of Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Sergeant Maurice J. Aucoin, 21, of Houston, Texas. "Next of kin have been notified, and an investigation by a board of officers has been called to determine the cause of the crash." 31 July Eight crew members and International News Service correspondent John Cashman, 27, were killed when their Consolidated B-24 Liberator exploded on take-off from Okinawa. Cashman, who lost his left arm to an ammunition explosion while on Navy sea duty in the Atlantic in May 1942, was honorably discharged in December of that year. He later became a sportswriter and correspondent for the INS, was sent to Guam in February 1945 and covered the invasion of Borneo. Cashman was en route from Borneo to Guam to cover the experiences of XXI Bomber Command crews over Japan when he was killed. A military funeral was held for Cashman on Okinawa, attended by high naval officers, on 1 August. 1 August USAAF Canadian Vickers OA-10A Catalina 44-34096, en route from Hunter Field, Georgia, to Mather Field, California, crashed in the Cibola National Forest 25 miles southwest of Grants, New Mexico after an apparent engine failure, killing its seven crew members: Lt. Wilson Parker, Lt. William Bartlett, Lt. James Garland, Sgt. Irwin Marcus, Sgt. Robert Crook, Sgt. Harold Post and Sgt. John Jackson. The airframe was so badly damaged that no determination of the cause could be made. 2 August Lockheed YP-80A Shooting Star 44-83029 (c/n 080-1008) of the 1st Fighter Group as of April 1945 crashed near Brandenburg, Kentucky, killing pilot Major Ira Boyd Jones, 25, of Lancaster, South Carolina. The plane left Wright Field in Ohio shortly after 2 pm on a routine test flight to an unspecified army air field in Texas, said Brig. Gen. Joseph T. Morris, commanding general of Wright Field. "Eight-year-old Chester and Martha Smedley, 14, of near Brandenburg, said they saw a 'big explosion' in the sky. Their father, Sheriff Alex Smedley of Meade county [sic], added that the explosion blew the wings loose from the fuselage, landing 200 or 300 feet apart. Maj. Jones' body, the sheriff said, was found about a quarter of a mile from the wreckage." Maj. Jones, a fighter pilot with 11 months of service in the China-Burma-India theatre, was attached to the fighter test branch at Wright Field. The son of Mrs. Mary C. Jones of Lancaster, South Carolina, he was a