Sergeant John Gordon MacIntosh Jr., An Airman's Story
Sergeant John Gordon MacIntosh Jr., An Airman's Story
Sergeant John Gordon MacIntosh Jr. was born on May 20, 1920, in Akron, Ohio.
His family later relocated to Steubenville, Ohio, where he attended high school and briefly worked for the Fuller Brush Company. As global tensions escalated toward war, he chose service. On July 1, 1941, months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the US Army Air Forces (United States Air Force).
MacIntosh trained as a turret gunner and was eventually assigned to a B-24 Liberator crew with the 431st Bombardment Squadron, 11th Bombardment Group, operating in the Pacific Theater. The B-24 was a long-range heavy bomber critical to the Allied island-hopping campaign, often flying grueling missions over open ocean and heavily fortified enemy positions.
On July 28, 1944, while flying aboard B-24J Liberator #42-73018, his aircraft encountered an unknown disabling event during operations near Truk, one of Japan’s most heavily defended naval strongholds in Micronesia. The aircraft was last seen off the coast, and it did not return from the mission.
No confirmed wreckage or survivors were recovered.
Sergeant John Gordon MacIntosh Jr. was declared missing in action and later presumed dead. He is memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial in the Philippines, alongside thousands of other American service members who were lost in the Pacific and never recovered.
He was twenty-four years old.
A turret gunner in a vulnerable position aboard a heavy bomber.
Another name in the long, quiet roll call of the Pacific air war, where miles of ocean often meant that loss left no trace.
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About the Author
a.d. elliott is a wanderer, photographer, and storyteller traveling through life
She shares her journeys at Take the Back Roads, explores new reads at Rite of Fancy, and highlights U.S. military biographies at Everyday Patriot.
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