Lt. Maxwell Van Valen

He was Robert Earl Wildermuth’s pilot for the entire combat tour with the 400th Squadron, 90th Bomb Group (“Jolly Rogers”) in the Pacific, 1944–45. From Newton, Massachusetts and MIT-educated — the most formally educated man on the crew at a time when an MIT engineering degree was rare in the Army Air Corps. Per Robert Earl’s memoir, Van Valen used to turn the controls of the B-24 over to the co-pilot and crawl down into the nose of the aircraft where Robert Earl was navigating, to watch the navigation calculations and marvel when they ended up where they were supposed to be — “flying over long distances of ocean where there were no radio stations or landmarks made a believer in the techniques of navigation out of him.”

The night Robert Earl got lost over the South China Sea — the lightning thunderhead Lt. Adler had mistaken for the home airstrip radar return, the Japanese decoy radio bearings, the U.S. naval convoy that gave them a heading home — Van Valen was the pilot wrestling the controls back to Tacloban on the last fifteen minutes of fuel. “As we were taxiing in to our parking place on the airstrip, the two outboard engines stopped running — out of fuel.”

He is named in Robert Earl’s combat log The Big One crew roster. His post-war life, his marriage, his children, and any reunion attempts with Robert Earl after the war are open research.

Sources: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s 1989 memoir; The Big One.