A daughter's hero finally coming home

James Island woman's pilot father was killed in '52

Mic Smith
The Post and Courier

Corinne Mauldin holds a portrait of her father, William Kennedy Mauldin, in his Air Force uniform taken around 1945.

Corinne Mauldin of James Island doesn't remember her father. The Air Force Reserve pilot died in the Korean War when she was 2.

Now 58, she's lived her life knowing only scant details about how he was killed while flying a reconnaissance mission in 1952. His remains were never identified.

But thanks to modern DNA testing and sheer persistence, Mauldin's decades-long quest to learn her father's fate will conclude this week when she escorts his flag-draped coffin back to South Carolina. She boarded a plane for Hawaii on Friday, filled with anxiety over a reunion she thought would never come. Capt. William K. Mauldin is coming home.

He hailed from Pickens and attended college at The Citadel. He was a member of the military college's vaunted class of 1944, a group whose education was cut short by service in World War II. A couple of his classmates have been invited to attend the military burial scheduled for Friday in Easley.

If not for his daughter's search for answers, the story of the captain's service might still be incomplete. But she deflects any credit; the focus should be on her dad and the military's commitment to honoring him, she says. "It's been an ongoing search for me," said Mauldin, a clinical counselor. "It's just incredible. It's almost too much to handle."

She first contacted the military about her father while a student at Spartanburg's Converse College in the late 1960s. Air Force officials were helpful but they were limited in what they could say and faced a lack of cooperation from North Korea.

Corinne's mother eventually remarried and there was never much talk about her father at home. She gleaned details about his life from other relatives.

Her father entered The Citadel on Sept. 9, 1940. He took flight training and studied civil engineering while attending the military college. He was honorably discharged from the college on Sept. 20, 1942, when he was called to fly in World War II.

Thirty-four of his 549 classmates were killed in the war. Mauldin survived and married while stationed in Germany. The couple started a family. They had a son in 1948, and Corinne came along in 1949 while they were stationed on the West Coast.

The next year, North Korea attacked South Korea and sparked the three-year war. By 1952, Mauldin was flying missions out of Kimpo Air Base in South Korea.

At 3 p.m. on Feb. 21, 1952, Mauldin and another pilot took off in two single-seat RF-51 Mustangs and flew toward enemy territory at 10,000 feet. Two hours later, Mauldin radioed the other pilot that he'd been hit by enemy fire. Mauldin's fighter disappeared from the sky, and he did not respond to radio calls. A few moments later, the other pilot spotted wreckage burning in a clump of trees. He snapped a photo that captured plumes of white smoke but he could not be certain it was Mauldin's plane. Planes sent in to search for Mauldin's Mustang were fired upon and had to retreat.

Mauldin was listed as MIA. In 1953, after the two Koreas signed a cease-fire and continued searches were blocked by North Korea, Mauldin was declared dead at age 27.

"I had a tough time after he died," said Mauldin's widow, Margot Robinson of Easley, now remarried. "You try to keep that hope that a miracle might have happened."

Corinne would start her own family and settle in Charleston, but she never stopped asking about her father.

Every few months she called and prodded military officials about his case. Every December, Christmas cards arrived from the White House, each successive president pledging to keep up the search for those missing in action.

Periodically over the decades, the military would identify remains of service members and notify Corinne that her father was not among them. "I guess I thought it's just not going to happen."

Then in 1993, unbeknownst to Corrine, the Koreans turned over nearly three dozen coffins said to contain the remains of U.S. service members unaccounted for from the Korean War. The human remains were catalogued and stored in a government building in Hawaii.

One set, contained in "Box 9," included bones and fragments of survival equipment from a plane. The documentation noted they were recovered from an airplane crash site near a mountainous area known as Sinan-ri.

But it wasn't until nine years later that the military contacted Corinne about new DNA testing that could be used to identify recovered remains. The test required a DNA sample from her father's maternal line. She contacted her cousin, Ward Ayers, in Surfside Beach.

Ayers had known his uncle well. In fact, he was also in the Air Force and visited Mauldin in California shortly before he left for his fateful duty in Korea. Ayers was honored to provide a blood sample.

Years passed as Corinne continued her inquiries.

In 2005, bone samples from the unidentified remains in Box 9 in Hawaii were sent to an Armed Forces laboratory.

Three more years passed. Then, in April of this year, Corinne got a phone call. Her hands shook as the military official on the other end explained that based on the DNA tests and evidence that the remains were discovered in the same area were Mauldin's plane was shot down, the military was identifying them as belonging to her father.

She hung up the phone and cried. "I didn't know if it was something I would ever find out. I felt a sense of peace."

When the news spread to The Citadel, alumni mobilized to help honor one of their own.

Retired Air Force Lt. Col. Ted "Tex" Curtis, a 1964 graduate of the Citadel, and others stepped up to research Mauldin's time at the college and track down his classmates so they could attend the burial.

Curtis flew missions in Vietnam and some of his combat buddies remain missing. He understands how locating and identifying the missing can bring their families closure. "It's been more than 50 years. Never would anybody expect this. He is part of a long gray line, and his coming home is cause for celebration," Curtis said.

Reach Ron Menchaca at rmenchaca@postandcourier.com or 937-5724.