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2 WWII veterans get monuments at Veterans Park
Betty McBrayer’s eyes teared up as she remembered the day 63 years ago her family got word her brother had been declared missing in action.
A plane carrying Sgt. James Edward Massengill had gone missing over Hoko Island in the Pacific Ocean on March 2, 1945.
Her father received a telegram shortly after that, telling him that his son was missing. McBrayer says her mother was working at the time, and when she got home her father took her into their bedroom and delivered the news.
“I could barely hear them talking. He told her that James was missing in action. Mother was so brave. I think she was brave because her daughters were there,” he said. “But she didn’t get hysterical.”
Years later, she said, McBrayer asked her mother how she took the news so calmly.
“She said ‘Well, at that time several boys had been killed or were missing in action from our community — the Westside, Trichum, Rocky Face, Tunnel Hill area. We’d lost a lot of boys.’ She felt like she wasn’t the exception. It was God’s will,” McBrayer said.
One year and one day after the plane carrying Massengill went missing, the government declared him dead.
On Saturday family members, veterans and other came to unveil memorials to Massengill and to Dual Broadrick, another Whitfield County native, at Dalton’s Veterans Memorial Park.
Lawson Broadrick’s eyes also teared up as he remembered his brother who had passed away just one month earlier, on Aug. 20.
“I remember the day (Dec. 19, 1944) we got the telegram from the War Department stating that he was missing in action. That was one sad day, and it was probably the worst Christmas we ever had,” he said. “But just a few weeks later, we got a telegram saying he was a prisoner of the German Army. That was about as good a news as we could have,” he said.
While he was a prisoner of war, Broadrick wrote his family about the mission that ended with his being captured.
Broadrick, like Massengill, served in the U.S. Army Air Corps, the precursor to the U.S. Air Force.
On Nov. 30, 1944, his squadron flew a bombing mission over Germany to destroy a synthetic oil plant.
“He said it was the worst mission he’d ever flown. He said the flak looked like you could walk on it,” he said. “The pilot was killed immediately.”
Broadrick, who was a turret gunner and staff sergeant, grabbed his parachute to bail out, but could only get one side of it fastened.
As soon as Broadrick hit the ground, a German soldier had a gun trained on him.
“He told him ‘Come with me.’ But (Broadrick) didn’t have any shoes. Somehow his shoes had come off. So the German guard told him to pick out a pair of shoes from one of the dead American soldiers laying on the ground,” Broadrick said.
Dual Broadrick would spend five months in a German prison camp before being liberated. He returned home to Whitfield County where he served as clerk of Superior Court for many years.
“My dad would have been so honored and humbled that people would make the effort to do this and to remember him this way,” said Broadrick’s daughter Pam Bass.
Massengill’s sister Winnie Hunt said her brother would have been “overwhelmed” by the ceremony.
“We are so thankful to the American Legion and all they have done to honor our brother,” she said.
Whitfield County Sheriff Scott Chitwood said that Broadrick and Massengill were heroes.
“All our service men and women should be recognized as heroes,” he said.
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