Flight To The Past Archaeologist Feels Connection To Pilot Who Died In Crash

November 13, 1944 was a typical winter day in the Blue Mountains - cold with a trace of snow, perhaps foggy.

Ensign Norman Jacobs was flying an F6F Hellcat on what should have been a routine mission. During the test run, the fighter plane mysteriously crashed into a hillside north of the Mill Creek watershed.

The impact killed the 23-year-old pilot from the Pasco Naval Air Station. His disappearance remained a riddle for seven months, until the wreck was discovered by the U.S. Army Air Corps. By that time, the rest of Jacobs’ squadron was far away in the East China Sea.

Archaeologist Steve Lucas first visited the crash site seven years ago. He felt an instant connection to the young pilot.

“You immediately step back into the time,” says Lucas, north zone archaeologist for the Umatilla National Forest. “There’s enough of the plane still there that you have the feeling of being in the cockpit yourself.”

Tracking down Jacobs’ story has become a personal hobby as well as a professional interest for Lucas. He has interviewed the pilot’s colleagues, researched his military records, even visited the Manhattan apartment building where Jacobs’ father lived when he received news of his son’s death.

Lucas also hopes someday to see the site listed on the National Historic Register.

“This is the only land crash of a Hellcat in Washington state,” he said. However, “I think the part of the story I latched onto was the personal side. Who was this person and what was he doing?”

For Lucas, the story’s intrigue is its ordinariness. World War II history books are full of flashier stories about air battles and flying aces. In reality, “this story was probably more common,” says Lucas, who found numerous references to accidents and mishaps in the base logs of the Pasco Naval Air Station.

Jacobs arrived at Pasco in September 1944 when the war in the South Pacific was nearing its climax. the Japanese were beginning to use kamikaze pilots, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf - World War II’s largest naval surface engagement - would be fought a month later.

The Navy “was trying to crank out pilots as fast as they could,” Lucas says. Even so, American pilots completed more than two years of training before they saw combat, which far exceeded the training the Japanese received.

Pasco’s naval air station had been built two years earlier. The Navy already had an extensive cadet training program in Seattle, but poor flying weather there prompted it to look east of the Cascades as well.

Lucas has learned just enough about Jacobs’ personal history to tantalize him.

“Jake” as his buddies called him, was a member of the BF 24 squadron. He was Jewish. He’d grown up on Manhattan’s upper west side and he’d completed a degree in industrial arts at Oswego State Teacher’s College in upstate New York before joining the Navy training program.

His colleagues remembered him as a quiet, friendly guy. “He was always willing to buy drinks when his turn came up, though he didn’t drink himself,” says Lucas, who tracked down members of Jacobs’ squadron through the Internet.

The plane crashed straight into the hill, as if Jacobs didn’t see it coming, Lucas says. The cause of the crash was never determined. And its location surprised his squadron members, since pilots usually headed to Moses Lake on their test runs.

“There’s a lot of questions we’ll never know the answer to,” Lucas says. “I think about the family, knowing their son had disappeared, but not knowing for seven months what had happened.”

Lucas is working on an article about the crash that will be published in Naval Aviation History this spring. He also gives talks about it around the area, which is the best way to convince the public of its importance and prevent vandalism, he believes.

“It literally and figuratively is a vehicle to the past,” Lucas says. “If it continues to disappear, it won’t be there to tell the story.”