A few days ago, I wondered whether I might find any clues to what happened to Captain Charles Hansford Kendall not when Rear Admiral Tex Settle was base commander of NAS Lakehurst (1946 – September 1947), but when Captain George Henry Mills was (October 1947 to June 1949). Helpfully, Captain Mills’ family made a substantial donation of his papers and notes to the Smithsonian Archives not too long ago: and – amazingly – almost all of the George H. Mills Collection is digitised and available online. So there is plenty to work with…
11th March 1947
There’s a brief mention of Captain Kendall here, in a memorandum from Tex Settle (it’s in one of the files holding correspondence between Mills and Settle):
16th August 1947
Close to the end of his time at NAS Lakehurst, Tex Settle sent out a fairly robust letter summarising the difficulties he had experienced as base commander. Kendall’s name was on a list of addressees, but unfortunately it’s not clear (to my eyes, at least) what was marked against his name:
I tried zooming in but it’s no clearer, the punched holes went straight through the interesting bit, alas:
10th October 1947 – Lakehurst Org Chart
This organisational chart of the base dated 10th October 1947 was something I found interesting: this was in Memos – Naval Airship Training and Experimental Command (CNATE) personnel, 1947-1949. You can see that the Chief Staff Officer position (immediately below CNATE, the base commander) was a hugely important position (page 4):
Page 2 includes a list of the major roles under CNATE at Lakehurst, including the Experimental Officer role (which was essentially head of the Experimental Section):
Oddly, Charles Kendall’s newspaper obituaries gave conflicting accounts of his position at Lakehurst: the Associated Press version was that he was Chief of Staff (CSO) to the base commander, while the reporter who talked to his widow noted that he was NAS Lakehurst’s Experimental Officer.
However, page 1 of the same document shows that it was Captain William Arthur (“Art”) Cockell who was the CSO as of October 1947:
November 1947 – List of Lakehurst Personnel
The following document gives a list of NAS Lakehurst personnel as of November 1947. This starts with RADM Tex Settle (who had just left), and you can see Captain George Mills as CNATE just below:
At the end of the section listing all the Captains, we see Captain Art Cockell and Captain Charles Kendall, who were both noted as being base Staff:
And yes, you can see that Captain Kendall’s entry was clearly marked as “SICK”.
January 1948 – Visitors to Base
A different series of document give CNATE News Memoranda, which are a lot like cut-down versions of NAS Lakehurst’s “The Airship” newsletter, but much more tightly focused on the NATEC part of Lakehurst, rather than its (numerically larger) training section.
Here we can see visitors such as airship designer C. P. Burgess coming over from BuAer visiting the base:
15th June 1948 – XZPN Design Visit
Here we get to see the first active mention of Charles Kendall I found from George Mills’ time as CNATE:
Hence it would seem that Associated Press (later) got it wrong: Kendall was not Lakehurst’s CSO, but NATEC’s Experimental Officer.
25th April 1949 – Naval Hospital, Philadelphia
This, alas, is the last mention I was able to find of Charles Kendall in the George Mills Collection, and signals Kendall’s impending transfer to the Naval Hospital in Philadelphia:
Because Captain George Mills left Lakehurst (and indeed retired from the Navy) in June 1949, the series of CNATE memoranda the Smithsonian has finishes just before Captain Kendall’s death (in the Naval Hospital) in August 1949. Hence – unless further CNATE memoranda appear – this report may also prove to be the end of the line for this particular archival trawl.