Homeland's Arthur Bennett craved adventure…got it in World War Two battles on Navy Carriers.

Lieutenant Commander Arthur Bennett, Homeland Native, saw his flight squadron involved in heavy Pacific fighting. His Squadron took part in secret mission when Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. was killed. Photos show him when he first enlisted, and near retirement as Lieutenant Commander. USS Bunker Hill in photo was one of Bennett's carrier bases.

In Homeland, Georgia, where he lived, Arthur Bennett had shown an affinity for "tinkering" with automobile engines. His neighbors said he had a knack for making things work. Luckily, this was a trait that would serve Bennett well in the years ahead. He worked at what he called a  "grease monkey's" job in Folkston with two Homeland neighbors, Louie and Orlando Roberts. The two brothers operated Roberts Brothers Ford on Folkston's West Main Street. Bennett also worked with the local telephone company for almost two years.

It was a hot June in 1941 in Charlton County. Many Charlton County men had gone to work in shipyards in Jacksonville and Brunswick. The Blue Willow Café on Folkston's Main Street was a favorite hangout for the teenage crowd. Verne Pickren's Rockola jukebox blasted out with songs like Hut Sut Song and As Time Goes By.

Bennett was 20 years old and eager for adventure. The United States was gearing up for a possible war as Adolph Hitler's Nazi Germany devoured Europe one country at a time. "Join the Navy" posters in store windows beckoned to Arthur Bennett and millions of other American young men. The navy offered adventure and the chance to serve the nation. Bennett succumbed to the plea. He sold his two-tone brown 1936 Ford coupe to Kirby Jones and signed up with the U. S. Navy.

That was the beginning of an excitement-filled 28-year career for the youthful Homeland resident; years that would see Bennett rise in rank from an Apprentice Seaman to Lieutenant Commander before finally taking his honorable discharge.

Six months after Bennett became a navy seaman, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and America was plunged into World War Two. Bennett's craving for action and adventure had come sooner than he expected.

The adventurous sailor soon found his niche in the navy. Rapidly moving through Boot Camp at Great Lakes, Illinois, and Aviation Machinist Mate's school in Chicago, and a brief period at Yellow Water Gunnery School at what is now Cecil Field in Jacksonville,

Bennett soon got into the thick of battle on a half-dozen different aircraft carriers. His training had equipped him well for assignment to a flight squadron moving from one aircraft carrier to another in the action-filled Pacific as he supervised the maintenance of the TBM Torpedo Bombers of his squadron.

The aircraft carriers on which Bennett and his torpedo bomber squadron served reads like a "who's who" in the pacific fighting of World War Two. The USS Yorktown, The USS Bunker Hill, The USS Boxer, and The USS Princeton saw Bennett and his flight squadron assigned to their flight crews.

Bennett and his squadron of patrol torpedo bombers were in the thick of the fighting in the Pacific as the bombers flew from the Bunker Hill and the Yorktown, two of World War Two's most decorated carriers.

Japanese Kamikaze pilots desperately aimed their suicide planes toward the carriers in the torrid fighting off the chain of Pacific Islands. Bennett, at a recent 90^th birthday party for his sister, Mrs. Celeste Dinkins, modestly protested, "I was no hero." His service record and campaign ribbons say otherwise.

Nevertheless, it was off the coast of England, in the Atlantic, that Bennett's flight squadron had a rendezvous with destiny. It was code-named "Operation Aphrodite", a highly secret mission of the Allies, testing radio controlled bombers flying from England to German targets in France.

Bennett and his torpedo bomber squadron of navy PB4Y-1s were to act as mother control planes maintaining radio control over the B-17 and B-24 bombers loaded with 21,000 pounds of bombs.

The American bomber pilots were to bail out over the coast of England, leaving the bomb-laden plane to seek its target by radio control from the mother planes of Bennett's squadron. The planes aimed at launch sites of the V-2 German missiles in France. Those rocket-bombs handed England terrible punishment in the latter days of World War Two.

It was August 12, 1944; a number of Army planes had failed to successfully control the unmanned bombers. Now the navy decided it would try.

Lieutenant Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr., an experienced navy pilot, and the eldest son of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy, was being groomed by his family to make a run for the U. S. Presidency after the war. Kennedy was the pilot aboard a Liberator Bomber. His co-pilot and only other crew member was Lieutenant Wilford J. Willy, a close friend of Arthur Bennett.

Kennedy and Willy were to bail out of their Liberator drone bomber before it left the coast of England.  Two mother planes were to radio-control guide the bomber in a crash dive on the target, a V-2 rocket-launching site in Normandy.

The airplane was in flight with routine checking of the radio controls proceeding satisfactorily, when at 6:20 p.m. on August 12, 1944, two explosions blasted the "drone" resulting in the death of Kennedy and his co-pilot.

No conclusion as to the cause of the explosion has ever been reached. Kennedy was posthumously awarded the Navy Cross and the Air Medal.

Bennett said although he was not actively participating in that attempted radio control mission of Kennedy's plane, it was his flight squadron's mission.

The mission was attempting to radio control the drone bombers into France and Germany after the American pilots bailed out over the coast of England. Operation Aphrodite was never successfully concluded.

Those action-packed days of World War Two are still engraved in the memory of 78-year old Arthur Bennett who now lives in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, a career away from the quiet surroundings of Sardis in Charlton County where he was born, and in Homeland where he grew up.

Arthur Bennett, after World War Two ended, went on to serve in the Korean War with the navy aboard the Valley Forge stationed off the Korean coast.

Bennett remained in the navy for the Korean War, with his squadron aboard the USS Valley Forge. Bennett retired as a Lieutenant Commander in 1969.

He says now that he is enjoying the tranquil years of retirement, and visiting again the Charlton County area where he grew up. Bennett left home in June of 1941 seeking travel and adventure. He got both.