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September 2017 36 Find Us On Facebook at Boating On The Hudson
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the wars.
During the Battle of Midway in 1942, Commodore Kiefer
survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Yorktown and was wounded
while saving other sailors. During the kamikaze attacks on the
Ticonderoga, he ordered the ship maneuvered in a way that
saved many lives, even while he was badly wounded. He was
also featured in “The Fighting Lady,” a 1945 Academy Award-
winning documentary.
Mr. Keith agreed to write a book with Mr. Rocco, who sent
him a large box of research material he had gathered. The
result is the recently published biography, “The Indestructible
Man: The True Story of WorldWar II Hero ‘Captain Dixie’.”
Mr. Rocco’s own serendipitous path to memorializing the
crash stems from volunteer crusades that included efforts
to get an old rail bridge crossing the Hudson River near
Poughkeepsie, N.Y., renovated into the Walkway Over the
Hudson pedestrian bridge that opened to the public in 2009.
Afterward, Mr. Rocco turned his sights to renovating
theMount Beacon FireTower, duringwhichhewas toldby local
residents about two Navy plane crashes on Mount Beacon: the
1945 crash, and one in 1935 that killed two servicemen whose
remains have not been found.
One of those local residents was an avid hiker and dentist, Dr.
Bill Stolfi, 59, who had come upon the crash site after hiking
Mount Beacon for years. Dr. Stolfi began taking people to the
site and marking the trail with small flags. He replaced a small
wooden marker at the site with the plaque, which is posted
under a laminated New York Times article by the Pulitzer Prize
winning journalist and columnist Meyer Berger.
The article describes how the six servicemen, after attending
an Army-Notre Dame football game at Yankee Stadium, were
flying back to the Quonset Naval Base in Rhode Island, where
Commodore Kiefer was the commander. The pilot went off
course, “obviously lost in the soupy fog,”Mr. Berger wrote.
At the crash site on a recent weekday, Mr. Rocco replaced some
of the smaller weathered flags and adjusted the hanging ones.
He pulled out two small boxes containing Commodore Kiefer’s
Navy medals, which he obtained from a friend of the Kiefer
family.
The “indestructible man”was less concerned with medals than
the welfare of his sailors, Mr. Rocco said, adding that 240 of
Commodore Kiefer’s men rushed from the base to help with the
rescue efforts.
After a 15-hour search, Commodore Kiefer’s cap was found
along with his charred remains. He was 49.
“There were a lot of bummed-out people when they found out
Dixie Kiefer was among the dead,” Mr. Rocco said as he began
his labored descent back down the trail blazed by the rescuers.
Mr. Rocco near what
remains of the Navy plane
that crashed in 1945.
Masuike/The
New York Times
Posted on a tree above pieces of wreckage is a New York
Times article from Nov. 13, 1945, about the crash
Masuike/The New York Times