Aviation Cadet
Walter S. Crowell
Mustang Field
June 1943

Walter S. Crowell was born in 1924 and grew up in Melrose Park, PA, a suburb just north of Philadelphia. He was in the class of 1941 at Cheltenham High School and spent a year at the Peddie School in Hightstown, NJ before matriculating into the University of Pennsylvania.

World War II, at least for the United States, began on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Walter saw the war as an opportunity to realize what had always seemed an impossible goal. Learn to flow. In 1942 he took a military leave from the University and enlisted in the Army Air Corp’s Aviation Cadet Program.

Only eighteen years old, a month shy of his nineteenth birthday, in February 1943 he received his orders to report for active duty. He graduated from flight training in January 1944 as a Second Lieutenant.

Walter S. Crowell
Prisoner of War ID Photograph
October 1944 Dulag Luft, Germany

Walter flew 32 missions with the 456th bomb group out of Italy, was shot down and interned by the Germans as a Prisoner of War and liberated by General Patton’s 14th Armored Division, on April 29, 1945. By the time he was separated from the military in January 1946, he’d attained the rank of Captain.

Following his graduation from the University of Pennsylvania in 1949, he moved with his wife and three children to Sudbury, MA, and spent over thirty years in New England as a Human Resources executive, mainly in the Aerospace industry.

The last ten years of his business career were as a principal with a human resources software concern, which he helped to establish, and always claimed this was another great adventure in life. Since 1977 he has called Littleton, MA, home and sadly misses the loss of his wife, Virginia, who died in 1992.