World War II veteran navigator to fly again

“They removed the blindfold and told me to find my way home,” Wakefield recalled Monday, 73 years later from his Goshen home. “I was a celestial navigator and used the stars to head home. It took me about four hours, I think."
A World War II veteran, Wakefield, 94, was the navigator on Boeing B-29, based in Tinian in the Mariana Islands. Wakefield said his crew completed between 25 to 32 missions against Japan. 
The veteran, now a resident at The Maples at Waterford Crossing in Goshen, described sitting left of the pilot with a little desk in front of him during their missions in the B-29 bomber.
“We had a fantastic crew. The pilot was calm and easy-going. We left at dawn (on bombing missions) so we couldn’t be seen and I used star constellations while flying over water, because there was no visible land,” Wakefield said. “We ... we would be tired at the end of a mission. They (a bombing mission) usually averaged 13 hours so we got pretty tired. We got to rest and get the planes ready between missions on the island. It almost seemed like a southern vacation, sometimes, because of the sunshine.”
Wakefield said he opted to join the Army Air Corps after completing his second year of college in 1943.
“The air training sounded a lot better than the Army ground training,” he said, and attended navigation school in southern Texas. After the war, Wakefield returned to college and received a bachelor’s degree in engineering. He was married to his wife, Joan, until her death in 2014. The couple had three sons.
“It’s been a wonderful life and the Lord has been good to me,” Wakefield said.