On the second floor of the Middletown Historical Society, in a display honoring the town's WWII veterans, is a four-foot-long, black airplane propeller blade tipped with yellow paint.
Around 72,000 World War II soldiers still remain unaccounted for, and for a long time Corson’s family had no idea what had happened to him.
It's the remains from a B-17 bomber that was shot down on Dec. 20, 1942, in France, taking the life of the 27 year-old pilot and Middletown resident, 1st Lt. Daniel Winstead Corson.
“Yeah, this is quite a story,” said Sam Ashworth, a historian and the former director of the Middletown Historical Society.
In 2005, Ashworth was contacted by a man in Boulder, Colorado, named Dan Corson. The 70-year-old turned out to be the nephew — and namesake — of Lt, Corson.
“He wanted to donate the family's archives to the historical society,” Ashworth said, looking over the display. “ A big portion of it was military history.”
Long story short, two brothers went off to war. They were both shot down in B-17 bombers six months apart. One came home after the war, and one didn’t.
“Dan’s father Bill survived the crash. He was in a prisoner of war camp and was liberated when the war was over,” Ashworth said, pointing out Bill’s leather bomber jacket on display.
His uncle and namesake, Lt. Dan Corson, was listed as MIA.
Among the items that the younger Dan Corson was donating were correspondence between the two brothers and their parents during the war.
“He said, ‘So we have all the letters back and forth from my grandparents to my uncle and to my father in the prisoner of war camp,” Ashworth recalled. “And that’s what caught my interest.”
Ashworth said that he was struck by the letters, which gave a glimpse into what life was like for them in the service during their training in the U.S. and deployment abroad.
Around 72,000 World War II soldiers still remain unaccounted for, and for a long time Corson’s family had no idea what had happened to him.
Although there were reports that Corson’s plane had been shot down by anti-aircraft fire during that last bombing raid on a German aircraft factory at Romilly-sur-Seine, France.
There was no body or official confirmation that he was killed in action, he was simply listed MIA.
It was his third mission.
“His plane was called the Danellen, named after his father Dan and his mother Nell. The Danellen was hit by a German fighter. It must have been hit very badly because it went into a deep dive,” Ashworth said. “One of the interesting things was that the tail section flew off. The tail gunner survived, he bailed out. He was captured by the Germans and sent to a prisoner of war camp. But he was the only one. All the rest of them died in this crash at a location about 20 miles north of Paris, right on the Seine river.”
The Germans occupied France, and they came over to the crash site to recover anything that might be there.
“And the story that was handed down was that the Germans collected the remains, which unfortunately weren’t many. (The remains were) transported over to a small cemetery in Everuex, France next to a very small church in this little village,” Ashworth said.
Why would they do that?
“That has been a question I have asked many times,” Ashworth said, shaking his head. “Hermann Goering, who was…. over the whole (German) air force, he had an affinity for pilots no matter where they came from. And so that’s the only thing I can come to.”
A 10-year-old French boy named Jean Erisay claimed to have seen the B-17 “flying fortress” shot down. He went with his dad to the crash site looking for souvenirs, and was able to gather a few small bits and pieces of debris.
These would later be shown in a museum that Erisay formed as an adult, along with that four-foot propeller blade that was eventually unearthed later from where it had been buried by the impact of the crash.
Both Sam Ashworth and Corson’s nephew visited the museum and talked to Erisay about the crash. In 2005, after Erisay and his wife had passed, the nephew reached out to the family to ask that the propeller blade be sent back to the pilot's hometown, where it now resides on display at the historical society.
Corson’s body was exhumed from the Normandy American Cemetery in 2019, and identified on Sept. 22, 2023, through DNA provided by his nephew, under the U.S. Army’s Past Conflict Repatriations Branch.
Now, 82 years after his plane was shot down, 1st Lt. Dan Corson finally came back home to Middletown and was interred with full military honors at Woodside Cemetery.
