1943 Servicemen Aircraft Accident Memorial
Smithfield, Providence County, Rhode Island
Marker Inscription
On This Location 5 August 1943 Three U. S. Servicemen Perished In An Aircraft Accident 2 LT Otis R. Portewig Richmond VA 1 SGT Herbert D. Booth Rahway NJ 2 LT Saul Winsten Pawtucket RI
The Story
In the summer of 1943, the United States was deep in World War II, and the skies over the home front were crowded with military aircraft ferrying crews, training airmen, and testing planes bound for the war effort. Accidents were tragically common: thousands of servicemen died not in combat overseas but in crashes on American soil. This marker in Smithfield remembers three such men — an officer from Virginia, a sergeant from New Jersey, and a lieutenant from nearby Pawtucket — who lost their lives together when their aircraft went down on August 5, 1943.
Why it matters
It preserves the memory of the many Americans who gave their lives in uniform far from any battlefield, a reminder that the cost of the war was paid in training fields and quiet crash sites across the country as well as abroad.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the summer of 1943, the United States had been at war for a year and a half, and the effort touched every corner of the home front. Factories ran around the clock, families followed the fighting through newsreels and letters, and the skies over America filled with the drone of military aircraft. Rhode Island, small as it was, played its part — its coastline, airfields, and proximity to the great ports and industries of the Northeast made it a busy corner of a nation mobilized for total war.
The air war demanded pilots and crews in numbers no country had ever trained before, and almost all of that training happened at home. Young men who had rarely traveled far from their hometowns were taught to fly, navigate, and maintain fast, complicated machines, often in crowded airspace and in all kinds of weather. It was urgent, high-pressure work, and it carried real danger long before anyone reached a combat zone.
That is the backdrop for this quiet memorial in Smithfield. On an ordinary day in August 1943, the war's cost arrived here not from a distant battlefield but from the sky overhead.
People & events
On August 5, 1943, three American servicemen lost their lives in an aircraft accident on this spot. The marker records their names, ranks, and hometowns — the essential facts a community wanted never to be forgotten.
Two of them were young officers: Second Lieutenant Otis R. Portewig of Richmond, Virginia, and Second Lieutenant Saul Winsten of nearby Pawtucket, Rhode Island. With them was First Sergeant Herbert D. Booth of Rahway, New Jersey. They had come from different states and different walks of life, drawn together, as so many were in those years, by a war that reshuffled the whole country.
Winsten's hometown of Pawtucket sits just a short drive from here, a reminder that for at least one of these men, this was home ground. The others had traveled far from Virginia and New Jersey to serve. What exactly happened in the air that day, the marker does not say — and it is right not to guess. What it does preserve is the simple, sobering truth that three men died together, in service, on this ground.
Its place in the American story
It is easy to picture the losses of World War II as happening "over there" — on beaches, in bombers over Europe, on Pacific islands. But a great many American servicemen died on home soil, in training flights, ferrying missions, and accidents during the enormous work of preparing for war. Thousands lost their lives this way, far from any enemy.
Those deaths were no less real to the families who received the telegrams, and no less a part of the war's true cost. A memorial like this one insists on that truth. It marks a place where the war's price was paid quietly, without headlines, by men whose names might otherwise have faded from memory.
Across the country, small markers like this one form a kind of scattered national memorial — each one local, personal, and specific. Together they tell a story the big monuments can miss: that the sacrifice of the war reached into ordinary towns and touched the ground beneath ordinary lives.
If you visit
This is a place for a pause, not a crowd. Come expecting something modest — a memorial that speaks in three names and a single date rather than in grand gestures. The power here is in its quiet.
Take a moment to read the names slowly: Portewig of Richmond, Booth of Rahway, Winsten of Pawtucket. Notice how far two of them traveled from home, and how close the third began. Standing here, it is worth looking up at the same sky they flew in, and imagining an ordinary summer day in 1943 suddenly turned tragic.
If you are traveling through the Providence area, this makes a fitting, reflective stop — easily paired with other Rhode Island history nearby. Bring nothing but your attention. The best thing you can offer a place like this is simply to remember that it happened, and that these three men were here.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · 2 Lt Otis R. Portewig
- · 1 Sgt Herbert D. Booth
- · 2 Lt Saul Winsten
Related events
- · World War II
- · August 5, 1943 military aircraft accident
Themes & tags
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