ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, September 11, 1996 TAG: 9609130182
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
It was May 27, 1944, and Wynans "Flip" Frankfort was flying low, hot on the trail of a Japanese fighter plane.
He was a dashing Virginia Tech cadet who had left school early in his eagerness to join the war. He was 21 - and an ace flier who had gunned down two Japanese aircraft and won a Silver Star for flying a dangerous volunteer mission.
And he was seconds away from death in a jungle wilderness that would hide his remains for 50 years.
Frankfort is home at last, buried a year ago beside his parents in a Franklin cemetery.
And, in a chain of events that defies logic but may say something about fate, one last belonging has finally followed him home from the South Seas island where he spent half a century:
His class ring.
The ring - which includes a pink stone and the inscription "Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1944, Wynans Frankfort" - was presented to Frankfort's older brother in a special ceremony at the Indonesian Embassy in Washington, D.C., last month.
It was the final chapter in an implausible story - one that has left the flier's brother flying high.
"It's in my hip pocket right now," said Philip Frankfort recently of his brother's ring, which he plans to donate soon to the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, along with the Silver Star. "I just held onto it until I could show it around to my family," Frankfort said.
Frankfort, himself a 1940 graduate of Virginia Tech and a World War II flier, described his brother as a popular, outgoing kid with large enthusiasm and several girlfriends. "He cut a wide swath wherever he went." As a child, Wynans Frankfort was so enamored of airplanes that he hung a propeller on his bedroom wall.
He had no career plans. "The only thing he had on his mind was getting in the Air Force before the war was over," his brother said. "He went the way he would have liked to have gone, doing what he wanted to do."
Finding Frankfort
The story of Wynans Frankfort's return home after almost 50 years, and of the ring that followed after him, is tangled - but his death was simple enough. Wynans, attached to the 342nd Fighter Squadron stationed in New Guinea, was giving air support to Allied troops landing on a sparsely populated Indonesian island.
His squadron commander Walter "Jim" Benz was beside him in the sky. Now retired and living in San Antonio, Texas, Benz described the young pilot as a talented flier.
"A squadron commander usually doesn't let just anyone fly his wing - not if he can help it," Benz said. "He was a very, very fine person and an excellent pilot, top notch."
Benz recalled Frankfort's last mission:
"Our forces were making landings on the island of Biak, which is not far from the coast of New Guinea. We arrived in the air over Biak, and shortly after that we saw Japanese fighter planes below us. The Japanese went down into the clouds, and we did, too. That's the last I saw of Frankfort or the Japanese planes."
He said the squadron flew many missions over Biak in the area after that and always looked for Frankfort's airplane when they did - but to no avail.
Frankfort had been missing once before, forced to bail out of his aircraft when it ran out of fuel. On that occasion he landed in a tree, cracking a rib, and wandered in the jungle for days before some natives found him and transported him to civilization - by canoe. He eventually rejoined his squadron.
But this time his luck had run out. His family held out hope until after the war, then finally gave him up - holding funeral services in 1946. "I always figured he got behind a Japanese plane and followed him up a canyon and couldn't get out," his brother said. "After the war they made searches and all and turned up nothing. We never expected to hear anything else."
He said the U.S. Air Force in 1948 declared him "lost and unrecoverable."
More than 40 years later, a South Seas scavenger would prove otherwise.
In 1990, Bruce Fenstermaker, a one-time trucker from California, was roaming the vast island chain of Indonesia looking for valuable World War II aircraft parts.
Working from military reports of missing aircraft, Fenstermaker already knew quite a bit about the scrappy young pilot whose comrades had called "Flip."
In fact, the story had got beneath his skin by the time he the found the overturned P-47 Thunderbolt, 1,000 yards from the Biak island village of Makarbo. A few hundred yards in front of Frankfort's plane was another downed fighter plane, a Japanese Oscar.
"You get to know a lot about him from his military records," Fenstermaker said. "He was a young kid. You wish he'd got away and got home. You think, maybe he got left and was living up in the highlands - that he married some native girl.
"If he was my little brother, I would have been proud as hell."
When Fenstermaker saw that the airplane's cockpit canopy was unopened - meaning the pilot had not ejected and was still inside - he said he left the aircraft untouched. He also informed the U.S. government of the location of a downed American aircraft containing a pilot's remains.
The recovery of Wynans Frankfort's remains was still years off, however
Officials at the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Honolulu verified they were told of a downed aircraft believed to be Frankfort's in 1991.
However, said a spokesman , these things take time.
"One there's so many," said Major W.L. Ray - 78,000 missing soldiers from World War II alone. Also, in many cases political unrest in the country where the remains are can make retrieval difficult, he said. And obtaining the necessary visas and clearances can take time. "Sometimes it takes 90 days," Ray said. "Sometimes it takes years."
Frankfort's brother had only praise for the government's efforts.
Once Frankfort's body was returned to America, he said, an Army escort accompanied his remains across the country to Virginia. Burial was in September1995.
"They had full military honors, with a flyover," Philip Frankfort said. "That meant a lot to our town. He had been a very popular young man."
The missing ring
It didn't stop there. Frankfort, it turned out, had never received the medal he earned while flying a volunteer mission, in which he provided cover for the rescue of some downed flyers stranded under fire in the sea.
The Silver Star was awarded posthumously in a ceremony last May at Fort Eustis. Philip Frankfort - who received the medal in his brother's absence - said he will donate it to Tech along with the class ring.
About that ring
Some months after Wynans Frankfort's remains came home, an American tourist spelunking in Indonesian caves met a native who showed him something curious: a 1944 Virginia Tech class ring.
According to a recent article in the Army Times, the tourist reported it to American officials in the Indonesian capital, who, together with some Indonesian officials, visited the native and persuaded him to give it up.
"I'm sure that when they had the native crew in there making the excavation [of his brother's airplane] someone turned that bauble up and stuck it in their pocket," Frankfort said.
He said he did not even know his brother - who, after all, never graduated from Virginia Tech - had a class ring. "I'm just assuming they set up for people who were going into the services to get their rings early," he said.
In any event, as if to make amends, the Indonesian Embassy in Washington invited Frankfort up last month to receive his brother's ring in person at a special gathering of Indonesian and U.S officials.
"My wife and I went up there and received the ring," Frankfort said. "It was a lovely ceremony."
Stan Musser, commandant of the Virginia Tech Corps of Cadets, also attended the ceremony. "That ring is just absolutely perfect," said Musser, still amazed. "I could not believe what kind of shape it's in."
Musser said they hope to invite the Frankforts up sometime in the future, when they have installed the ring in a display case with the rest of the young flier's artifacts: his pilot's wings, his two Purple Hearts, his Distinguished Flying Cross, his portrait and the letter of consolation to his family.
From Harry Truman.
"Freedom lives," the president's letter says of the young flier, "and through it he lives - in a way that humbles the undertakings of most men."
In addition to the display in the corp's museum, a $50,000 cadet scholarship fund has been set up at Virginia Tech in Frankfort's name, funded by a childhood and college friend, Clifford Cutchins III.
LENGTH: Long : 161 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ``Flip'' Frankfort is remembered as a popular andby CNBoutgoing kid whose only career plan was to fly in the war. Graphic.
This portrait of Wynans "Flip" Frankfort is in the Corps of Cadets
museum at Virginia Tech, along with the fighter pilot's two Purple
Hearts and his Distinquished Flying Cross. His class ring and his
Silver Star will be added to the collection. color. Type first letter of feature OR type help for list of commands FIND S-DB DB OPT SS WRD QUIT QUIT Save options? YES NO GROUP YOU'VE SELECTED: QUIT YES login: c