Lieutenant Howard A. Sessler

Howard Albert Sessler was the navigator-bombardier of the B-25 named TNT. The TNT plane belonged to crew 15.

Sessler was born on 11 August 1917 in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents were Edward and Elizabeth Sessler.

As a young man, he worked as a caddy at a local golf course and played baseball with a Boston Red Sox farm team. While attending Northeastern College in 1940, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps.

Most of the planes were to crash land in China after bombng Japan but poor visibility forced Sessler’s plane to make a water landing in the East Chinese Sea. He swam about a mile to an island, where he met up with his crew members. They were taken on a Chinese merchant ship to another island, where they hide from the Japanese in the tunnel of a Buddhist temple. After finally arriving in mainland China, they walked for five nights to get to a hospital as several crew members were slightly hurt.

He married Frances Shrader in 1944. The couple had one daughter, Barbara Elizabeth, who was born in 1945. Howard Sessler earned a bachelor degree in civil engineering from USC in 1950 and was employed by the Los Angeles County Flood Control District. 

In 1964, he married Anna Bell and started his own construction company. He was president and owner of the company.

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