Alfred Leo Gates Jr. (February 8, 1924-July 5, 1944)

527th Bombardment Squadron, 379th Bombardment Group, 8th Air Force

By Sharon Forand and Isabella Love

Early Life

Alfred Leo Gates, Jr. was born in Birmingham, AL on February 8, 1924, to Alfred Leo Gates Sr. and Sadie Mae Gates (née McMullen). His father and mother, natives of Georgia and Alabama respectively, married in Birmingham on December 25, 1921. On February 10, 1926, the family grew with the birth of Gates’s younger sister Carolyn in Birmingham.¹ Gates's father earned the rank of Painter First Class in the US Navy during his service from 1916 to 1920, including during World War I. This complemented Alfred Sr’s occupation by 1930 as a sign writer for a department store along with his younger brother Louis. By this time, Alfred Jr, his parents, his sister Carolyn, and his uncle Louis lived in Jacksonville, FL.² While Jacksonville did not experience the rapid real estate activity that drew tens of thousands of new residents to southern Florida cities like Tampa and Miami during the early to mid-1920s, Jacksonville still experienced modest growth with new residents like the Gates family. With the bursting of the real estate industry in the late 1920s that resulted in Florida’s economic downturn that preceded the Great Depression, Jacksonville’s position as the state’s chief commercial center made this downturn less severe as the city had higher levels of economic activity between 1927 and 1930 compared to other major Florida cities.³

In 1935, the family lived in a home in Jacksonville owned by Gates’s father, who continued to support the family as an artist. During the Great Depression, Gates’s father possibly participated in federal programs like the Workers Progress Administration (WPA) and after 1935, the WPA’s Federal Art Project where artists created prints, easel paintings, drawings, and photographs that related to the current times, reflected the location of the art, and accessible to the broad public.⁴ By 1940, the family moved east of the city to Jacksonville Beach where Gates’ father worked as an advertising manager for a department store and earned $1600 in income the previous year. His mother Sadie, who had completed two years of college education, continued to take care of the household while Alfred Jr, a junior, and Carolyn, a freshman, attended a local high school. In the 1940 Census, sixteen-year-old Alfred Jr, while attending school, had a part-time job working as a clerk for a restaurant, which earned him a salary of $100 the previous year.⁵

Gates later graduated high school and by June 1942 worked for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad Company (ACL). The ACL served the southeastern US from Virginia to Florida, helping facilitate travel to Florida, particularly during the winter season for northern vacationers and seasonal residents. Gates used his clerical experience for his boss, W.R. Pittman, the freight agent at the Jacksonville station. Freight agents handled daily business transactions for the ACL and managed an agency that employed clerical employees like Gates.⁶

Military Life

In 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Selective Training and Service Act in anticipation of the growing tension overseas which required all men between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five to register for the draft. After the US entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, millions of men continued to register for the military draft as Congress eventually lowered the age range to eighteen.⁷ On June 30, 1942, Gates, now eighteen, participated in the Fifth Draft reserved for men born between January 1, 1922, and June 30, 1924, as seen here. Yet, motivated to serve his country, Gates enlisted in the US Army Air Corps on February 1, 1943, in Miami Beach, FL.⁸

After his initial training, Gates became a member of the 527th Bomb Squadron. The 527th served as one of four squadrons within the 379th Bomb Group that formed the First Bombardment Division of the US 8th Air Force. On February 3, 1943, two days after Gates enlisted, the 379th moved to Sioux City Army Air Base, IA. Under the command of Colonel Maurice A. Preston, the group trained there until April 9, 1943, before preparing to travel overseas. By May 1943, the 379th arrived at the Army Air Force Station 117 in Kimbolton, England, around sixty miles north of London.⁹ The 379th flew the B-17 Flying Fortress as the aircrews destroyed communications centers, industrial buildings, and other strategic locations within Axis-controlled territory in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Poland. The group bombed radar stations and airstrips in preparation for the Normandy landings by Allied forces on June 6, 1944, and struck airfields, rail choke points, and gun emplacements during the campaign that followed. The precision skills of the 379th earned the group the 8th Air Force’s “Operational Grand Slam” in May 1944.¹⁰

After extensive training, Gates achieved the rank of flight officer. The Air Corps gave this World War II era rank to qualified enlisted personnel who, through education and training, performed commissioned officer equivalent duties on an aircraft.¹¹ In Gates’s case, he served as a navigator for the B-17 aircraft Aces-n-Eights as part of its ten-man crew. As a navigator, Gates guided the aircraft to its target and, when engaged by enemy aircraft, operated the B-17’s cheek guns.¹² Over six weeks from early to mid-1944, Gates flew several missions over Europe and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and a Bronze Star. Airmen received these awards for distinguished bravery and heroism. Unit commanders had great latitude to determine what specific actions warranted an award. In the case of the Distinguished Flying Cross, airmen like Gates earned them for flying twenty-five missions, shooting down enemy aircraft, or other dangerous tasks. Earning these distinctions in such a short period demonstrated Gates’s dedication to his duty.¹³

On July 5, 1944, the crew of Aces-n-Eights took off from Kimbolton on a routine training mission. While in flight above Andover, England, over 100 miles to the southwest, the aircraft had a mechanical issue. As the pilot, 1st Lieutenant Charles M. Sakryd attempted to land his aircraft in an open area, one of the wings of Aces-n-Eights clipped Burbidge's Bakery in Andover and crashed in a nearby field. All six crew members aboard, 1st Lieutenant Charles M. Sakyrd, 2nd Lieutenant Jack M. Harter, Technical Sergeant Frank J. Roma, Staff Sergeant Tilgham Williams, Staff Sergeant Carl H. Hirthier, and Flight Officer Alfred Lee Gates Jr, perished in the crash.¹⁴

Legacy

Locals branded the crash as the worst of its kind in the area during the war. Nine-year-old Peter Curtis witnessed the crash while getting off his school bus as the plane crashed right in front of the bus. Decades later, Curtis as well as history enthusiast Doug Morley spent decades researching the crash and the men involved. Their efforts to memorialize the airmen of the Aces-n-Eights, along with Steve Burbidge, the great-grandson of the owner of the bakery, resulted in the establishment of a memorial plaque and accompanying monument at the site of the crash in 2022.¹⁵ Additionally, in the St. Andrew’s Church in Kimbolton, there is a memorial plaque, seen here, dedicated to the 379th Bomb Group who served at Station 117, Kimbolton.¹⁶ Originally buried at the Brookwood American Cemetery in London, Gates’s body returned to the US in December 1948. On January 27, 1949, officials reinterred him in the St. Augustine National Cemetery to be close to his family. He rests among his fellow Veterans in Section D, Site 176.¹⁷

During the war, Gates’s parents divorced in 1944.¹⁸ By the mid-1940s, his father Alfred Sr. moved to Miami, FL where he worked as a deputy in charge of the Miami U.S. Marshal office, which he continued to do in 1950.¹⁹ Alfred Sr. eventually returned to the Jacksonville area where he lived until his death on January 21, 1965, at the age of sixty-five.²⁰ Gates’s mother, Sadie, by 1950 continued to live in Jacksonville Beach where she worked as a postal clerk at a local post office supporting her elderly father Nathan McMullen.²¹ She lived in Jacksonville Beach at the time of her death on December 15, 1987, at the age of eighty-eight.²² Gates’s sister Carolyn in the mid-1940s attended Stetson University in DeLand, FL. On August 14, 1948, in Jacksonville Beach, she married Carroll Kendricks, a World War II Army Veteran and student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. By 1950, the couple lived in Gainesville where she worked as a secretary at the university while her husband finished his degree. She eventually returned to the Jacksonville area, living in Orange Park, FL until her death on August 8, 2007.²³

© 2023, University of Central Florida