Sibley, Lonnie M., St. Helena Parish, Louisiana File prepared by D.N. Pardue and submitted by Inez Bridges Tate. ************************************************ Submitted to the LAGenWeb Archives ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://usgwarchives.net/la/lafiles.htm ************************************************ From "St. Helena Vets Remember World War II: Personal Interviews With World War II Vets", published by St. Helena Historical Association, 1995. Compiled and edited by Inez Bridges Tate and reprinted with permission. Lonnie M. Sibley was born in Jackson, Louisiana, and grew up in Baton Rouge. He attended school at Hollywood and Wyandotte, later graduating from Istrouma High in 1942. He was very active in football and tract and served as president of his senior class. Lonnie's roots are deep in St. Helena and he actually attended Pine Grove School for two years. Following high school he attended L.S.U. for one summer and one semester. In February 1943 he volunteered for military service and in time reported to Kearns, Utah, for basic training. Completing basic training he was sent to William Beaumont Hospital in El Paso, Texas, where he was assigned to Army Air Force Medical Corps School. At the end of about six months he was stationed at Love Field in Dallas. His next assignment was at Warner Robins, Georgia, where small units were created, called Medical Dispensary Aviation Units. The much televised MASH units seem to have been patterned after these Units, Lonnie said. His 226th MDA departed for overseas duty, leaving Newport News for Algeria, North Africa, where they remained about thirty days. The 226th MDA then proceeded to India via the Suez Canal, landing in Bombay, and were transferred to Kharagpur. They were shortly sent to Tsing Ching, China, where the Air Force was creating a staging area to refuel and prepare the B-29 planes for flying all the way to Japan and back to Tsing Ching. The fuel for the refueling process on the B-29's had to be flown in over the Hump. Unfortunately, the planes bringing in the fuel were crashing near Tsing Ching due to altimeter problems. Lonnie said that after their Unit established a small hospital and dis- pensary, they also became search and rescue personnel, seeking the crews that had crashed, of both the fuel hauling planes as well as the B-29's. The B-29's were sent directly from the fac- tory in the States to China without being properly tested be- cause they were trying to get them there as quickly as possible. He felt that many crashes were due to poor engineering which would have been picked up in proper testing. The search and rescue people worked with the underground Chinese, and they heard that there was a $125 bounty placed on the head of each American by the Japanese. When there was a crash, the resuce personnel had to travel any way they could to get to the site. They would travel by Jeep as far as possible, then walk, swim or go by boat. Many of the crews died in these crashes, and often those who survived were horribly burned. Parachute fabric of the crashed crew where available was used to wrap the dead and tied to a bamboo pole for carrying the body back to the base. The injured were carried out on litters made of bamboo and para- chute fabric. Chinese coolies were hired to assist in the carry- ing. The rescue units went deep into China in various directions seeking to find and return U.S. crash victims. The staging area at Tsing Ching was bombed and strafed on many occasions by the Japanese airforce. The American personnel were housed in an installation used formerly by the Germans who had withdrawn much earlier from China. The Chinese government provided both housing and food for the U.S. people. Lonnie recalls he spent his 21st birthday there in China. It was later decided to move the B-29's to the Pacific islands that had been made secure. There was no further need for the Tsing Ching staging area, so Lonnie was sent back to Kharagpur, India. While awaiting to be rotated home, they lived in the buildings that were previously used to imprison Mahatma Ghandi. He said he played golf on the Royal Golf Course in Calcutta, and with several others, flew to see the Taj Mahal. He was on detached service with a British unit when President Roosevelt died. That morning he was awakened by what seemed to be all the British soldiers in the area who came as a delegation to express their sympathy at the death of the President. This was when Lonnie learned of the President's death. In time Lonnie was sent to Myitkyina, Burma, with a combat cargo unit as medical personnel. When the A-Bomb was dropped, he was in North Burma at Myitkyina. At the cessation of hostil- ities, he was sent to Rangoon, Burma, and attached to the office of Strategic Services. They flew into Southeast Asia to pick up the POWs, many of whom had survived the construction of the Jap- anese Railway across Southeast Asia. Some of the planes available for this work were in bad condition. Unfortunately, after pick- ing up 32 of the POWs, one plane flew all the way back to Rangoon, and when about to land, was waved off, and in making the circle to come back in, it crashed, killing everyone aboard. Following this detached service, Lonnie went back to his regular unit, the 226 MDA, and was sent back to India. When he was finally able to return home, he received his discharge at Tyler, Texas, January 18, 1946. He and Miss Eleanor Yeargan were married in May of 1946 in Dallas. He had always wanted to be a physician. He attended S.M.U., later graduated from L.S.U. in pre-med, but he was haunted by his war time experiences of death and dying, and he had no answers. It was at this point that he changed to medical entomology, researching insects which cause disease, but he was still not satisfied. He came to the realization that the questions which he was confronting were really theological in nature, and after much prayer, he entered the Methodist Church ministry, serving first a church at Port Allen, to determine whether this was appropriate for him. He had previously received his Masters Degree with a major in ento- mology, and was working as a research entomologist at L.S.U. He resigned from the University and went to seminary at S.M.U. in Dallas. He became a full-time student, pastor of a church and a father of two sons and a husband, and taught one semester at the Methodist Hospital School of Nursing in Dallas. On graduation with a Masters Degree in Theology and birth of a third son, he became a member of the Louisiana Conference of the Methodist Church. He transferred to the Little Rock Conference when he served the Pulaski Heights Methodist Church. Transferring back to Louisiana he served churches in the Baton Rouge and Shreveport Districts. He earned his Doctors Degree from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and after over thirty years of service in the ministry, he retired at the end of 1989, which means he can arrange his own schedule, but still preaches and does the rites of the church on request. Lonnie's and Eleanor's sons are a surgeon, an emergency physician and a dentist. They have four grandchildren and divide their time between their Baton Rouge home and their very charming home, Dogwood, near Pine Grove. The Pine Grove home is nestled in a setting of dogwoods, shrubs and pine trees. It is a peace- ful, serene setting. * * *