Connecting the dots

SAGLE - Military memorabilia can be found everywhere, from thrift stores to waste collection sites and musty basements.

But the stories behind those artifacts can be harder to find.

Richard Le Francis, director of the Pappy Boyington Field Museum in Hayden, has made it his mission to reunite a piece of military hardware with the story of where it came from.

The Marine Corps League in Kootenai County donated a collection of memorabilia to the Pappy Boyington museum. Among the items was an Arisaka, a Japanese military bolt-action service rifle.

"There was no story with this stuff and it was just accumulating," Le Francis said.

A tag affixed to the World War II-era firearm warned that the rifle had a faulty firing pin and therefore should not be fired.

"The white tag was more of a warning than anything else," Le Francis said.

Curious, Le Francis sought to trace the origin of the war trophy.

"A lot of these stories are being lost," Le Francis said.

Le France's quest led him to Dion Holton, a Kootenai County resident who was unable to provide a backstory for the rifle. Holton, however, had a remarkable story about his grandfather, a U.S. Army Air Force pilot who was shot down while softening up German air defenses in the run-up to D-Day.

Jack Ward Holton was flying a Lockheed P-38 Lightning for the 474th Fighter Group when he had a run-in with a Focke-Wulf, a mainstay fighter/interceptor aircraft in the Luftwaffe.

"It began with my second mission on May 7, 1944, escorting B-26 bombers to northern France from which I did not return directly to England as I had to parachute from my burning P-38 into Belgium," Jack Holton said in a written recounting of his time in the military.

Jack Holton's wingman, Lt. Milton Merkle, was killed. But Holton survived and was taken in by a farmer. He connected with the underground and passed through German-occupied France on foot, buses and trains using falsified travel documents until he reached Switzerland on June 2, 1944.

Hector Maurage built a monument to the airman killed in action and exhumed bits of the P-38 that were embedded in the soil of the farm.

More than 60 years later, a small accumulation of the wreckage was donated to Dr. Forrest Bird's Aviation Museum & Invention Center in Sagle by Jack Holton's son, Allyn.

The Bird Museum agreed this month to share some of the wreckage for a display at Pappy Boyington Field Museum.

"It's a good thing," Dr. Pamela Riddle Bird, Forrest Bird's wife and founder of Innovative Product Technologies, said of the exchange.

Le Francis, meanwhile, will continue investigating the origins of military artifacts he comes across.

"What we do is preserve the stories," he said.