Grave IVa. E. 27, in the Commonwealth Grave Cemetery. Cenotaph

A standard upright British military inscribed gravestone.

The cenotaph remembers First Lieutenant Max Eugene “Skip” Dowden, a US Army Air Corps Pilot who was killed while serving with the Royal Air Force (RAF) on May 22, 1944.

Dowden was born in 1916 in New York and grew up in California.  At the start of the war he enlisted in pilot training with the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF).  His first assignment was to ferry planes from North American to Britain.  He later shifted back to the US Military, but soon was on loan to assist the RAF with bombing missions.

Dowden was assigned to the RAF 625 Squadron, a Lancaster Bomber unit.  He lead several missions with his crew and became a strong team leader as a proven pilot with his British crew.  On the crew’s 19th mission together to Duisberg, Germany, Dowden’s plane was shot down.  Dowden and his fellow Pilot Officer Francis H. R. Moody were killed guiding the plane to safety near Antwerp, Belgium; the other five crew members were able to safely escape and became POWs for the remainder of the war.

Max Dowden is officially listed as Missing in Action on the Tablets of the Missing at the Cambridge Cemetery and Memorial in the UK.  He is also remembered as "Believed to be Here" gravestone at the Schoonselhof Commonwealth Graves Commission (CWGC) Cemetery in Belgium. His fellow crew-mate, Francis Moody, is buried nearby at grave site IVa. E. 10.

Source: Aircrew Remembered.com

More on the Dowden Grave from the American Overseas Memorial Day Association Belgium (https://aomda.org/en/content/aomda-foundation):

The reason why AOMDA does not list Dowden as an isolated grave is that there is considerable doubt that Dowden is actually buried there, and it is more likely that he is buried in an unknown grave at the Ardennes American Cemetery.  The sole reason why the grave at Schoonselhof is marked as “believed to be” Max Dowden is that, during the 1980s, one of Dowden’s crew members visited the cemetery in order to pay his respects to other crew members who are buried there.  He saw that there was a grave marked unknown next to the graves of the other crew members that died on the same mission.  This surviving crew member petitioned the Commonwealth War Graves Commission to replace the unknown grave marker with the grave marker “believed to be” Max Dowden, and the CWGC did so.  However, there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Dowden is actually buried in that grave.  Moreover, in the American files, there is evidence to suggest that one of the unknowns at the Ardennes American Cemetery could be Dowden, but that could not be proven with the technology that was available in the 1950s.  (Unlike the CWGC, the US does not put a name on a grave unless the identity of the person is 100% certain.)  We have reported Dowden’s case to DPAA, and asked that they investigate.

BELIEVED TO BE

LIEUTENANT

M.E. DOWDEN

UNITED STATES ARMY AIR FORCE

22 MAY 1944  AGE 28

DIED AS HE SERVED

WITH THE RCAF 

(RCAF- Royal Canadian Air Force)