It's a Liberty V-12 engine (I've posted about them before, many of you are familiar with them) if you don't recognize it... what a perfect way to anchor a memorial to some flyboys, with a significant airplane feature of their era, from a crashed twin seated Army De Havilland DH48 that crashed in Dec 7th 1922.
Erected on
May 22, 1923, and refurbished later in 1934 and
1968
dedicated to U.S. Army pilot First Lieutenant Charles F. Webber and U.S. Cavalry Colonel Francis C. Marshall
Behind the controls was 26-year-old pilot First Lieutenant Charles F. Webber navigating the plane. Sitting in front of him in the forward passenger seat was 55-year-old Colonel Francis C. Marshall.
First Lieutenant Webber had returned to Rockwell Field in February 1922 after a short stint in the Philippines, and became the chief test pilot and officer in charge of flight training.
A decorated World War I veteran, the Sioux Indian Campaign, the China relief expedition and the Philippine insurrection, Colonel Marshall had been promoted to Brigadier General during WW1 in command of the One Hundred Sixty-Fifth Field Artillery brigade, American Expeditionary Forces, in June 1918 he accompanied his troops to war-torn France. In October-November 1918, Gen. Marshall commanded the Second Brigade, First Division during the Meuse-Argonne operations. Reduced in rank to Colonel in the peacetime army, he was acting as assistant to the newly appointed Chief of Cavalry on a fact-finding inspection tour of cavalry posts throughout the American Southwest.
Within two weeks they had logged almost 4,000 miles of exploring and mapping potential air routes. This was arguably the most historic use of DH4Bs
Having just completed an inspection
tour of Troop F of the Eleventh Cavalry based at Camp Hearn near the United StatesMexico International Boundary in
Imperial Beach, he was now on his
way eastward on a three hour flight
to inspect an ROTC cavalry unit
at Tucson, then the Tenth Cavalry
base at Fort Huachuca, Arizona.
Rockwell
Field’s base commander, thirty-six-year-old Major Henry “Hap” Arnold had personally instructed Lieutenant
Webber to turn his aircraft around and head back to Rockwell Field if conditions
prevented him from flying over the mountains, due to the the rugged mountain and desert route between San Diego
and Fort Huachuca, where no fewer than nine military aviators had reportedly
vanished without a trace
Many pilots attempted to locate the crash site when the two failed to reach their destination that day. By December 17th, their search had grown to the largest combined air and ground search in U.S. military history during peacetime.
Reaction from Army headquarters in Washington was swift. The war
department issued instructions that “the search for Colonel Marshall and
Lieutenant Webber be [conducted] with every facility at the command of the
government in an effort to clear up as rapidly as possible the mystery surrounding
the fate of the two officers.”16 Army Chief of Staff, General John J. “Blackjack”
Pershing personally ordered that other air units be made available.
Three days after they were reported missing, Lieutenant Webber and Colonel
Marshall were the focus of what would become one of the most comprehensive
combined air and land search and rescue missions instituted by the United States
government at the time.20 During its peak, between December 12 and 19, forty
military and two civilian aircraft, with almost 100 pilots and observers, would fly
along the 1,500-mile U.S.-Mexico border region between San Diego, California,
and El Paso, Texas. Included were every available flight officer and airplane
stationed at Rockwell Field.21 In addition to the aircraft under Major Hefferman’s
command, planes from two aerial attack groups at Brooks and Kelly Fields, San
Antonio, Texas, and the Ninety-First Observation Squadron from Crissy Field,
San Francisco, took part in the search. Major Arnold dispatched spare parts, spare
motors, and other equipment from Rockwell Field to the interim operating base
at Camp Stephen Little, near Nogales. This way, if any search plane was forced to
land or crash, as several would, reserve airplanes would rush replacement parts to
the site in order to repair the plane
There had been one valid tip to the last moments of the flight, the manager of the Oak Grove Store at Descanso said that a local cowboy, entered his store and told him about an airplane on the afternoon of
December 7, between 1 and 2 p.m., flying over Green Valley north toward the
Cuyamaca Ranch. He specifically remembered that the plane’s engine “seemed to
be working badly and the airplane was flying at such a low altitude it would have
been impossible, in his judgment, for it to have gone over the Laguna Mountains
safely.”
It wasn’t until May 4th, 1923, almost a year later, that the wreckage and pilots were discovered.
A local ranger named George W. McCain was riding on horseback along Jamacha Ridge in Cuyamaca when he discovered them. A memorial was soon dedicated e. Led by Prentice Vernon Reel, civilian supervisor of the
base’s aero repair shop, the men, carrying digging tools and sacks of concrete,
hiked up from the nearby road to Japacha Ridge. Here they mixed the concrete
and poured it into a rectangular wooden form over the half-buried Liberty
engine. While the concrete slab was setting, they placed several small pieces of the
wreckage, and a small rectangular bronze plaque that Reel had cast in his machine
shop.
in 1934 civil
engineer Charles Carter stumbled upon the monument while surveying the park’s
boundaries. Carter then notified the unit leader of a Civilian Conservation Corps
construction camp at Green Valley Falls. One of these
construction projects involved the development of , the Japacha Ridge Trail, led from the newly built Green
Valley Falls Picnic Area to the Airplane Wreck Monument site. Completed in the summer of 1934, the one and one-half mile “Airplane
Monument Trail” hugged the southeastern spur of Japacha Peak before leading
up and over “Airplane Ridge,” where it continued northward to the West Mesa
Trail junction. At this point it descended northward down to a point overlooking
the Japacha Creek where Webber and Marshall had perished. The CCC crews,
which at times consisted of segregated African American workers, cleared brush,
moved and split large boulders, widened and leveled the trail, and built at least
three stone ramparts along the way.
Thirty-four years later, on March 12, 1968, California State Parks again chose
to improve the Airplane Crash Monument, which had become a popular hiking
destination. Park maintenance workers broke up the concrete slab, exhumed and mounted the Liberty V-12 engine on a new, stone rubble and concrete platform,
and placed the bronze memorial plaque on the low platform’s east-facing side.
it was untouched by the October 26-29, 2003 Cedar Firestorm
along with hundreds of other archaeological and historic artifacts. Spreading at
a rate of 6,000 acres per hour in its first 36 hours, the fire incinerated Cuyamaca
State Park.