A brother's mission from the past
Rockdale veteran relives WWII plane crash with special visitor

BY Mike Brown
Rockdale Reporter

 “I’m another Robert Timmons,” said Rockdale native Tim Cook as he spoke on the phone to a man he’d never met, Mickey Cochrane of Coloma, Michigan.
 That conversation led to a meeting Thursday in Rockdale between Cochrane and B. F. Cook, father of Tim.
 Cochrane and B. F. Cook had never met but are forever linked. Cochrane’s half brother, Robert Timmons, was one of six men killed in the training flight crash of an Army Air Corps B-17 in January, 1944.
 Cook was one of five men who parachuted to safety. He named his second son Robert Timmons (Tim) Cook in honor of his fallen friend.

Promise kept
 “It was a pretty emotional meeting,” Cochrane said. “We told a lot of stories and, yes, there were a few tears.”
 “Until recently he did not know I was still around,” Cook said. “He had thought a crewman named Ernie Hunt, who lived in Oregon, was the last survivor.”
 Hunt has since passed away but Cochrane was able to visit him first. Astoundingly, Hunt also named a son “Robert Timmons.”
 Cochrane’s story began decades ago when he promised his mother, Joda Cochrane, some day he would find the plane crash site and place a marker there.
 “I just kept thinking about that promise, even after she passed away,” he said. “I had given my word and in my generation that meant a lot.”
 In 1995, Cochrane filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to have the still confidential records of that fatal flight released.
 He received a map and the name of Phil Bennett, a Bureau of Land Management employee in Utah.

Site found
 Bennett said a helicopter pilot rounding up wild mustangs in the Cedar Mountains in remote Tooele County Utah, had reported seeing the wreckage of a large plane and recorded the GPS coordinates.
 One attempt to locate the plane failed in 1999 but Cochrane returned in 2004 after Utah resident Rex Pearlmain found the wreckage and started his own attempt to locate crew members or their families.
 Cochrane carried a wood-burned plaque he had made, along with a metal base, to the remote site and placed it there.
 A few human bones, buttons, insignias and a canteen were brought back.

Survivors
 Finding survivors proved to be an equally daunting task.
 He didn’t find B. F. Cook, who was not listed as a survivor on a national directory of veterans. But Hunt’s name was listed.
 So Cochrane and wife Shirley went to Oregon. Hunt had gone blind after sustaining a stroke and was not in good health.
 Ironically, Hunt had married the widow of one of the B-17’s victims, Mary Barbosa, whose husband Joe had posed for a photo with Cook and Timmons during their training.

‘Crooks’
 Then fate took a hand.
 In October, 2006, Tim Cook found an article about Robert Timmons on a website and found Cochrane’s phone number.
 “I answered the phone and Tim’s first words were ‘I’m another Robert Timmons’,” Cochrane said. “Wow. It was quite a moment.”
 Tim put Cochrane in touch with B. F and Thursday’s visit was the eventual result.
 Cook’s name was eventually located in the Army’s original report of the accident but he was listed as “Staff Sgt. Byron F. Crooks of Greenwood, Louisiana.”

Dick Tracy
 Cook recalled the fateful flight. The plane took off from the remote training site of Wendover. Utah, in a furious snowstorm. Its crew was headed for Newfoundland, then England and combat. But they never really got airborne.
 “A huge chunk of ice, as big as a wing, came off and took off an aileron, which is used to steer,” Cook said. “That tore off and hit the rear horizontal stabilizer. We knew it was bad and we knew we were going down.”
 “I headed for the door to bail out and Sgt. Neil Buck, a Nevada sheepherder, was frozen in the opening. He wouldn’t move,” Cook said. “I literally kicked Neil out of the plane and then I bailed.”
 “I yelled at Bob (Timmons) to get out,” Cook said. “But he didn’t. I really don’t know why. I guess there was just too much noise and confusion.”
 Virtually all the men who got out were injured—Cook broke his collarbone—and they were high in the Utah mountains in a January snowstorm.
 Amazingly, Buck had brought along a Dick Tracy comic book he’d been reading.
 He used it to light a mesquite fire.

DNA
 At the time, the Army gathered up what body parts could be found, had them cremated and sent six caskets to grieving families from California to Massachusetts.
 Cook and Buck accompanied Timmons’s casket home to Michigan.
 And that’s where the matter stayed until Mickey Cochrane followed through on the promise he’d made to his mother.
 One question has to be asked. What are the chances of DNA tests still being performed on the bones found in 2005?
 “It may still be possible,” Cochrane said. “They can do amazing things with DNA. I’m certainly willing to be tested.”

Phone call
 There would appear to be no chance any humorous story would come out of such a grim event but Cook actually remembers one.
 “We all struggled out of the mountains, hurt and ragged and seemingly just barely alive and managed to make it down to the little town of Delle, Utah,” Cooke said. “It wasn’t really a town. It was a bus stop. One building and one phone.”
 “We went in to use the phone and, can you believe it, the guy at the counter said we couldn’t use it,” Cook said. “The phone was for the bus passengers only!”
 “He hadn’t reckoned with Neil Buck. Neil was from the Nevada frontier and was a character,” Cook said. “Also, Neil still had his .45 pistol strapped on.”
 What happened? “We got to use the phone,” Cook said.

mike@rockdalereporter.com