Cpl. Lyle Found
also known as Lyle Pound (variant reading — see name note)
Flight engineer of Robert Earl Wildermuth’s ten-man B-24 Liberator crew — the man responsible for the airplane’s mechanical systems in flight, monitoring engines, fuel transfer, hydraulics, and the small constant calibrations that kept the Liberator working through the long Pacific missions. He sat on the flight deck behind the pilots and acted as backup pilot in emergencies, able to fly the aircraft if both pilots were incapacitated.
From Great Bend, Kansas — central Kansas, the south-central Great Plains wheat belt. His family farmed a thousand-acre wheat farm there. Robert Earl’s Big One manuscript opens his sketch with shorthand: “Lyle was a farm boy from the land of really big farms Kansas.”
“Lyle was an excellent aircraft engineer and he was always ‘tinkering’ with the various aircraft systems to make everything as fine tuned as possible.”
He was the oldest man on the crew — age 22–23 when the crew formed at Gowen Field, a year or more over Van Valen and Steckroth and four or five over the youngest. The age made him the crew’s “old man” and counsellor: “he acted as ‘old man’ and counsellor to the other crew members.” In a crew of mostly 18-to-21-year-olds at the edges of their lives, the farm-boy engineer was the steady ear.
Coming from a Kansas wheat farm where he had driven all kinds of equipment from boyhood, Lyle was also the only crew member who possessed a driver’s license at enlistment — a small data point of how rural the country still was in 1942–43: nine of ten crew members on a heavy bomber had never driven a car.
The Caribbean B-29 crash, postwar
Robert Earl notes that Lyle re-entered the service after his postwar discharge:
“One time while I was attending a movie, the MGM movie newsreel showed survivors of a B-29 type aircraft that had crashed in the Caribbean and Lyle was one of them.”
This is the only one of the ten-man crew whose postwar life Robert Earl can confirm — by accident — the MGM newsreel survivor shot of a Caribbean B-29 crash that put Lyle’s face on the screen in a Marietta theater years after the war. Lyle survived. Robert Earl flew the MGM cameraman over Nagasaki in c. mid-September 1945; the same studio’s news cameras later put his crewmate on screen. The MGM cameras intersected this crew twice.
Which Caribbean B-29 crash, which year, which newsreel — these are open research questions, along with his pre-war Kansas life and post-war return. The path forward sits at MGM News of the Day newsreel archives, postwar B-29 accident reports from the Caribbean, and Great Bend / Kansas wheat-belt newspaper records.
A note on the name: Robert Earl’s 1989 memoir roster lists him as “Cpl. Lyle Found,” while the Big One crew sketch was read as “Lyle Pound.” This archive follows the memoir’s typed roster spelling and notes the variant. Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir; The Big One, Crew Members section.