Meet Radioman 2nd Class Melvin McClendon

Honor Flight Fort Worth will be taking 2 flights in October to Washington, DC to visit the WWII Memorial. The flights will be on October 10 and October 16 on American Airlines out of DFW International Airport. Each flight will have 26-27 WWII veterans and their guardians. We still need donations for our October 16 flight!

Meet Radioman 2nd Class Melvin McClendon

In October 1942, Melvin McClendon enlisted in the Navy straight off the farm and was sent to the Naval Station Great Lakes for boot camp. He went to radio school where he was in the top 20 of that class. There he learned the German and Japanese radio codes. He served in the Atlantic and the Pacific theater intercepting German and Japanese code using D/F (Direction Finding) equipment to locate the enemy submarines. Once the locations were called in, the subs were usually bombed within a short period of time. Towards the end of the war, he was shipped back to Seattle to learn the Russian codes and then shipped to China as the war ended.

RM 2C McClendon met his wife Louise during boot camp through her brother. Louise would send her brother cookies and Melvin would eat them. In 1946, he got permission to write her and later they were married. Those must have been great cookies!