Years after a World War II mission, a pilot still remembered a man who didn’t make it.

No one’s certain how my father, Boyd Lee Grubaugh, got the nickname “Dan.” My mother thinks it was a shortened version of “Dirty-Neck Dan,” a moniker created by crew members commenting on how filthy his flight suit got after hours of training exercises.

In 1941, he volunteered for what was then called the Army Air Corps even though he was enrolled at State University in Bowling Green, Ohio, with an eye on pre-med courses. So many friends were volunteering for the war service as pilots that “Daddy Dan” was drawn to join them. He was sworn into service on his 23rd birthday.

After serving as an instructor at Ellington Field in Texas, Daddy was pulled a world away by the war. He spent 10 months in the China-Burma-India theater, flying the notoriously dangerous “Hump” over the Himalayas into China.

By piecing together information from letters he wrote home to my aunts and uncles, along with official Army Air Corps/Air Force military documents, I learned he was part of the 20th Bomber Command, whose mission it was to pound the city of Yawata, Japan, flying in Boeing’s revolutionary aircraft, the B-29 Superfortress. The B-29 was considered an ideal weapon to fulfill the War Department’s mission for the 20th-century air force: the application of a new refinement in global warfare.

The raids on Japanese industrial targets would announce to the world that the undeniable era of American air superiority had dawned.

But the 26-year-old pilot’s participation in those June 1944 strikes was cut short on his very first run.

“As we were coming off the target at Yawata, Japan, flak knocked out our No. 1 engine and put both our rear gun turrets out of operation,” my father told a reporter for the Santa Ana Army Air Base newspaper in March 1945. “A Japanese fighter then attacked from below and raked the ship from stem to stern, seriously wounding the top-turret gunner and ruining the flight instruments.”

Within the hour, the gunner was dead. There was little time then to mourn. The instruments had to be repaired to save the rest of the crew.

“We really ran into trouble when we hit very rough weather,” Daddy continued in the newspaper report. “The big ship was thrown violently about by the storm; we hit one terrific updraft that tossed the B-29 over on its back. I got the plane back on an even keel by flipping it into a dive at 450 miles per hour. When we pulled out at 7,000 feet, I discovered that I had no control. … The violent maneuver and dive had either sprung the wings or ripped fabric off the elevators. … There was nothing to do but to order the crew to bail out.”

According to Air Force reports, my father was the last man to leave the plane when he jumped at 7,000 feet. He watched as it crashed into the side of a Chinese mountain.

Daddy fractured a knee in the fall. He hid out until daylight and, after making a crutch from a small tree, started out to seek help.

That crutch would become a family legend and a lifesaver for future Hump pilots. Throughout his 30-day journey in China, aided by various farmers, Daddy asked the friendlies to carve the symbols for their villages into the wood, creating a road map for future pilots seeking safety and help.

One farmer constructed a litter and had my father carried by two laborers. In one village, Daddy and two crew members who found the same community were treated to a 24-course dinner, including such delicacies as 100-year-old eggs. It was a meal fit for royalty – or liberated American pilots.

The local mandarin provided bearers who carried the men 40 miles in 10 hours over rugged mountain trails, to an advanced 14th Air Force base. Two more members of the B-29’s crew were there. The survivors waited for three weeks before a C-47 could slip in past a Japanese airdrome to return them to their home base.

My dad’s leg suffered from the lack of medical attention, and he returned to the States for further treatment. In later years, people said that when he was tired, his lameness became more noticeable.

But more than his leg suffered from the experience. In his role as the ship’s captain, he carried the responsibility for his crew to his core.

Years later, he still mourned the loss of that unnamed gunner. In her memoir to her grandchildren, Ada Grubaugh wrote that Boyd “could not forget nor discuss it. Just said, ‘I can’t stand civilians; one question and my grief lies out on the table. So I’ll never leave the Air Corps.”‘

And he never did. Lt. Col. Boyd Lee Grubaugh became the chief of flight test at Edwards Air Force Base in California, where he and his co-pilot died ejecting into the arid skies above the Mojave Desert after a midair collision during a test flight in 1958. He was 40. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

My grandmother wrote in her memoir, “We understand it was quick and merciful, and in all honor. He was a Praying Pilot.”