David Leake Milam

1. DAVID LEAKE MILAM (DAVID WALKER⁷, DAVID WALKER⁶, JEHU LEAKE⁵, JOHN "JACKEY"⁴, JOHN³, JOHN², UNKNOWN FATHER OF THE VIRGINIA¹ MILAMS) was born 1925 in Dallas, Dallas County, Texas. He married MARY JUSTINA GRATTAN. She was born 1930 in Kansas City, Kansas.

Notes for DAVID LEAKE MILAM:

Walker Pierce:
"I talked to my grandfather, David Leake Milam this evening, and asked him to tell me about his years in the Army Air Corps in WWII. He entered the Army October 1943, trained at Fort Hays in Kansas until April of 1944, logging 10 hours in the air, and then was sent to Santa Ana, California for pre-flight training for three months. Then he was sent to San Marcos Army Airfield for Navigator training.

He said he didn't remember that they named their B-24 Liberator "Destiny's Tots" and mused that his mother might have called it that, alluding to the fact that the crew, as fate or providence would have it, were not sent overseas. But according to the captions she wrote in his scrapbook:

"He went to March Field, Dec. 1944. Here he was assigned to a crew and the ship they named "Destiny's Tots." After six months training, they left March Field June 27, 1945 and went to Salinas California." She clipped a notice from one of the Dallas newspapers announcing the graduation of two Dallas men from AAF Navigation School, San Marcos Army Air Field.

He said he remembers having a feeling he wouldn't be deployed that summer while they were waiting for their assignments. And then as it turned out, when the instructions were finally posted in July 1945, his crew was on the page, but with an asterisk. Apparently, their plane had structural damage and they would have to wait for a replacement. About half of the other crews were flown to Seattle in preparation for deployment to the Pacific. But on August 5, just before the atomic bombs were dropped, those crews came back. And the rest is history."