Smokejumper Obituary: Greene, Melvin L. (Missoula 1942)

Authors

National Smokejumper Association

Files

Obituary

Melvin "Smoke" Greene, Colonel, USAF (Ret.), died January 20, 2014, at age 95. He was born April 12, 1918, in Columbia Falls, MT. Smoke graduated from Talbott H.S. in Columbia Falls and worked for the Forest Service as a teenager in Montana. He started college at the School of Mines in Butte before joining the smokejumpers in 1942. In 1943 he left college early to join the Army Air Corps. He was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant and trained as a Flight Engineer on the new B-29s flying from Guam in the Pacific. On his sixth mission in April 1945, his plane was hit by a kamikaze pilot over Nagoya, Japan. After parachuting from the plane, he was captured and spent the remainder of the war as a POW in Omori Prison near Tokyo. Smoke continued his military career retiring as a full colonel in 1972 after 29 years of service. In 1986 his wife, Martha, died and he relocated from Austin to the Air Force Village in San Antonio where he lived for the next 22 years before moving back to Austin in 2008 where he later died of natural causes.

Identifier

Greene_Melvin-L_Missoula_1942

Publication Date

August 2014

Keywords

Smokejumping; Smokejumpers -- United States; National Smokejumper Association; Wildfire fighters; Obituaries

Disciplines

Forest Management

Recommended Citation

National Smokejumper Association, "Smokejumper Obituary: Greene, Melvin L. (Missoula 1942)" (2014). Smokejumper Obituaries. 820.
https://dc.ewu.edu/smokejumper_bios/820