17068 DAVIS, THOMAS GIFTON
10 December 1924 - 14 December 1954
Died near St. Marks, FL.
Interred in Live Oak Cemetery, Selma, AL.
Aged 30 years.

THOMAS GIFTON DAVIS was born in Lamison, AL, but soon after his family moved to nearby Selma. In high school, Tom developed into a superb athlete. He was a three-letter man in both football and basketball, and he excelled at his favorite sport, gymnastics, where parallel bars was his specialty. While still in high school, Tom let his teachers know he was determined to go to USMA.

The fundamental formative influence upon Tom's character was the strongly religious home environment shaped by his parents, especially his father, a lay preacher. Throughout his personal and professional life, Tom unfailingly displayed the high moral standards inculcated in him in his youth.

After graduating from Selma High School in 1943, following in the footsteps of his older brother Woodard, Tom enlisted for flight training in the Army Air Corps. In due course, he soloed. With only 23 flying hours needed for graduation and earning the coveted wings of a fighter pilot, Tom decided to interrupt his budding flying career to accept an appointment to West Point. He went to the USMA preparatory program at Cornell University in preparation for the academic and leadership challenges of West Point.

Tom entered USMA in the summer of 1945, as WWII was drawing to a close, and excelled as a cadet. His roommates recall that academics got Tom's conscientious attention but held no terrors. He was dedicated to physical conditioning and sports, lettering in soccer and gymnastics. Tom was known, while sitting in his desk chair, to swing himself up into a handstand on the arms of the chair and then do a pushup or two. His strongest suit as a cadet, though, was not necesarily his athletic accomplishment, but his strength of character and personality. He accepted his friends uncritically, and his warmth and natural leadership brought him wide affection and admiration.

After graduation, Tom breezed through pilot training, finishing in 1950 at Williams AFB, AZ. Along the way, he managed to meet and court Martha Alice Aldridge who, as Mrs. Tom Davis, helped him pin on the wings of a jet fighter pilot.

When the Korean War began in June 1950, three squadrons of the 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing (F-86 Sabrejets) at LangleyAFB, VA, were deployed to nearby bases. Tom joined the 335th Fighter Interceptor Squadron at Andrews AFB, just outside Washington, DC, and flew to North Island NAS, near San Diego. The planes and their pilots were loaded on the USS Cape Esperance, a small aircraft carrier headed for Korea. Initially, Tom flew as wingman for COL John C. Meyer, a leading ace who later became Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force. He also flew as wingman with his flight commander, Ralph D. "Hoot" Gibson, another of the Korean aces, who remembers Tom as "an excellent pilot and superb officer, a much sought after wingman."

Events swirled swiftly in those first months of the war. As the ground battle surged back and forth over the peninsula, Tom's squadron moved from airfield to airfield - first to Korea, then out to Japan, and then again to Korea. He fought in the First UN Counteroffensive, Chinese Communist Forces Spring Offensive, and the UN Summer-Fall Offensive campaigns, earning credit for shooting down one MiG-15 and assisting with several others. He was awarded two Air Medals for his service with the 4th, the highest scoring (air-to-air victories) unit in the Korean War.

After completion of his Korean tour in 1951, Tom was assigned to the Continental Air Command at Griffiss AFB near Rome, NY. That assignment involved flying the F-89 in an Air Defense role, duties that may have seemed a bit tame after the pressures and excitements of combat. He sought, and in January 1953 received, transfer to the 3626th Combat Crew Training Group at Tyndall AFB. There, assigned to the Fighter Weapons School, he participated in a test program set up by GEN Curtis LeMay, commander of the Strategic Air Command, to test all aspects of the air-ground system for bomber defense. Tom had flown in 19 test flights when the general scheduled a visit to Eglin AFB to observe further tests, at higher altitudes than before, of tactics using the B-36 "box" that the F-86D had penetrated.

On a night exercise during the preparations for LeMay's visit, Tom's aircraft experienced a shattering engine failure. The hydraulic system shut down and the aircraft went out of control before Tom could eject. Later, it was believed that he may have been inverted and hanging in the seat when the ejection mechanism fired. Tom, painfully injured, successfully parachuted into the Gulf, inflated his dinghy, and somehow rowed to shore and put out flares, perhaps not realizing that he had broken one or more vertebrae. Later, he was found stretched out in the raft with his hands behind his head. Air Force accident investigators concluded that the latter movement may have severed the spinal cord, causing his death. Tom's final determined-though ultimately unsuccessful-fight to survive provides an inspiring example of courage.

Tom had just turned 30 when the accident claimed his life. In his Korean service and after, he had already made a succession of valuable contributions to the security of his country and to military aviation. Just before his death, he was appointed Assistant Project Officer to test the F-102 in California. His achievements had manifestly placed him on course toward an illustrious career. In his death, the Air Force and the nation suffered a most grievous loss.

Tom's death, though, fell most acutely on his family. The children - son Thomas Gifton, Jr., and daughter Nancy Carolyn were four and two at the time, too young to remember much of their father. Those who knew and loved him, though - his widow, brother, sister, friends, and comrades - still cherish his memory. We feel privileged to have shared part of his life.

A S S E M B L Y NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2000

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