Des Allemands writer tells story of Louisiana pilot tortured
On May 30, 1944, ace pilot and Ida native Capt. Fletcher E. Adams was shot down in German territory and tortured and murdered by German civilians.
Sixty-one years later, Des Allemands resident Joey Maddox set out to tell his story.
Maddox, who graduated from Hahnville High School in 1976, traveled to Ida during the spring of 2005 where he lived in a tent on some wooded property that he partially owned. Out of boredom, Maddox started a small newspaper, which was given away for free to the 278 citizens of the small town.
“Very soon I learned that the citizens of Ida were a very patriotic bunch and that my stories that centered on the war experiences of the older veterans in town were extremely popular,” Maddox said. “I decided to write a news article about each of the war dead on our local monument, and the first name on it was Fletcher Adams.”
Falling back on the research instincts he gained while working as a creative writing teacher, Maddox set out to tell Adams’ story. His first stop was the pilot’s widow, who had never remarried and raised her son as a single mother.
“In fact, she still lives in the little wood-framed house that she moved into when her husband went to war,” Maddox said.
The widow, Aline Adams, was thrilled about the idea of an article and soon passed along several pieces of important information that she had kept for all those years.
“While other pilots would go out on the town, Adams stayed at home every night and wrote letters to his wife,” Maddox said. “He also kept a diary, which was illegal to do during wartime, and wrote down his experiences as a young soldier.”
With that crucial insight into Adams’ mind, Maddox began working on an article. However, when he found out just how much material he actually had – and how long it would take him to go through it all – the article turned into a book.
“Even when I started to write the book, I thought it would take me three weeks,” Maddox said. “Instead, it took me four years.”
Adams was a part of the 357th Fighter Group, which was the first P-51 Mustang outfit in the 8th Air Force. They were considered one of the best fighter groups ever produced by the United States. Known as the “Yoxford Boys,” a name given to them the day they arrived at their new base by German propagandist Lord Haw Haw in his daily radio address, the group would produce more aces than any other fighter group in the Air Force during World War II.
“They were also the fastest scoring group, and on Jan. 15, 1945, the Yoxford Boys shot down 55.5 enemy aircraft in a period lasting just over two hours,” Maddox said. “This is a record that will probably stand forever.”
And while the group included several well-known pilots, such as Chuck Yeager, who became the first person to break the sound barrier, Adams was the leading ace of the group when he was shot down.
“I believe that if Adams would have survived the war, he could have been the one to have broken the sound barrier,” Maddox said.
When Maddox first began researching the book, he knew he had an interesting story on his hands. But he didn’t just use diary entries and letters to capture Adams’ personality, he also had first-hand insight from the surviving members of the 357th.
“I developed relationships with many of the pilots from the group by e-mail and telephone and was able to interview them and ask them questions,” Maddox said. “I even traveled to Columbus, Ohio for the 60th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force and was able to speak to many of the famous pilots who still remembered Adams.”
While Maddox used this information to tell the story of Adams’ training and early fighting experiences, he also made two contacts in Germany. The two men, who were discovered with the help of an amateur German aviation historian named Werner Oeltjebruns, were able to give him a first-hand account of Adams’ death in 1944.
“Using court transcripts from the trial of the two people who were convicted of Adams’ death, I was able to form a pretty good idea of what happened on May 30, but the two first-hand accounts really made everything clear to me,” Maddox said.
In fact, Adams’ own son and widow did not even know the full details of his death and were overwhelmed when reading Maddox’s account.
“The son took it very hard and that’s the reason why I pushed back the publication of the book,” Maddox said.
While the book, called “Bleeding Sky: The Story of Captain Fletcher E. Adams and the 357th Fighter Group” is scheduled to come out on Sept. 14 on Amazon.com, Maddox is not yet done with Adams.
“I am going to create a museum dedicated to Adams and the 357th fighter group in Ida,” Maddox said. “Right now, there is a small museum in England for the group that doesn’t really have anything in it. I have gathered so much memorabilia about both Adams and the 357th that this will be the biggest museum about the group in the world.”
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