WWII pilot lost at war grew up in a much younger Harlingen
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The following is an excerpt from myRGV.gov, written by Travis Whitehead. All images are also courtesy of myRGV.com, unless otherwise noted.
HARLINGEN — It’s a slower time and a quieter time in the life of the world and in the life of Harlingen when a young Porter Pile heads off to school.
He’s just a youngster at Central Ward Elementary school on Jackson Street in the new town founded just a few years before in 1910. There is promise, there is new agriculture and there are farmers and railroads and the establishment of new communities.
World War I has ended with the Treaty of Versaille, which levied crushing penalties on Germany with the message that Germany was solely to blame for World War I. And while all seems quiet on all fronts, the crushing penalties of the Treaty have already set in motion events which will prove catastrophic to millions.
There’s an unsettling of things beneath the slowness and the quietness, a stirring of dark changes in far away places where Adolf Hitler is beginning his sinister work and where Japan has begun its expansion. At the moment, Japan has expanded only into northeastern China; it is but a precursor of things to come, as is the erratic behavior of a fledgling madman on the fringes of German society who will exploit German resentments against the Treaty to satisfy his own bloodlust.
The United States is still in its isolationist state, quietly and deceptively immune from the tragedies across the Atlantic and across the Pacific. Farmers and industrialists take care of their own. In the 1920s so many enjoy the delusions of the Gilded Age with wild spending that ultimately leads to an economic collapse.
It is into this America, this very different America from what anything we know today, that Porter Pile is born. His story begins in Joplin, Missouri where he and his two sisters were born. It stops off in a bombing raid over Germany in 1944 when Porter’s B24 Liberator is shot down, and finally comes to an end on Oct. 31 when he is buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery…