EDWARDS, CHARLES – MAJOR, USAF
Class of 1935Service: U.S. Army Air Corps
MOS: PILOT
Maj. Charles Graham Edwards, Squadron Commander, Panama Canal Zone
Maj. Charles Graham Edwards died in a plane crash in Panama in 1945.
He was born on Aug. 20, 1917, in Wilmington, New Hanover County, North Carolina, to William McGee Edwards, a grocer, and Mary Caroline “Mamie” Page Edwards, a homemaker to their three sons: Furney, Eugene, and Charles.
Charles grew up in Wilmington and was a star football and baseball player at New Hanover High School and at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, class of ’39. He received honorable mention on two All-America college football teams.
“At the conclusion of his college career, he received professional football bids from the Chicago Cardinals and a Canadian team, in addition to baseball feelers from the Athletics, Red Sox and Tigers,” The Wilmington Morning Star reported in 1943.
“He turned all of them down and decided upon a military aviation career.”
He received his silver pilot’s “wings” in 1940 and trained fighter pilots at Randolph and Foster fields in Texas. On June 11, 1942, he married Miss Josephine Sevenoaks Chadwick of San Antonio, Texas. He was 24 and she was 20.
In February 1945, he was sent to Panama as a squadron commander. By then a major, his service number was O-379683.
On April 21, 1945, he was crushed and burned to death in an airplane accident near Chame, Panama. He was 27 years old. He was buried in Corozal American Cemetery in Panama and reinterred in 1948 in Oakdale Cemetery in Wilmington.
His widow Josephine remarried and died in 2020. She was about 98.