Save the Date for “The Service Knows and Will Remember”: the Airplane Crash Site Memorial on Japacha Ridge.
Local award-winning historian and preservationist Alexander D. Bevil will use historic photographs and maps to reveal a forgotten chapter in North Island’s early military history: the search for missing pilot 1 st Lieutenant Charles L. Webber, and his passenger, Assistant Chief of Cavalry Lt. Colonel Frances C. Marshall. The search, which lasted from December 7, 1922, to February 1923, was the largest and longest combined air and ground search in American military history during peacetime.
The presentation will also focus on the leadership role Rockwell Field’s pilots and observers played flying outdated aircraft over forbidding mountain and desert terrain from San Diego to Tucson, Arizona. It will also discuss the role these men played in recovering Webber and Marshall’s remains and the erection of the first of two monuments in their memory at the crash site. Two of these, base commander Major Henry “Hap” Arnold, and Texas-based pilot Major Theodore C. Macaulay would later play key command roles during World War II. After the war, Major Macaulay would serve as an active and well-respected member of the Coronado Civic Club and a local branch bank manager.
A graduate of San Diego State University, with a Bachelor’s degree in History, Mr. Alexander D. Bevil is an
award-winning local historian. Before, during, and after his 20-year tenure as a California State Parks
historian, he had worked diligently trying to save historic resources both in and outside the California State
Parks system. Based in San Diego, he has evaluated numerous historic resources in California State Parks
throughout southern and central California. Ranging from stone-built mountain cabins to “lost” towns, his
favorite projects, however, involved investigating historic military resources: especially “lost” aircraft crash
sites. In addition to explaining the memorial’s historical significance, Mr. Bevil seeks to use his presentation
to garner support for his upcoming nomination of the crash site and its memorial to the National Register of
Historic Places in time for the former’s 100th anniversary this December 7th.
