Navy LCDR Bryon Eberle "Cookie" Cooke was born in Marshall, Texas on April 21, 1915, the son of Eberle "Ebb" C. Cooke (1876-1932) and Mary Elizabeth "Bessie" Strange (1884-1956). For the most part, his father supported his family as a farmer in Harrison County, Texas. Cookie would enlist in the Navy sometime around 1933 before entering the US Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1935 (Class of 1939). Volunteering for the flight program, he reported to NAS Pensacola. Here, he met and married Miss Olivia Muriel Bobe in c1943, a Pensacola High School girl of the Class of 1939.
During WWII, he was sent to the Pacific around October 1943 and stationed aboard the USS Yorktown as the commanding officer of Torpedo Squadron (VT-9). There he would receive three "Distinguished Flying Crosses" for heroism and dedication to duty. In a seven month period, he flew combat missions over Wake, Rabaul, Tarawa, Saipan, Tinian, Guam, and the Marshalls. One DFC was for combat over Truk Island on the 16th & 17th of February 1944.
As the war was coming to its bloody end, the high command was preparing for the invasion of the Japanese homeland. This meant they needed Okinawa for its airbases and as a staging area. The Navy was ordered to begin bombing missions to prepare for the invasion of April 1, 1945. To that end, a mission was ordered on March 26th with the fighters and bombers from the USS Yorktown participating. In flight, Byron's right wing collided with a Hellcat fighter flown by Lt. Frederick Michael Fox (1918-2007). The collision caused Byron to crash, killing him, his radioman Norman Bruce Brown, and his gunner Robert T. Mathews. Fox's Hellcat crash landed, but he survived. The bodies of the three TBM crewmen were eventually recovered, with Cooke and Brown being removed to Arlington Cemetery in June of 1950, and buried in a common grave. Matthews was buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.
Olivia was notified by the war department and the family surrounded her to console her for the loss of her husband. Sadly, her sister Annie Mae (PHS Class of 1937) had lost her husband, Thomas Joshua Coker only seven weeks before. He had been killed in a glider crash with the Army's 327th Infantry Regiment in the Ruhr Valley, Germany.
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