Airman Missing in Action from WWII Identified

            The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of a serviceman, missing in action from World War II, have been identified and are being returned to his family for burial with full military honors.

            Army Air Forces 2^nd Lt. Martin P. Murray, 21, of Lowell, Mass., will be buried on April 16 in Marshfield, Mass.  Murray, along with 11 other crew members, took off on Oct. 27, 1943, in their B-24D Liberator from an airfield near Port Moresby, New Guinea.  Allied plans were being formulated to mount an attack on the Japanese redoubt at Rabaul, New Britain.  

The crew’s assigned area of reconnaissance was the nearby shipping lanes in the Bismarck Sea.  But during their mission, they were radioed to land at a friendly air strip nearby due to poor weather conditions.  The last radio transmission from the crew did not indicate their location.  Multiple search missions in the following weeks did not locate the aircraft.

Read More at the U.S. Department of Defense

Missing WWII Naval Aviators Identified

The Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of two servicemen, missing in action from World War II, have been identified and are being returned to their families for burial with full military honors.

Navy Lt. Francis B. McIntyre of Mitchell, S.D., will be buried on Sept. 29, and Aviation Radioman Second Class William L. Russell of Cherokee, Okla., will be buried on Oct. 1. Both men will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

On Nov. 10, 1943, the two men took off on a bombing and strafing mission in their SBD-5 Dauntless dive bomber from Munda Field, New Georgia, in the Solomon Islands. Witnesses last saw the aircraft flying at low altitude through a large explosion on an enemy airfield on Buka Island, Papua New Guinea. None reported seeing the crash of the aircraft itself.

The American Graves Registration Service searched numerous South Pacific Islands in 1949 in an effort to gather data about aircraft crashes or missing Americans. The team was unable to find any useful information, and failed to recover any American remains in the area. A board of review declared both men unrecoverable.

In 2007, a Papuan national found a World War II crash site near the Buka airport, which was reported to U.S. officials. In May 2008, specialists from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), working with the country’s national museum, investigated the crash site but were unable to excavate it because of inclement weather. Local officials turned over human remains, McIntyre’s identification tag and other military-related items which had been recovered earlier. After examining the remains in 2008 and 2009, JPAC determined that no excavation would be required since the two sets of remains were nearly complete.

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC used dental comparisons for both men and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used mitochondrial DNA which matched a sample from Russell’s relatives and DNA extracted from a hat belonging to McIntyre.

At the end of World War II, the U.S. government was unable to recover, identify and bury approximately 79,000 individuals. Today, more than 72,000 Americans remain unaccounted-for from the conflict.

Source "Departement of Defense"

Hills reveal WWII secret

Arunachal teacher braves fear to find plane remains
ATONU CHOUDHURRI
(From "The Telegraph", Calcutta - India)



The metal plate from the aircraft. (Telegraph pictures)


Itanagar, June 20: A village schoolteacher’s personal challenge to his clan’s fear of the unknown has led him to the wreckage of a World War II aircraft on a perilous wooded hill in Arunachal Pradesh.

Tani Bagang, 28, had heard legendary tales of how sightings of arre — “mystery object” in the Nyishi language — on the hill would scare off his ancestors. Ten days ago, he decided to see it for himself.

Braving snakes and poor weather, he trekked alone for seven days, losing his way once in the remote hill forests, before stumbling on mangled pieces of metal. A little further down, where the hill sloped towards a gorge, he lifted a veil of foliage to find a metal plate. A skeleton and four-inch bullets lay nearby.

The inscription on the plate said: ST 95T6 BLACK HAWK 7.26.1943SPMCO. The schoolteacher realised he may have discovered the wreckage of a WWII aircraft that probably crash-landed at the spot.


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Mass. researcher says he has ID'd 7 MIAs from WWII

By DAVID DISHNEAU
Associated Press Writer
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin


SUITLAND, Md. (AP) -- A private researcher who has labored for years to identify the remains of U.S. service members declared missing in action during World War II says he has matched seven MIAs with the remains of unknowns and he expects to match as many as 19 more within a week.




In this photo taken Tuesday, June 8, 2010, Ted Darcy, of Fall River, Mass., is surrounded by documents on his research into the identity of soldiers missing in action from WWII, while at the National Records Center in Suitland, Md. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)




Ted Darcy's list of five Marines and two sailors missing since the 1944 Battle of Saipan may not sound long. But his announcement Tuesday - the 66th anniversary of the battle's opening day - was remarkable, considering the military's average of confirming 72 such matches annually from all U.S. wars.

Darcy, a retired Marine Corps gunnery sergeant from Fall River, Mass., has helped bring home three WWII MIAs since 1991 from burial sites in the Philippines, Hawaii and Newport, R.I. Now he is accelerating his work using computerized databases filled with information he painstakingly entered from two sets of government documents: those containing physical descriptions of MIAs and those containing autopsies of slain service members buried as unknowns.

He hands over his findings to the military, which then tries to verify his work.

It sounds simple, but the identifications are the fruit of 20 years' labor by Darcy, who says he's determined to bring home thousands of missing WWII fighters.

"If I can bring home 4,500 American MIAs, I'll be a happy camper," he said in a recent interview at the Washington National Records Center, a federal repository in Suitland, just east of the nation's capital.

Soft-spoken, with a thatch of curly, salt-and-pepper hair, Darcy, 59, runs a business, WFI Research Group, that digs up details of decades-old battles for other WWII researchers at $50 an hour. But he doesn't charge MIAs' families to find their loved ones, usually buried anonymously in distant cemeteries under white marble crosses inscribed, "Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God."

The Associated Press isn't naming those identified by Darcy unless they have been officially confirmed.

There are nearly 88,000 American MIAs, including 78,000 from WWII, according to the Pentagon's Defense Prisoner of War-Missing Personnel Office. Darcy says he has located the remains of nearly 9,000 unidentified WWII fighters, and he hopes to put names to at least half of them.

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