in the good months. It appeared initially that the Buckeye State might become the family’s permanent home. In his home state of Ohio, Larry started up a successful paint-contracting business, and he and Rusty added a third daughter, Abby, in October 1947. The more he saw of it, the more he liked it.”īut those desires didn’t lead him directly to the Last Frontier.Īfter his honorable discharge from the military in December 1945, Larry and Rusty moved briefly to Florida, where, as one publication put it, he took “a brief look at crop-dusting.” That look, said the magazine, “convinced him that he wanted a longer life.” After a second Lancashire daughter, Lori, was born in March 1946 in Tampa, the family returned to its roots in the Midwest. These long flights, said a newspaper article a few years later, gave the young lieutenant “an opportunity to see quite a bit of Alaska. Larry spent the remainder of the war stationed in Great Falls, Montana, serving as a pilot flying supplies and ferrying fighter planes over Canada to Fairbanks, where they were held for pilots of then-ally Russia. According to daughter Lori, her mother did some modeling while she waited. When Rusty learned that Larry would be delivered to New York City, she left Martha with relatives and traveled east to await Larry’s arrival. ![]() Larry spent that time in England before being sent stateside. 30, 1944, the Romanian government released him to American military authorities, but his reunion with Rusty was still four months away. Larry Lancashire, who earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal for his military efforts, was freed from captivity eight months later. He said he was feeling well and getting plenty of exercise and good food, but he was craving some Hershey’s candy bars and cigarettes, some loose-leaf tobacco and a pipe, plus information about whether he was the father of a son or a daughter. 15.Ĭontrary to what she might have heard, Larry wrote, he “didn’t have a scratch” from being shot down. She was given an address she could use to correspond with him.Ī full month later, she received her first written word directly from her husband: three cards, dated Aug. 13, Rusty learned that Larry had been moved to prisoner-of-war Camp 2 in Brasov, Romania. You will hear more of this at a future date.” Lancashire’s deeds which has been approved by Gen. I have made a recommendation for an award for 2nd Lt. Lancashire is one of the great heroes of this war,” Ent wrote, “and his name has been indelibly written in our country’s history…. Four days later, she received what was likely cold comfort: an official letter of praise for Larry from Gen. 12, Rusty was told that Larry had been injured and was a prisoner of the Romanian government. The portrait had been taken with the intention of sending it to Larry, who did not know for sure that he was a new father. ![]() The next day, a photo of Rusty, holding her 3-week-old daughter Martha, appeared in the Cleveland Press. 12, 1943, Rusty was informed that her husband was officially missing in action. The grounded airmen fled into the Romanian countryside, but in about a week they were out of food, safe shelter and options. They waved as Weir’s plane flew overhead. He could see six of its nine crew members, including Lancashire, standing around the ship. As Weir’s plane soared over the roiling oil field, he had spotted Larry’s aircraft on the ground, lying in a nearby wheat field. Weir had been a crew member had been following Lancashire’s B-24 during the raid. Edward Weir had returned safely to base after the bombing raid on the Nazi refineries at the Ploiesti oil field in Romania - and after the next of kin of airmen killed, missing or captured had been notified - he contacted Rusty Lancashire and told her that when he had last seen her husband, Larry Lancashire had been very much alive. Decades later, a research report conducted by the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, would term this bombing campaign “one of the bloodiest and most heroic missions of all time.”
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