Friends, family and Greenfield residents honor decorated World War II veteran Maurice Bowes at a ceremony Saturday at Greenvale Cemetery in Greenfield.
Bowes, who grew up in Greenfield, passed away Dec. 11, 2025. He would have turned 103 on Jan. 1.
A former POW, Bowes served with distinction in World War II, serving as both first engineer and top turret gunner on a B24 bomber in the European theater. He was awarded a Purple Heart, two Oak Leaf clusters and an Air Medal for his valor.
Service members from the U.S. Army performed a flag-folding ceremony at the Bowes family plot at Greenvale Cemetery, where Bowes’ grave marker is surrounded by several generations of his family.
After returning from the war, Bowes ran the family business, Windy Hill Florists in Greenfield, for many years before raising his family in Marlborough. He also served on the Greenfield Fire Department.
Chaplain Charbel Semaan of HCS Healthcare in Keene, who officiated the ceremony, said Bowes was a man of incredible optimism and energy and had an enduring faith.
After growing up in Greenfield, where his parents had commercial greenhouses, Bowes went into the Army Air Corps in 1943, at the age of 20. After training in Louisiana, Bowes joined the 98th Bombardment Group as a flight engineer on a B-24 bomber.
According to the Maurice Bowes papers in the UNH Library Archive, Bowes’ aircraft was shot down over Romania in July 1944. Bowes was taken as a prisoner of war in Bucharest and held for a month until Romania surrendered to the Allies at the end of August.
According to his family, Bowes said the mission in which he shot down was the first time he had not been flying in B-24 “Silver Queen,” which he called his “good luck plane.” Bowes, who was injured in the crash, was commended for his bravery in getting his entire crew out of the plane.
While Bowes was missing in action in 1944, Greenfield residents created a wooden honor roll memorial listing the names of soldiers who had been killed or were missing in action. The town asked Bowes’ mother, Elva, to unveil the memorial.
In 1955, the Greenfield Improvement Association decided to dedicate the town park on Otter Lake to Greenfield’s World War II veterans and create a permanent stone memorial to replace the wooden memorial. Bowes and other World War II veterans were present at the dedication.
Greenfield State Park later absorbed the town park and town beach, and the memorial stone was moved to a different location within the state park.
In 1998, Bowes, who was then living in Marlborough, learned that the World War II memorial stone had been moved to the lawn of Stephenson Library, adjacent to the plaque commemorating the veterans of World War I. Bowes was determined that the stone be moved back to Otter Lake and remain on the land that had been forever dedicated to Greenfield’s World War II veterans, and personally organized and funded the stone’s return to Otter Lake, where it remains today.