Thomas Vincent Collins, Jr.

Tom was the eldest child of Thomas and Margaret, who had one other son, Allen, two years later. That prompted a move to a bigger space but in the same area, around Woodland Avenue between 53rd and 58th Street in southwest Philadelphia. 

Their father was a machinist at Baldwin Locomotive Works in Eddystone. A few years later he shortened his commute by taking a trolley to the General Electric plant in Elmwood Park where  he was a sheet metal worker. The boys had a longer commute to school; John Bartram High School on 67th Street wasn’t opened until the 1939-40 school year, so they went to West Philadelphia High School, where Tom graduated in 1937. His yearbook photo is shown above.

He went to Temple University for two years, but just as it is today, a college education was expensive. Tom was determined, so he worked a day shift as a clerk at the Atlantic Refinery on Passyunk Avenue and went to night school at the University of Pennsylvania.

The world was at war, again, so Tom chose to join the Naval Reserve on April 23, 1942. He completed boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Training Station north of Chicago, then had additional training at the University of Chicago and Pensacola Air Base in Florida to become an Aviation Radioman. They were based  on aircraft carriers as operators, technicians, or as part of the flight crew. With over 20,000 carrier-based aircraft, thousands of men were needed for this job.

Besides learning communication skills and operating aircraft radio equipment, an ArM had gunnery school and aviation training. Tom’s obituary says he also flew solo in a Grumman F6F Hellcat, the dominant fighter in the second half of the Pacific War that debuted in September of 1943. 

He was stationed in Hawaii in February of 1944, but was killed in action on April 5 somewhere in the south Pacific, presumably in the dive-bomber. His body was never recovered and he was posthumously awarded the Purple Heart.

Tom is remembered at The Honolulu Memorial within the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific. The names of 18,000 World War II military personnel who are missing in action or were lost or buried at sea in the Pacific are inscribed on marble slabs in eight “Courts of the Missing.” He is also memorialized with this family gravestone, beneath the names of his parents. His brother Allen became a sergeant in the 6th Army Air Forces Radio Squadron and was buried in Section C, Range 6, Lot 1.