Lieutenant McClure's home town was Indianapolis, Indiana. He was 22 years old when he died on Sharp Top Mountain, near Bedford, Virginia, on February 2, 1943, in the crash of a B25D U.S. Air Corps "Mitchell" bomber. The following tribute was printed by The Indianapolis Star
FROM OUR MIDST
The war struck cruelly home to members of The Star's staff when news was received of the death of Lieutenant William Carson McClure, who was injured fatally in the crash of an army plane near Bedford, VA, Tuesday night. Older members of the staff had watched Bill, the eldest son of William L. McClure, day assistant managing editor of The Star, and Jane Carson, former society editor of this paper, grow up from a toddler. Younger members had worked shoulder to shoulder with him in the city room. He was one of us.
No finer man than young Bill McClure ever joined The Star's staff. Starting as a copy boy, he worked his way up to a position as an efficient and dependable reporter while he was still a student at Butler University, just as he later won his wings and his commission in the Army Force the "hard way" through a year of toil and sweat. Life had everything to offer him, yet months before this country entered the war he began quietly and industriously to prepare to do his share, and more, for what he believed was right.
Bill McClure had many friends, but closest to him were Stewart Kranuss, missing on a flight off Hawaii since last March, and Ted Shadinger, who died in a Marine Corps plane crash on the Pacific Coast on the same day that Bill kept his final rendezvous on a Virginia mountain peak. Almost inseparable boyhood chums, the three were Sigma Nu college fraternity Brothers....
Bill McClure is gone from a world that sorely needs young men of his caliber... and now, more than ever, it has become a war that must be won. It must be won for Bill McClure, for Ted Shadinger, for Stewart Krauss... and for thousands of others like them.
Bill McClure was like that. And during the hard months of first separation from family ties that had been tender and close, during long grueling days of grinding work and exacting study, no word of complaint or discouragement ever reached his home or his intimates. Bill McClure was like that, too, and all his friends know, too, that he must have died as gallantly as he had lived.
Three bomber pilots from Epsilon Mu Chapter at Butler University: Lieutenant Stewart Krauss, missing since March 25, 1942; Lieutenant William Carson McClure and Lieutenant Dallas F. Shadinger
