National History Day teacher is amazing! The Historical League is proud to support Donna and her NHD program!!
Air Force Technical Sergeant Thomas J. Walker was recently married and had a month-old child waiting for him at home when his plane was struck and started going down in France in 1943.
All the service members in the plane bailed out. All but one of them were captured by Germans and sent to a prisoners of war camp. No one knew what happened to Walker from Arizona.
82 years later, a Chandler teacher has solved that mystery.
Donna Gustafson, who teaches history at Santan Junior High School, was one of 61 educators from 31 states and an international school chosen to be part of the Silent Heroes program run by National History Day.
Each educator got to choose one U.S. military service person from one of four wars and research their lives.
“I just think this is important to do,” Gustafson said. “I think for the families it’s important, and I think that he would have told his story if he could. I’m a Navy wife … I know how important it is for us to do these things.”
Gustafson said she was given a cemetery in France with the names of service members from Arizona and asked to choose one.
“They gave us a list of 18 to 20 people we could research, and I did a preliminary research on the men that were buried there,” Gustafson said. “Thomas was the one who really stuck out to me. … They couldn’t find him when he bailed out.
I did a lot of research, this is very interesting, I wonder why they can’t find him.”
Walker’s body is not in that cemetery and was never found. After starting to dig for his story in July, Gustafson’s big break
came when she was looking over court records.
The Allies held numerous tribunals after the war. Gustafson found Walker’s name in one of the trials.
It appears that he was found by two members of the French resistance after his plane went down. They in turn were captured by German SS soldiers, who took Walker into the woods and then executed him.
“His family was never able to bring him home,” Gustafson said. “A lot of people had claimed he was just lost, or that he was killed by the French. That’s not what happened.”
Walker grew up in Illinois but at some point, his mother moved to Arizona and remarried. Gustafson said the handsome Walker was active at Kingman High School, playing football and basketball, doing theater and playing the saxophone. He was 27 when he died.
Gustafson said she hasn’t completed her research yet. She would love to talk to one of his descendants if she can find them.
She said she’s been sharing the research with her classes.
“They ask me questions about it too,” she said. “They’re like, ‘What did you find out now, Mrs. G.?’ I’ll let them know. I’ve taught them how to search through census data and some of the kids looked their parents up on Ancestry.com.”
National History Day has given the researchers deadlines to complete their research. Then they’ll take the story and images that were collected and post them to the web page. It’s one way of recognizing some of the Silent Heroes from the past.
 |
| Cathy Shumard Historical League co-chair NHDAZ and Donna with Mobi at NHD mentoring session, Spirit of the West |
 |
| Donna with her 2 students whom she took to Nationals, Sonja Piccinini and Kadence Jackson, along with furry companion Mobi at Jim Henson statue, University of MD. |
