I previously wrote about the return and burial of Pfc John A. Donovan, USMC. He and six fellow Marines were lost when their aircraft crashed on the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu, on 23 April 1944.
The Department of Defense today announced that the identification and return of remains for the crew is now complete. A group burial will be held at Arlington National Ceremony on Thursday, 4 October 2012.
The individuals in that ill-fated flight crew were Marine Corps 1st Lt. Laverne A. Lallathin of Raymond, Wash.; 2nd Lt. Dwight D. Ekstam of Moline, IL; 2nd Lt. Walter B. Vincent, Jr. of Tulsa, OK; Tech. Sgt. James A. Sisney of Redwood City, CA; Cpl. Wayne R. Erickson of Minneapolis, MN; Cpl. John D. Yeager of Pittsburgh, PA; and Pfc. John A. Donovan of Plymouth, MI. All but 1st Lt Lallathin have been previously identified and interred in individual ceremonies. 1st Lt Lallathin’s remains will be also interred individually in a separate ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery on 4 October 2012.
In separate announcements last week, the Department of Defense announced that the remains of Army Air Forces 2LT Samuel E. Lunday, of Marianna, FL, and USMC Pfc. Richard S. Gzik, of Toledo, OH, have been identified. Their remains will also be returned to their families for burial with military honors.
2LT Lunday and four others were lost on 24 April 1943 when their C-87 aircraft did not return to its home base in Chabua, India, from an “Over the Hump” resupply mission to China. In 2003 the aircraft’s crash site was located near the Burmese border approximately 100 miles away from Chabua. Several artifacts from the aircraft, along with some human remains, were recovered and turned over to US authorities at that time. The remains returned were identified as Lunday’s through mitochondrial DNA testing from maternal-line relatives. Negotiations are underway with the government of India to allow excavation of the crash site.
Pfc. Gzik was KIA west of the Chosin Reservoir, North Korea, on 2 December 1950. His remains were buried alongside the road leading to Hagaru-ri. However, the US retreat from the Chosin Reservoir later that month made recovery of his remains impossible at the time. Gzik’s remains were returned to US control in 1954 during an exchange of war dead with North Korea, but could not be definitively identified using then-current technology. They were reburied as Unknown at National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Hawaii (the “Punchbowl”). Subsequent advances in technology led to subsequent reexamination and identification of Pfc. Gzik’s remains earlier this year.
A belated welcome home, my elder brothers-in-arms. Rest now in peace – at home.
I am glad to see these men finally being brought home. My father’s uncle was lost in 1943, as a engineer/top turret gunner on a B-24J flying to Hawaii from Hamilton Field in California. No chance of ever finding that crew. I am glad that these families have the closure that comes with finding their loved ones. I have found a great website that details a guy who searches for CBI MIA crews on his own. I have really enjoyed looking through his site at the crash sites he has found with the pictures and the crash reports. My mother’s father was a radio operator assigned to the EW(Early Warning) radio sites in the Naga Hills between India and Burma from 1942 to 1944. When I see the crash reports, I often wonder if he talked to any of those crews when they were trying to get their bearings so they could try to get home. If anybody wants to look at the site, the link is here: http://www.miarecoveries.org/index.html
Never Forget.
As I was doing some background on the guy whose site I listed above, Clayton Kuhles, I came across a 2009 article on Huffpost about him. I thought I would share an excerpt from it. Some of the things in it were stuff that I didn’t know about JPAC. I sure hope their budget situation has gotten better since then. I know they have to forecast, but I think the spokesman could have been a little more subtle. Here’s the excerpt:
When Zaetz found out his uncle’s plane, named Hot as Hell, had been found, he and the survivors of his uncle’s crew tried to get the attention of the Defense Department’s Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) but made little progress. The agency’s 400-person staff spends $55 million per year to conduct expensive, high-tech and time-consuming investigations all over the globe. Its excavations result in the recovery of about 100 service members a year.
The Hot as Hell families say the agency initially told them that the case was not a priority, and that the Indian government was not giving them permission to visit the remote area where Kuhles had found the wreckage. But they kept pushing, urging members of Congress for help and taking their case to the media. Last fall, JPAC sent an expedition and returned to excavate the site in January but were snowed out. A third government-run mission is scheduled to depart his month, more than three years after Kuhles filed his report to JPAC.
“I do feel the U.S. basically closed the books on World War II MIAs around 1950 and only began looking at them again in the 1970s when the whole MIA issue became visible politically as a result of lobbying by Vietnam War MIA families,” said Zaetz, 55, of Cary, N.C. “But as the years continued, the focus continued to remain solely on the Vietnam War MIAs, with token attention to the vastly larger number of WWII MIAs.”
No law requires JPAC to respond within any length of time to credible information of MIAs’ whereabouts, but a provision in the recently passed Defense Authorization Act does requires the agency to recover the remains of about 200 service members per year by 2015. What it doesn’t include is any additional funding, said Larry Greer, spokesman for the Defense POW/MIA Personnel Office at the Pentagon, which is responsible for assisting JPAC with policy and diplomatic issues related to conducting searches and excavations on foreign soil.
JPAC’s spokesman, Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, said the group welcomes the information Kuhles provided but that its tight budget requires it to plan out a year in advance which leads to investigate. JPAC has nearly 700 sets of remains to identify at its lab on Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii, and priority for field expeditions usually goes to sites that are somehow threatened by physical turmoil.
“To those families, it’s very important, but that mission is one of thousands for us,” Perry said. “Unless that mountainside is going to be developed or something, there’s not a reason for us to rush to go there.”
John Lenox and the aging relatives of other World War II veterans disagree. His mother is 92, and he’d like the government to return her some remains for a proper military burial of her long-lost husband before she dies.
End excerpt.
Here’s the link to the article: http://www.aolnews.com/2009/11/11/veteran-day-feature/