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Memorial Day 2023: Remembering the WWII ‘Pathfinders’

Group plans memorial in England to honor airmen, including Camas native, killed in ’43 crash

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John Reynolds, a 1942 Camas High graduate, holds his infant daughter, Christina, while visiting his brother Arthur Reynolds' gravesite at the Cambridge American Cemetery and Memorial in Coton, England. Arthur Reynolds, also a Camas High graduate and member of the 1938 CHS wrestling team, was killed Nov. 10, 1943, during World War II, when the Pathfinder plane he was piloting crashed in Brome, England, killing all 13 airmen onboard as well as four road crew workers and a horse on the ground. (Contributed photo courtesy of Christina Reynolds Price)

Her father and uncle both served as bomber pilots during World War II, but war stories were not common during Christina Maree Reynolds Price’s childhood. 

“My dad really didn’t talk about his experiences in the war,” Reynolds Price said of her late  father, Lt. Col. John Robert Reynolds, a 1942 Camas High School graduate who had been training to fly B-29s in the Pacific during WWII when his older brother, Arthur Joseph Reynolds — then a 24-year-old U.S. Army Air Force bomber pilot flying combat missions over Europe with the 482nd bomb group — was killed on Nov. 10, 1943, in a horrific crash that claimed the lives of all 13 airmen inside the plane, plus four civilians and a horse on the ground. 

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