LT Tom J. Cress was a U.S. Navy pilot assigned to Attack Squadron 153 (VA-153), Carrier Air Wing 15 (CVW-15) aboard the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea (CVA 43). In early 1961, the Coral Sea was on duty in the Far East with the U.S. Navy’s Seventh Fleet as part of a multi-ship carrier task force deployed off the Indochinese Peninsula. On January 6th, she was steaming near the south coast of Honshu Island, Japan, conducting flight operations when LT Cress crashed his Douglas A-4C Skyhawk (#142918) on the deck and was lost in the waters of the Philippine Sea. The accident also killed two airwing personnel and caused major damage to several aircraft parked forward of the portside flight deck. The following is a personal account of the incident by William C. Sherman: “The night Tom was killed, I was working with the flight deck crew as a yellow shirt/plane director. It was late, and Tom was overdue, every plane back but his. I saw his lights (coming in), and it looked as though he was up and down on the horizon. As he came closer to the ship, the landing signal officer gave the red light (abort landing signal), but Tom ignored it, I figured he was either low on fuel or wounded. He landed short, rupturing the (A-4’s) wing tanks. I watched the aircraft become a ball of fire, coming right at myself and my crew. It hit the first plane in the pack, then took out nine more planes on the port side of the bow. There were ordinance men and mechanics working under all the planes on the bow. Two ordinance people were killed. It continues to haunt me to this day.” Flight operations ceased following the crash and search and rescue efforts were initiated. Cress’s remains were not recovered. [Taken from coffeltdatabase.org and information provided by William C. Sherman (December 1999) at thewall-usa.com] (WKillian, vvmf.org)

According to the photos on Cress’s Wall of Faces page, he was active at Marquette University.

The C-47 aircraft crew consisted of 1LT Ralph W. Magee, pilot; 1LT Oscar B. Weston, co-pilot; 2LT Glenn Matteson, navigator; SSGT Alfons A. Bankowski, flight engineer; SSGT Frederick T. Garside, assistant flight engineer; SSGT Leslie V. Sampson, radio operator; and passengers MAJ Lawrence R. Bailey and WO1 Edgar W. Weitkamp. Bailey and Weitkamp were assigned to the Army Attache Office at Vientiane, Laos. The aircraft crew was all Air Force personnel flying from the 315th Air Division, Osan Airbase, Korea. This C-47 was a specially modified intelligence-gathering SC-47 which took off from Vientiane for Saigon. The passengers and crew were bound for “R & R” in the “Paris of the Orient”. Before heading for Saigon, the pilot turned north toward Xieng Khouangville, a Pathet Lao stronghold on the eastern edge of the Plain of Jars. The crew, experienced in intelligence collection, planned to use their radio-direction finding equipment to determine the frequencies being used by Soviet pilots to locate the Xieng Khouangville airfield through the dense fog that often blanketed the region. Pathet Lao anti-aircraft guns downed the plane, shearing off a wing and sending the aircraft plummeting toward the jungle. MAJ Bailey, who always wore a parachute when he flew, jumped from the falling aircraft and was captured by the Pathet Lao. Bailey spent seventeen months as a prisoner in Sam Neua, the Pathet Lao headquarters near the North Vietnamese border, before being repatriated after the signing of the Geneva Agreements on Laos in 1962. The caves at Sam Neua were said to have held scores of American prisoners during and after the war. The seven men lost on March 23, 1961 were the first of many hundreds of American personnel shot from the sky only to disappear in the jungles of Laos. Four Lao sources stated that 7 of the 8 personnel on board died in the crash of the aircraft, and were buried in the vicinity. [Narrative taken from pownetwork.org; image from wikipedia.com] (WKillian, vvmf.org)