Captain George Van Vleet, Jr.

George Van Vleet Jr. was born on August 16, 1908, in Fresno County, California, to George Van Vleet Sr. and Elin Wilhelima Teresia Peterson Van Vleet. His early schooling took place at the Harvard Military School (today Harvard-Westlake) in Southern California. He graduated from Fresno High School and went to Fresno State College for one year before finishing his bachelor’s degree at Stanford. He later received a master’s degree from Cornell.

Van Vleet was active in Fresno’s social scene. A 1931 Fresno Bee article lists him as an invited guest to a large New Year's “tea and dance” gathering. Some of his real estate holdings included a logging company based in British Columbia. He married Elizabeth Gallagher on October 20, 1934, at the Episcopal church in Yakima, Washington. They then departed for Van Vleet’s new position at Washington State College. They had three children together.

Van Vleet arrived in Pullman in 1934 to teach game management, which had recently been added to the college as a program of study. He participated in research studying the impact of early-season elk hunting in Yakima County and the Olympic Peninsula on elk populations. Van Vleet defended the practice in a piece appearing in the Spokesman-Review. The Daily Evergreen reported that he gave talks on the conservation of Pacific Northwest game birds to the Natural History Club. In 1937, he resigned from his position at WSC and went into business with his father, George Van Vleet Sr.

The military initially denied Van Vleet for military service. The Army, Navy, and Marines rejected his applications, citing his age (33), advanced education, marriage with three children, successful business, bum knee, and poor eyesight. 

Determined to get in, he made a personal appeal to army personnel. They allowed him to join the Air Corps, and after training, he received a commission as a captain. He was stationed in Tarawa as a "desk jockey," doing signals intelligence. Committed to getting in the air, he got aboard B-24J “Miss Bee Haven” as an observer on the morning of January 21, 1944. The plane’s mission was to bomb targets on Roi Island, which contained a Japanese airfield.  The plane struggled to take off the runway and crashed. Fully loaded with bombs, the plane detonated on impact. Miraculously, the pilot, copilot, and navigator survived, but Van Vleet and the rest of the crew did not. A second B-24 crashed just a few minutes later during takeoff. The accidents were blamed on "bad fuel." 

Van Vleet and the others were buried in Tarawa until the end of the war. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart. Eventually, the military exhumed the remains, but Van Vleet's were missing. There Van Vleet would stay for the next 70 years until, in 2015, a non-profit called "History Flight" began locating the remains of missing service members in Tarawa. Van Vleet's were discovered in 2017. 

From there, the DPAA took over. Their research concluded that Van Vleet's remains had been separated at some point during the 1940s recovery process. Most of Van Vleet's remains ended up in an anonymous grave at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. But part of Van Vleet's skeleton and, most importantly, the dog tags remained buried in Tarawa until 2015. The DPAA was able to match the Honolulu remains to the Tarawa remains, and together, the remains were sent home to Fresno in 2018. After a ceremony at a local funeral home, Van Vleet's remains were cremated, and the ashes spread on family property.

Van Vleet's daughter, Elizabeth, was less than a year old when he died. In 2018, at the age of 77, she told the Fresno Bee: "It was hard for me to miss him when I've never known him. But now that I've read his letters I'm thinking 'I missed a really great guy, a really fascinating person,' and how different my life would've been if he had not made that choice (to enlist). But I have to honor his decision and thank God that people like him went over there."

Van Vleet Jr. is memorialized in the Court of the Missing at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. After his identification in 2018, a rosette was placed next to his name, indicating he had been recovered. The George Van Vleet Jr Memorial Scholarship is established at Washington State University. It is available to undergraduate juniors and seniors majoring in life sciences. A scholarship bearing his name is also available to biology students at Fresno State University in his hometown of Fresno, California. The Fresno American Legion Post No. 594 is named in his honor.