MORE FROM TED DARCY


NEWS RELEASE

JOINT POW/MIA ACCOUNTING COMMAND (JPAC)

Public Affairs
(808) 448-1936
www.jpac.pacom.mil
public_affairs@jpac.pacom.mil

RELEASE NO. #06-10
March 9, 2006

WORLD WAR II-ERA AIRMAN IDENTIFIED

HICKAM AFB, HAWAII – Following today’s official notification of next-of-kin, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command confirms the identity of a U.S. World War II Aviation cadet found last October in the Kings Canyon National Park, Calif.

In October 2005, hikers in Kings Canyon National Park reported finding what appeared to be human remains. Park personnel excavated and transferred the remains to the Fresno County Coroner. The remains were then transferred to JPAC for identification.

JPAC identified the unknown man as Leo Mustonen, an Army Air Forces cadet who died in a 1942 flight mission while traveling over the national park.

U.S. Army officials briefed the Mustonen family today in Jacksonville, Florida. Funeral arrangements are pending at this time.

To identify the cadet, JPAC scientists used a biological profile, historical evidence, material evidence and DNA sampling.

JPAC Analyst Aaron Lehl is the author of the Mustonen historical analytical report. Lehl said one challenging aspect in this particular case was trying to answer the question: ‘Why was the aircraft so far east?’

The aircraft was located approximately 120 miles east of where it should have been according to the original flight plan.

“The records were clear that the plane went missing with four crewmen aboard, that hikers found the site several years later, and that a search team recovered remains from the site later identified as representing the group remains of all four airmen aboard,” Lehl explained.

“The historical record provides no information suggesting possible reasons the aircraft was so far east. Material evidence recovered from the crash site, however, indicates without a doubt that it crashed there. Why it was in the area remains an unknown,” Lehl said.

Material evidence included a corroded name badge. With forensic techniques, scientist illuminated several letters that indicated the name was Mustonen. Though the badge evidence surfaced early in the case, it remained circumstantial evidence until JPAC scientists had additional facts linking the remains to Mustonen.

A U.S. Army Air Forces collar insignia was also among the collection of material evidence. The insignia was unique to pins worn by officers and cadets in the U.S. Army Air Forces.
JPAC forensic anthropologist Paul Emanovsky deployed to California to help recover the remains.

“I was very pleased to see that a portion of the name had been preserved on the name badge. The badge was very corroded and that information could easily have been lost. While by itself the badge is not definitive proof of the individual’s identity, it is one more piece of the puzzle that can be put together to form the overall identification packet,” he said.

At first glance some of the items found with this individual may seem to be of little identification value, such as coins and a fountain pen found with Mustonen, Emanovsky said.

“However, in actuality these are very important for providing contextual information,” Emanovsky said, “and in some cases even seemingly mundane items yield a lot of personal information about the decedent. It is very rewarding to know that I helped return these items to his family members after so many years. My guess is that these items will hold a great deal of sentimental value for them.”

While historical and material evidence helped link the cadet to the plane and crash site, one last piece of evidence was needed for a conclusive identification.

This evidence came in the form of mitochondrial DNA, a type of DNA passed through the maternal line. Surviving relatives representing three of the four crewmembers provided suitable DNA samples. The DNA from the cadet did not match the comparison samples, consequently leaving only one possible individual: Leo A. Mustonen.

-END-

MEDIA ADVISORY:

The Mustonen family has asked media representatives contact Shari Lawrence; Deputy Public Affairs Officer; U.S. Army Human Resources Command; Alexandria, Va., at 703-946-0791 for more information. The family will not be taking any media requests for interviews.

JPAC can answer inquiries relating to the identification process, and its mission to accounting for the more than 88,000 missing service members.



World War II Vet’s Remains Never Recovered

March 19, 2006
By Pamela Lewis Dolan / Post-Tribune staff writer

A gravestone at Westville Cemetery bears the name of Harry Warnke. But for more than 60 years, the grave below it has remained empty.

Warnke’s older sister, his only immediate family member still living, hopes this will be the year her brother’s remains finally make their way back home.

The Warnke family placed the headstone at the family plot after their beloved son and brother, Navy Ensign Harry Warnke, went missing during World War II. The Gary family was told he crashed his F6F-3 Hellcat aircraft into the sea on June 15, 1944.

But in 1991, Warnke’s sister, Myrtle Tice, who now lives in Arizona, got a phone call from a man named Ted Darcy, saying he found her brother’s airplane in the Koolau Range on Hawaii’s Oahu Island —

and Warnke’s remains were still there.

“I have no idea how they found out (he was there),” said Tice. The family never questioned the information it was given, she said.

“That’s the sad part,” she said. Her parents went to their graves believing their only son was forever missing. For the past 17 years, Darcy, a retired Marine and World War II historian, has been working on a comprehensive database of all World War II’s missing, and the locations of their remains. Earlier this month, Darcy completed his database of 72,617 names.

His database is thought to be the most comprehensive in the world — more so even than the records held by the United States. He hopes one day the government will hire him as a consultant to help bring the men home.

When Darcy called Tice 15 years ago, he assumed she knew her brother was on the Koolau mountainside somewhere. Dozens of military records, which Darcy used for his research, told the precise story of what happened to Warnke that June morning in 1944.

That information never made it to the Warnke home in the 600 block of Carolina Street in Gary.

A young pilot

Warnke, a 1939 graduate of Emerson High School, took an interest in aviation at a young age.

He was a member of the Vulcanaires, a flying club based at the Gary Airport that prepared men for the military.

From Gary, Warnke went with the Fighting Squadron 20 Unit to the U.S. Naval Air Station at Barbers Point on Oahu for advanced flight training, the last step before deployment to the war.

At 8:50 a.m., June 15, 1944, Warnke was part of an eight-plane flight crew that left the base to practice dive angles. After the fourth dive, Warnke didn’t make it back to his formation.

Back home in Gary, his family received the devastating news. Warnke was missing and presumed dead.

For the next two days, several searches were made for Warnke and the missing aircraft, according to military records.

The now-declassified documents say a group from Warnke’s unit found the wreckage on June 17 on a mountain side in a ravine near the summit.

The records indicate that along with the wreckage, one of Warnke’s legs and a boot were found. The war diary that describes the day’s events indicate the remains were buried near the wreckage.

A letter to Warnke’s mother from John Brown, the chaplain of Warnke’s unit, dated Oct. 21, 1944, describes the memorial service the unit held for her son on June 20.

“The service itself was a simple one, and in order that you may know the spirit of it, I am enclosing the manuscript exactly as it was used,” Brown wrote.

“Ensign Warnke was highly regarded by those who knew him, and you may certainly feel proud of so fine a son.”

Two days after the service was held, Warnke’s unit was shipped out aboard the USS Enterprise, leaving Warnke’s body and the story of his disappearance behind.

Looking for closure

Tice isn’t angry that her family never knew the truth.

“During war time, they don’t tell much,” she said. “That’s OK.”

But now that she knows the truth, she wants her brother laid to rest near his hometown. Tice just hopes that day will come before she faces the same fate as her parents — dying without closure.

Tice turned 86 on Wednesday. She lives in a retirement community in Green Valley, Ariz. She knows her health isn’t the best.

She stopped flying several years ago. But she said when she finally has her brother’s remains, she wants to be in Westville to give him a proper burial.

“For that, I will make a great effort,” she said.

But it’s been the government’s lack of effort that has kept Tice waiting, say historians who also would like to see Warnke brought down from the Hawaiian mountain top.

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, also known as JPAC, is the agency responsible for collecting missing soldiers’ remains.

Colin Perry, director of the Hawaiian Aviation Preservation Commission, has been following the efforts in recovering Warnke’s body since it was first brought to his attention in the 1990s.

He said JPAC hasn’t put this case high enough on its list of priorities.

The group has focused much of its efforts on recovery missions of Vietnam casualties. Perry finds this frustrating since JPAC has its headquarters in Oahu, just miles from Warnke’s wreckage.

“Missions have taken them to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. ... Here’s one 5 miles from their headquarters, and they’ve blamed everything from environmentalists to terrain for not getting it done,” Perry said.

Darcy is similarly frustrated: “They’ve just dragged their feet on it.

“I get really furious with these people.”

According to Darcy, the agency has devoted more than 90 percent of its resources to finding Vietnam veterans’ remains, of which there are an estimated 1,400. In comparison, there are 72,617 missing from World War II, Darcy said.

Darcy has identified the exact locations of enough lost soldiers to keep the agency busy for the next 20 years doing four recoveries a week.

But “(Vietnam) is where the political pressure is,” he said.

According to James Pokines, JPAC forensic anthropologist, the agency hasn’t gained final permission to excavate the site where Warnke died. But he hopes the permission will come in time for a July mission.

“The summer months are the dry season up there, which will allow for dependable helicopter access,” Pokines said.

Pokines said it took several years to find the site after the agency learned of its existence.

Darcy notified JPAC just hours after he discovered the site in 1991 after six failed attempts. And, he said, he recorded precisely where the site was located and provided JPAC with the information.

JPAC went to the site in 1999 and recovered a piece of the airplane’s propeller. A piece of it was sent to Tice in December.

Pokines said the agency also has had to develop a low-impact plan to excavate since the site is located within a natural preserve watershed area. That also caused delays.

Most JPAC missions involve the crew living at the site and sleeping in tents. But because the terrain surrounding this site is unstable, this mission will require daily helicopter commutes along with a 45-minute hike.

More disappointments?

Gregg Kakesako, a reporter for the Honolulu Star Bulletin, has been covering the Warnke saga for more than 10 years. He accompanied JPAC on its 1999 visit to the wreckage.

He’s not holding out hope this will be the year for the mission to go forward.

He said he was not surprised to hear JPAC is planning a mission for this summer:

“They say that every year.”

Kakesako said the newspaper decided a few years ago not to report on the matter again until the mission actually takes place. He said he found himself making annual calls to Tice to ask how she felt about her brother’s remains being uncovered. It finally became clear she had nothing new to say since the story never changed.

But Tice hopes this will be the year. Her daughter, Patricia Turner, who lives in Michigan City, said she feels the same, but she “wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t” happen yet.

“The way it was handled was so poor,” Turner said.

Turner, who was only a year old when Warnke died, said she remembers hearing stories growing up about her uncle, whom the family referred to as “Bud.”

“My grandparents always talked about him and figured he was long lost, never to be found.”

Darcy said there are many stories like the Warnkes’.

While it seems telling a family their loved one’s remains have been found would be a happy part of his job, “It’s actually the hardest,” Darcy said.

“As soon as you bring it up, they start grieving again because they never had closure,” he said.

While Tice has waited more than 60 years for it, her expectations aren’t high that JPAC will find much.

“There won’t be any body left,” she said bluntly.

Turner hopes that perhaps some remains other than body tissue will be found, such as a ring or clothing.

Perry thinks there will be more than Tice expects.

In the mountainous conditions, “It’s been our experience that human remains, such as teeth and bones, actually last longer than metal pieces.”

JPAC’s Pokines agreed that the soil conditions at the crash site are much less harsh than places such as Vietnam and Laos, “where we routinely recover identifiable remains.”

“I’m certain there are human remains there,” Perry reiterated.

“They’ll bring them back.”

And it’s about time, he said.

“Sixty-two years left behind is unacceptable.”



Lisa is getting the efforts organized for all WW II MIA's. Please visit her site at http://mysite.verizon.net/vze8bzhi/wwrm_wwiifamilies_mia/



NEWS RELEASE

JOINT POW/MIA ACCOUNTING COMMAND (JPAC)

Public Affairs
(808) 448-1936
www.jpac.pacom.mil
public_affairs@jpac.pacom.mil
Contact: Troy Kitch

RELEASE NO. #06-11
March 22, 2006

SERVICE SCHEDULED FOR PREVIOUSLY ‘UKNOWN’
SEAMAN FROM PEARL HARBOR ATTACK HICKAM AFB, HAWAII

– More than 1,500 Sailors, Soldiers, Marines and civilians who died on Dec. 7, 1941 during the attack on Pearl Harbor were never identified. While about 1,000 of the unidentified are interred aboard the USS Arizona, some 330 others are buried in graves marked “unknown” at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific (Punchbowl). Now, one of those unknowns has a name.

In October 2005, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command identified the remains of Seaman 2nd Class Warren Paul Hickok, a U.S. Navy service member missing in action from the Pearl Harbor raid. Services for Hickok will be held on March 29 at the Punchbowl.

Hickok’s remains were first buried in Honolulu’s Nuuanu Cemetery in 1942. In place of a name, his gravestone was marked with the identifier ‘X-2.’ Military officials first tried and failed to identify him in 1949. After this attempt, his remains were re-interred in the Punchbowl. Six decades later, JPAC received new information about the case that finally led to his successful identification.

Back in 1941, Hickok was assigned to the USS Sicard. On the day of the raid, he volunteered to leave his ship to help the crews of the USS Cummings and Pennsylvania. That decision would ultimately lead to his unknown status.

In a report written in the aftermath of the attack, two petty officers stated that they thought they saw Hickok – a Kalamazoo, Mich. native – aboard the USS Pennsylvania right before an explosion took place. Based on this information, his ‘missing in action’ status was changed to ‘killed in action’ and his remains were presumed unrecoverable.

In Nov. 2003, Ray Emory, a Pearl Harbor survivor and researcher, contacted JPAC and offered information suggesting that the unknown sailor designated as ‘X-2’ could be Hickok.

Heather Harris, the JPAC historian who wrote the historical report for Hickok’s case, verified this new information which led to a second examination of the remains and his ultimate identification.

“We got lucky in our reexamination of the case,” Harris said. “During the original processing of X-2 Nuuanu, they noted in their paperwork that he had a healed right femur. Hickok’s medical records had no indication of this injury, but when I looked at his paperwork from his enlistment to the service [paperwork that wouldn’t have been previously available], I noticed that he had written that he’d broken his right leg as a boy.”

There are still 88,000 unaccounted-for service members from the nation’s past wars. Harris’ focus is on researching cases involving ‘buried unknowns’ from both World War II and the Korean War. She said that information from third parties is often valuable in bringing a case to the attention of JPAC.

“Mr. Emory has been collecting and analyzing information about World War II, unknowns, and the unknowns associated with the attack on Pearl Harbor for longer than I have been alive,” Harris said. “He amassed a prodigious amount of information and developed a keen understanding of how the information he obtained fit together.

“That said, JPAC historians and analysts often have easier access to much of this information and can obtain information that Mr. Emory may have a difficult time obtaining,” she said. “In this instance, we were able to use the information Mr. Emory provided as a starting point for researching the case.

JPAC scientists used historical reports, dental and anthropological analysis, and mitochondrial DNA to identify the remains.

Harris said it is important to identify all unknowns from past conflicts to acknowledge and honor each individual’s sacrifice.

“To acknowledge the commitments of the dead, we also recognize the loss incurred by their family and friends and, while we can never return their loved one, we can offer them the solace that comes with knowing what happened and being able to bury them,” she said. “We recommit ourselves to a national sentiment that we will not leave our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines behind and we won’t forget their sacrifice.”

-END-

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Seaman 2nd Class Warren Paul Hickok will receive full military funeral honors by the U.S. Navy at his re-interrment at the Punchbowl, 2177 Puowaina Drive, Honolulu, HI 96813. Services are scheduled for 10:30 on March 29, three days after Hickok’s birthday.

The public and media are invited to attend. Both the JPAC anthropologist and the historian who worked the case will be available for a brief question and answer session at the conclusion of the ceremony.



Nimitz Museum Article

THE MISSING IN ACTION FROM THE PACIFIC WAR

From Ted Darcy
May 1, 2006

I have researched and written three books on World War II in the Pacific, and at the conclusion of each project I have found myself with what I call "dangling threads." These dangling threads are little mysteries that I was not able to find answers to, and in many cases were sidebars to my research. For example, while researching my first book, Saipan: Oral Histories of the Pacific War, I learned that there are still over 400 Americans listed as missing in action from that one battle.

One of the people I interviewed for my Saipan book was Carl Matthews of Dallas, Texas. He was a member of the Forth Marine Division on Saipan, and his story is mostly about his platoon leader, a freshly minted second lieutenant by the name of James Stanley Leary.

D-Day, 15 June 1944, marked Mr. Stanley’s first taste of combat as a young Marine Corps officer when two marine divisions landed on the Japanese-held island of Saipan. Less than three weeks later, Mr. Stanley would be shot and killed during the closing days of the battle for that contested island.

Carl Matthews, although standing next to his platoon leader when this happened, escaped unharmed. However, two more marines where killed trying to recover Mr. Leary’s body before G Company retreated from the area. Although there were eyewitnesses to the fact that all three of these men died that day, their bodies were never recovered. They were declared "missing in action," and one year and one day later declared, "Killed in action, body not recovered."

Because of a concussion wound incurred several days before and emotional distress resulting from the loss of his platoon leader, Carl was evacuated and never saw Saipan again until June 2004, when we both returned for the 60th anniversary of that gruesome battle. Carl with the help of others and myself had no problem locating the area where all of this drama had taken place sixty years before even though it was overgrown with jungle. However, after several sweeps of the area over a period of several days, we were not able to locate the exact spot where Mr. Leary and the other marines were killed.

Fortunately, the story does not end there. At the invitation of a Japanese television station doing a documentary on the sixtieth anniversary of the ending of WWII, Carl returned to Saipan in June 2005. Again Carl went back for another search, and this time humane skeletal remains were found in the area where Mr. Leary and the two other marines were killed sixty-one years earlier. However, in order to close this chapter in the Battle of Saipan, a forensic team from the Central Identification Laboratory (CILHI) in Hawaii is need to come to Saipan, recover the skeletal remains that still lay there, and test them for identification.

As I sit here and write this, it has been almost a year since this discovery was reported to CILHI, and still there appears to be no movement on the part of that institution to excavate the area and recover the remains for identification. And the sad part is that Mr. Stanley still has one last living sibling who wants to know.

About a year ago a woman in Ohio wrote to me. She said that she had read my book about Saipan at the recommendation of somebody from the Gambier Bay Association, Gambier Bay having been a jeep carrier that was involved in the operations in the Mariana Islands during WWII. She told me that her uncle was a radio operator on a TBM that was shot down over Saipan on 17 June 1944. She went on to say that the pilot, although badly burned, managed to crash-land his stricken plane on a nearby reef, and was later rescued. Her uncle and the rear seat gunner, on the other hand, were seen to have bailed out but were never seen alive again. And as was the practice, they were both declared "missing in action" for one year and one day before being declared, "Killed in action, body not recovered."

Howard Rivers, the missing radio operator from the TBM has one surviving sibling, who, like Mr. Leary’s one surviving sibling, still wonders, "What happened to my brother?"

It was this letter from the woman in Ohio, the niece of Howard Rivers that got me thinking more about this one of many dangling threats that resulted from my years of researching the war in the Pacific. Since then, I have discovered numerous individuals and even groups who have been trying to track down, locate, and identify some of the thousands who are still missing in action from WWII.

A few months ago, I made contact with a WWII navy veteran in Bronx, N.Y, who was a photographer’s mate off one of the more than 500 ships involved in the Marianas campaign. I found out about him from a fellow navy veteran—a former Seabee with whom I had first made contact in the 1990s, when I was living on Saipan and researching my first book. The photographer’s mate told me that after Saipan had been declared secure, he was sent ashore to photograph the remains of Americans who had been captured and killed by the Japanese. He told me that there were hundreds of bodies that he had to photograph, and most of them had been tortured and mutilated. In fact, as I had been warned, that assignment was something that still bothers him more than sixty years after the event.

As I feared, the conversation was proving difficult and uncomfortable for the gentleman on the other end of the line. Before terminating our abbreviated conversation, about all I could get out of him was that he didn’t know what became of all the photos he had taken, and didn’t want to know. He wanted to forget, and unfortunately my telephone call had brought all of those terrible images back to haunt him once again.

More than sixty years later, there are still over 70,000 Americans listed as missing in action from World War II. Ray Emory, a Pearl Harbor Survivor and retired navy veteran, and Ted Darcy, a retired marine and Vietnam War veteran, are probably the two most knowledgeable experts on this subject. Through them I have learned that the U.S. Army buried over 10,000 unknown dead after WWII, and the vast majority of those unknowns are from the Pacific. There are1600 servicemen listed as missing in action from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. More recently, I learned from Ted Darcy that there are around 200 unknowns from the Battle of Saipan buried in Punch Bowl Cemetery on the island Oahu, and one of them has a date—17 June 1944. This, according to Darcy, is very unusual to find a date associated with an unknown.

Emory and Darcy have also been able to list the missing in action according to branch of service:

U.S. Army—16,669

U.S. Army Air Force—20,746

U.S. Navy—31,553

U.S. Marine Corps—3,007

U.S. Coast Guard—623

U.S. Civilians—875

The fact that there are approximately 200 unknowns from the Battle of Saipan gives me hope that families such as the niece from Ohio, and her father may find their missing family member buried there. However, as Ted Darcy has pointed out, there is a lot of bureaucracy to wade through in order to bring some conclusion to these dangling threads—these unanswered questions.

Most of the mothers and fathers of MIAs from WWII have long been in the grave. However, there are still widows, orphans, and siblings who want to know. And, as I have discovered, since beginning this quest, now there are nieces, nephews, and other family members of another generation who are out there picking up the threads and carrying on the search.

Below, are a few web sites dedicated to finding MIAs:

http://www.jpac.pacom.mil/

http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo/

http://www.missingaircrew.com/

http://www.pacificwrecks.com/



DNA reveals Newport's unknown sailor
Seaman 1st Class Raymond Johnson -- lost at sea in a naval tragedy in Rhode Island in 1942 --
can now receive a proper burial and gravestone.

01:00 AM EDT on Friday, July 14, 2006

BY RICHARD SALIT
Journal Staff Writer

NEWPORT -- What the unknown sailor cannot say, his bones can now tell.

Buried here during World War II, without a marker or a memorial service, the Navy seaman remained unidentified and forgotten through the years.

But more than 60 years later, the Navy has exhumed his remains from Island Cemetery and, through DNA testing, solved the mystery of who he was. Now Seaman 1st Class Raymond Johnson -- lost at sea in an all but forgotten naval tragedy in Rhode Island in 1942 -- can receive a proper burial and gravestone.

Today, the only surviving member of Johnson's immediate family is a 77-year-old brother, Jesse, of Needles, Calif. He's the last of nine siblings. Raymond, who was 17 or 18 when he died, never married nor had children.

"I don't have any great feelings about this whole thing," said Jesse Johnson, who got the news from the Navy two days ago. "Keep in mind that I was a kid who was 13. This happened over 60 years ago. Forgive me for not being emotional, but I'm not an emotional person."

A Navy casualty affairs officer will come calling at his door next week, as if his brother had only just died. Jesse Johnson will have a choice of where he wants his brother's remains reburied. He's not comfortable discussing what he plans to tell the Navy, but said he's "doubtful" he'll attend any ceremony.

The Navy's announcement this week, while providing an answer for Jesse Johnson, dashed the hopes of two other families that provided DNA believing the unknown sailor might be a relative. But the news was eagerly greeted by a Fall River veteran who devoted himself to unraveling the mystery of the unknown sailor.

IN 1995, retired Marine Ted Darcy was in Island Cemetery on a research job when he came upon an unmarked grave in a row of veterans. The discovery would lead him on an 11-year odyssey to honor and identify the serviceman at his feet.

Darcy had little to go on at first. No one knew anything about the veteran. But when Darcy checked cemetery records and pored over newspaper archives, he learned of a deadly naval accident on Dec. 2, 1942.

Shortly before midnight that evening, 17 Navy sailors boarded a 26-foot whaleboat in Newport after a night out on the town. While they were being ferried to Middletown's Coddington Cove, and to their 384-foot destroyer Gherardi, rain began to fall and the winds and seas kicked up fiercely. Suddenly, a large wave swamped the boat. Then another capsized it.

Only two sailors survived being thrown into the frigid waters. Fifteen perished.

Most of the bodies were recovered, but three were never found. Eight months later, fishermen found a badly decomposed body missing a head and arms. There were remnants of a Navy uniform, leading Navy medical examiners to conclude it was one of the three missing sailors. But they couldn't determine which one.

So instead of being sent home, the unknown sailor's final resting place became Island Cemetery.

After putting the pieces of the sad story together, Darcy got local veterans to pay for a stone marker that reads, "UNKNOWN US NAVY, AUG 1943." He also started tracking down the relatives of the three missing sailors. Darcy knew the military was using DNA to identify unknown dead because he was working on similar projects as a hobby.

He reached relatives of two of the sailors, including Jesse Johnson, fairly quickly. But it took until 2003 before he finally got in touch with a relative of the third, in Florida. Only then would the Navy consider exhuming the remains, even though Darcy was confident it was Johnson.

The reason, he said, is Navy records indicated the unknown sailor was wearing an on-duty uniform. Raymond Johnson was the coxswain of the whaleboat on its fatal trip. The two other sailors who were never found, Cecil Joyner, of Jacksonville, Fla., and Jack M. Shaul, of New Lisbon, Ind., were on liberty that night.

One relative from each of the three sailor's families sent blood samples to the Navy last year. Then, in April, without notifying any of the families, the Navy quietly exhumed the skeletal remains of the unknown sailor.

On Wednesday, Jesse Johnson got a phone call. It was the Navy. There was news of his brother.

THE JOHNSON children grew up during the Great Depression in Fort Wayne, Ind. They were poor, and things only got tougher when their father died in 1936.

So when Raymond Johnson was just 13, he struck out on his own.

"He was a good kid. He would give you the shirt off his back," said Jesse Johnson, the youngest in the family and three years younger than Raymond. "He never let anyone bother me. He wasn't very big, but he was tough."

At 16, and just three months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Raymond Johnson enlisted in the Navy. By the following December, the Gherardi brought him to Newport.

Soon after the whaleboat capsized, Johnson's family heard from the Navy.

"We were told he was lost in a boat accident. That's all we was told," Jesse Johnson said.

He remembers his widowed mother taking the news hard.

"I came home from school and she was really broken up," he said. "I remember that very well."

Today, Jesse Johnson considers any special attention paid to his family or his brother unnecessary.

"We were just normal people," he said, noting that it was typical then to join the Armed Services and to do so at an early age. One of his brothers earned the Purple Heart and, like Raymond, Jesse joined the Navy at 16. "I know what the Navy is. I know what can happen. I've seen guys die. And that's just the way it is."

Darcy, who's from another generation and served in Vietnam, sees it differently. Using a vast computer database he has assembled, he is trying to solve hundreds, if not thousands, of cases of unidentified military dead.

"To go from a plot of grass and all the way to Needles, Calif., and bring the guy's brother back, it's a little out of the ordinary," he said. "I'm a veteran. I have a soft spot for these things. I don't think it's fair to throw him in the ground and not even mark it."

rsalit@projo.com / (401) 277-7467

Online at: http://www.projo.com/news/content/projo_20060714_ntnavy14.1822a36.html



Team excavates remains of pilot lost in 1944

By Pamela Lewis Dolan
Post-Tribune staff writer
July 25, 2006

After 62 years, Gary-native Harry Warnke may finally get a proper burial.

Warnke’s body has been left with the wreckage of the F6F-3 Hellcat he was piloting on June 15, 1944, when it crashed in the Koolau Range on Hawaii’s Oahu Island.

But 15 years after the crash site was found, excavation to recover his remains began just last week.

Recovering Warnke’s remains has been a continuing saga for 86-year-old Myrtle Tice, who wants to see her brother laid to rest before she dies. Tice, who now lives in a retirement community in Green Valley, Ariz., is Warnke’s only immediate family member still living.

Both of Warnke’s parents died believing their only son was lost at sea.

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, also known as JPAC, is responsible for finding and identifying the remains of U.S. service men and women. Historians close to the case say JPAC has dragged its feet far too long and Warnke’s body could have been recovered years ago had it not been for politics.

When Ted Darcy, a retired Marine and World War II historian, first found Warnke’s wreckage 15 years ago, he immediately notified JPAC. He said JPAC has devoted more resources to recovering Vietnam remains because that’s where the political pressure has been.

But JPAC officials maintain the delay was due to a complicated recovery effort.

Since the crash site lies within a natural preserve watershed area, the agency had to develop a low-impact plan for excavation, and get special permission.

The agency also required the help of the Hawaiian National Guard which is providing helicopters for the recovery.

The recovery process is scheduled Aug. 24, but it’s hard to tell how long the identification process might take.

“It depends on what we find,” said Maj. Brian Desantis, a JPAC spokesman.

In a process called “sling-loading,” dirt from the site will be airlifted by helicopter from the crash site to a location near Wheeler Army Airfield, about a 10-minute flight away.

There, the dirt will be sifted through screens in search of any evidence or body tissue.

“We’re not expecting to find an in-tact skeleton, but we are expecting some biological matter,” Desantis said.

Warnke’s parents placed a memorial stone at their family plot at the Westville Cemetery soon after he went missing. Tice plans to bury his remains there, whenever they are returned to her.



The Lonely Bones
By Amy Wimmer Schwarb and Kathryn Drury Wagner

The team of searchers, dressed in T-shirts and khakis, pullovers and hiking boots, quietly passes bucketfuls of dirt from one pair of mud-caked hands to another, like a fire brigade. Two weeks into their mission, they’ve dug deep enough that their shovels are scooping up dirt flecked with crumbly, oxidized aluminum from the body of a plane. It’s a pale blue, like the color you’d paint a baby boy’s nursery. James Pokines, the forensic anthropologist on the excavation team, pulls from the dirt a small piece of webbing, probably from the pilot’s safety harness. It’s a sign he’s getting closer to the cockpit, closer to what brought him here. Closer to Harry Warnke.

They are working almost 2,500 feet up, in the Koolau Range on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, on terrain that catches the intense wind. The grass is rustling so loudly that it nearly drowns out the sounds of their radio, tuned to 105.9 FM The Big Kahuna, playing a barely audible “Carry on My Wayward Son.” The clouds rush over the mountains, so full of moisture they look white, even as you stand within them. Enveloped in sudden milky clouds, with the visibility dropped to nothing and the wind whipping, you can imagine how a pilot could lose control of a plane in these parts. But the team doesn’t need to determine why Warnke crashed 62 years ago. It just needs to retrieve what’s left of him, and send him home—to Westville, Indiana, where a grave marker etched with his name has stood for decades, waiting.

For the soldiers they seek, time has stopped. But the U.S. military’s bone-diggers, formally known as the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, are still racing against the clock, trying to locate the remains of fallen soldiers before those who cared about them in life have joined them in death. No other country devotes such resources to reclaiming the war dead, identifying them and returning them to their families. From the Korean War, 8,178 American soldiers are missing—195 of them from Indiana; from the Vietnam War, 1,796—57 of them Hoosiers; from the Cold War, 165, including one from Indiana. And from World War II, 78,000 soldiers remain unaccounted for—more than a fifth of all soldiers who fell in that war. About half likely went down over water and will never be recovered; the remaining lie where they fell in frantic firefights, or are embedded in mud where they crashed their aircraft, or are underground, where they were hurriedly buried in mass, unmarked, makeshift graves. Of the 88,000-plus casualties JPAC is charged with finding, 1,353 have been identified and returned to families.

Nearly all of JPAC’s missions carry the teams overseas, to countries with names that remind Americans of wartime heartache: Laos. Vietnam. Cambodia. Papua New Guinea. Until 2004, when diplomatic relations forced JPAC out of the country, teams even manned digs in North Korea. At many destinations, the locals hired to help sift dirt in search of teeth and uniform remnants do not understand the American drive to bring home long-dead soldiers. It’s a pledge that costs the U.S. government $50 million a year.

Given the far-flung places where JPAC usually works, the hunt for Harry Warnke, a World War II fighter pilot killed in dive-bombing training before he ever shipped out, should have been its easiest mission yet. He crashed on American soil, and even after 60 years, the military was fairly certain where Warnke was located: The paperwork filed after his accident specified the spot. But his rescue was logistically difficult because of the inaccessibility of his crash site, and politically tricky because the terrain of the Koolaus is considered sacred by native Hawaiians. So while JPAC combed the deserts of Africa and the jungles of Papua New Guinea in search of missing war dead, the Hoosier pilot and his plane remained wedged into a Hawaiian mountainside. Most ironically, Warnke went down just three miles from present-day Hickam Air Force Base, the headquarters of JPAC, where bones and teeth and dog tags dug up all over the world are matched to the names of missing soldiers.

Of Harry Warnke’s 22 years—21 of them spent in Northwest Indiana—little is known, and less is remembered. Nine people from his high school class of about 200, now in their 80s, were contacted for this story, but few recalled his name, and only one remembered him well.

Warnke was born on August 12, 1921, and grew up in Gary, the son of a steelworker and a homemaker, back when Gary was a company town stocked with good jobs. He and his sister, Myrtle, a year older than he, both enjoyed visiting their grandparents’ farm in Westville, a Lake County hamlet a few miles outside of town.

He lived in a house across from the Emerson High School football field but didn’t play sports, opting instead for the Volcanaires, a local flying club for young people interested in becoming military pilots. “He was one of those boys who never made a ripple in the water and was a real nice kid,” says Evelyn Irak, 85, a classmate of Warnke’s from high school.

Warnke’s sister, now Myrtle Tice, lives in Green Valley, Arizona. She tells stories of her brother—nicknamed “Bud”—in pieces, and can’t always remember the details. He once rode his bicycle from Gary to Paw Paw, Michigan—a 100-mile trek—but Tice doesn’t recall why he went or how her parents reacted. “He just did about everything he wanted to do, I guess,” Tice says. “Let’s just say he was adventurous.” After high school, Warnke attended Gary College for a couple years before enlisting in the U.S. Navy in 1943. His wartime photo shows a slight young man with dark, deep-set eyes and a comfortable smile.

By the time he arrived in Hawaii a few months later, the war in the Pacific was raging. Warnke’s training started off with promise; in June 1944, he qualified to land a plane on an aircraft carrier in the daylight. Five days later, around 8 a.m. on June 15, 1944, with the peaks of the Koolaus covered in fog, Warnke was one of eight pilots who took off from Naval Air Station Barbers Point in single-seat F6F-3 Hellcat fighters. His unit, Fighting Squadron 20, was working on test-dive maneuvers. Warnke made the dive four times, but when the pilots returned to the station, he was not among them.

The men of Fighting Squadron 20 searched the Koolaus for signs of Warnke, and found what they assumed what was their comrade. “The wreckage of Ensign Warnke’s plane, together with a small piece of flesh and one shoe, was found,” his commander, F.E. Bakutis, wrote three weeks later in his report. “Positive identification of Warnke was impossible. The scattered pieces of the plane wreckage were collected and buried on the mountaintop.”

Days later, Fighting Squadron 20 was dispatched overseas. Back in Gary, the Warnkes were told their son’s plane had gone down over the Pacific. Warnke’s parents lived several more decades, and arranged for a headstone alongside theirs in a small Westville cemetery. The casketless grave is marked, simply, “Lt. Harry ‘Bud’ Warnke.” His parents promoted him—Warnke was an ensign, not a lieutenant.

They never shared with their daughter, Myrtle, any expectation that their son would one day be buried there. But the unspoken message was that if Bud ever came home, he should have a place to come home to.

You can tell a lot about a society, either modern or ancient, by the way it treats its dearly departed. Some cultures revere death; others fear it. Still others have no respect for a body left behind once the soul leaves. Tibetan Buddhists, who view death as an opening for enlightenment, once left their dead for the vultures. After one of their tribe dies, the Mbuti of Africa relocate their camp and never again mention the deceased. Ancient Egyptians were entombed with tools and material goods for use in the afterlife; according to Jewish tradition, bodies are dressed in clothing without pockets, because nothing is needed in the hereafter.

The culture of ancient Hawaii, where Warnke’s body decayed on a mountaintop for 62 years, revered bones, or iwi, and believed they connected individuals to their ancestors. In the Hawaiian language, you don’t bet your life, you “wager your bones.” You don’t ask who will love you when you’re 64; you ponder who will care for your bones. “Bones were treasured, guarded and even deified,” says La’akea Suganuma, president of the Royal Hawaiian Academy of Traditional Arts. According to Suganuma, the bones of alii, or royalty, were carefully hidden, because if an enemy got hold of them, they could be spoiled forever.

The leave-no-man-behind refrain uttered so often by Americans is both age-old and surprisingly modern. Homer’s Iliad, written around 750 B.C., continually revisits the importance of treating soldiers’ dead bodies with dignity. When Patroclus is killed in battle and Achilles falls asleep before his friend’s burial ritual, Patroclus comes to him in a dream and implores him to finish the job. “You’ve forgotten me,” the ghost of Patroclus tells Achilles. “While I was alive, you never did neglect me. But now I’m dead. So bury me as quickly as you can. Then I can pass through the gates of Hades.”

Respect for the war dead transcends cultures. According to Earl Swift, an author who has chronicled the history of JPAC’s recovery operations, 18th-century Shawnee Indians carried off their battle casualties as they dropped, prohibiting white men from even knowing how many they had killed. In the Civil War, both Union and Confederate troops laid down their guns periodically to allow teams to remove the dead from the bloody fields between them.

Yet before the 20th century, and even through World War I, historians theorize, fallen soldiers were thought of more as a collective unit. Soldiers were buried where they fell: There are Confederate graves in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and Union graves in Petersburg, Virginia. Mass graves were common—when soldiers were lucky enough to be buried at all. George L. Mosse, the author of Fallen Soldiers, writes that only officers and soldiers from wealthy families were afforded the privilege of a postmortem trip home, partly because of the expense of preservation techniques.

Of course, fallen soldiers were always grieved by the families who loved them. But it wasn’t until World War II that Western cultures began to treat mourned soldiers as individual souls. In post–World War II Germany, that focus was crucial to mourning the dead: Soldiers who fought for a bad cause could be lumped together as weapons of evil, but taken individually, as someone’s beloved child who naively followed a nationalist ideal, their lives seemed more worthy. Americans, meanwhile, lost more than 400,000 soldiers, the great majority of them on the other side of the world. With so many Americans dying on foreign soil, the U.S. government created the American Graves Registration Service to account for the fallen.

Then came Vietnam. And as with so many other facets of American culture, Vietnam changed everything. The residual bitterness over that war pressured the U.S. government to answer for the lives of soldiers who hadn’t returned. Combined with Vietnamese officials’ elusiveness about the whereabouts of missing soldiers, Americans’ 1970s-era distrust of their own government and technological advancements that made recoveries more possible, the modern era of collecting, identifying and returning the war dead was born. The military was charged with retrieving not only the soldiers who fell in Vietnam, but also those missing from the Korean War and World War II. Like Homer’s fallen Trojans and Achaeans, the dead would be buried by their own.

In 1991, retired U.S. Marine Ted Darcy went hiking through the Koolau Mountains in search of a Hellcat fighter he knew was buried in the lush undergrowth. An estimated 1,000 pilots died in flight training in Hawaii, including those who crashed into the Pacific, but Warnke’s body was the only one sitting in a known location that had never been investigated. “The others were recovered after the war,” says Darcy, an aircraft salvager who was hoping to take the plane wreckage after JPAC removed the remains. “Warnke was overlooked.”

Darcy believes Warnke and other unrecovered soldiers from World War II have been slighted by a system that focuses on recovering soldiers who fell in the Vietnam War. Sites in Papua New Guinea and Europe—the resting grounds of World War II soldiers—are investigated less frequently than those in Southeast Asia, even though JPAC is charged with accounting for more than 40 times more soldiers from World War II than from Vietnam. “World War II is lagging,” Darcy says, “and they have the most unknowns.”

In World War II, Hawaii was a testing ground for pilots—and not a terribly safe one. Cavernous ravines, treacherous mountains and low clouds added up to dangerous conditions. “Hawaii was a major training ground,” says aviation historian Colin Perry. “They were crashing planes all the time in those years.” At some points during the war, Perry estimates, two or three pilots were crashing each day, sometimes fatally. Much of what happened in Hawaii during the war was classified, which might help explain why Warnke’s parents were told he was lost at sea.

In the Koolaus, Darcy found the remnants of a one-man Hellcat, crushed and upside down. The aircraft number matched Warnke’s plane, and he immediately alerted JPAC. But the military remained cautious. “Several attempts to locate site, all unsuccessful,” reads the site-investigation summary. “Warning! Area extremely mountainous and steep.”

Frustrated that JPAC wasn’t responding more urgently, Darcy tracked down Warnke’s closest living relative, his sister Myrtle, to tell her his remains were on American soil, not at the bottom of the Pacific. “Basically, she was in a state of shock, but she handled it very well,” Darcy says. “I’ve had next of kin come apart on me. She just asked, ‘What do we do?’” Tice told Darcy she hoped to bring home her brother’s body before she died. At the time, she was 71; today, she is 86.

JPAC encountered steep obstacles to recovering her brother—and not all of them were in the terrain of the Koolaus. By the mid-1990s, resentment against the U.S. government was growing in Hawaii. At the heart of the bitterness was dismay with the military, which occupied hundreds of thousands of pristine Hawaiian acres, and residual anger over the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy a century earlier.

For JPAC, it was a bad time to request permission to dig into environmentally sensitive lands—much less land in the Koolau Range, considered sacred territory among native Hawaiians. “He’s in a place that’s so special,” says Mahealani Cypher, an activist who opposed the mission. “I would not mind being buried there. It’s an honor.”

The struggle positioned one federal mandate—one that ensures the government will protect historic and cultural resources—against another, which pledges recovery of fallen soldiers. Because of the opposition, arranging the search took years of planning and seeking permits.

The Warnke case forced JPAC through the hoops of its own government, but for Darcy, the man who discovered the wreckage, the case was life-changing. He is now devoted to his true passion—locating the remains of fallen soldiers from World War II. Using military records, Darcy has constructed databases of missing military personnel and unidentified soldier remains.

Yet as Darcy learned in the recovery of another Hoosier veteran of World War II, not every family is pining to be reconnected with their long-dead loved ones. Darcy helped point to the identity of Navy Seaman 1st Class Raymond Johnson of Allen County, who drowned in 1942 in a shipwreck near Newport, Rhode Island. When discovered eight months later, his headless body could not be positively identified, so he was buried in an unmarked grave. This summer he was exhumed and identified through DNA sampling.

But Johnson’s brother—the last surviving of nine siblings—had little interest in reclaiming his brother’s remains. “He said, ‘that’s great,’” Darcy recalls. “‘Now go ahead and cremate him and put him back in the bay.’” Darcy implored the brother to reconsider, and Johnson was eventually buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

In July, about a dozen members of the JPAC recovery team waited at a hangar for their helicopter shuttle into the Koolau mountains. A few miles away, tourists were getting sunburned and mai-tai drunk in Waikiki, but the Koolau Range was as misty and moody as it was the morning of Warnke’s fateful flight. “The biggest challenge with the site, by far, has been the visibility getting in,” says senior team leader Captain Alex Vanston, a U.S. Marine. “There’s a lot of wind and rain. We can’t dig if it gets too wet—it might erode.” So they waited, hoping for a break in the clouds, napping on backpacks, spitting sunflower seeds, smoking cigarettes.

Once up on the mountain—a five-minute helicopter ride, followed by a breathtaking landing on a slab of concrete the size of a picnic blanket—everyone threaded rope safety belts through their belt loops for a 30-minute, mud-slathered hike to the crash site. Their crew included an explosive ordnance disposal technician. Warnke’s plane likely went down with six machine guns and 1,200 rounds.

Each year, JPAC tackles a queue of about 200 locations, all candidates for excavation in search of a missing soldier. Although most cases take years of research, the military agency does identify servicemen at the rate of about two per week. By this summer, 15 years had passed since Ted Darcy spotted the remnants of Warnke’s Hellcat in the Koolaus. But finally, with the permits in place, a JPAC team was assigned a mission close to home. Still, the proximity to base was about the only thing the searchers had going for them: Perhaps most constraining, the team could work only a few hours before the clouds dropped in and they had to leave, or risk spending the night in the shrubbery.

Other obstacles abounded: Only 16 workers could work at the remote site, and the soil they were searching had to be sling-loaded out by helicopter, and sifted offsite. “The environmental work alone will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars,” says Pokines, the mission’s lead forensic anthropologist. “That’s always the question: Is it worth it?”

Pokines pauses, and says something you might not expect from a military anthropologist whose job involves connecting the dead with the living. “I’m all for leaving a wreath up there,” he says. “But his sister really wants him back.”

The material transported down from the mountaintop would be analyzed in JPAC’s Central Identification Lab, the largest forensic anthropology facility in the world. Inside the lab’s calm, air-conditioned walls, rows of tables are neatly stocked with bones. After JPAC conducts a recovery mission, the materials found are brought to the lab and assigned to one of 30 anthropologists, who work “blind”—that is, they are not told any details about the remains. They create a biological profile: age, race, gender and stature. Bone samples are taken for DNA testing; in Warnke’s case, his sister supplied a sample to researchers so they could look for similarities. The anthropologist also consults with one of the lab’s three forensic dentists, because teeth, with their wear patterns and fillings, are almost as unique as fingerprints. The team studies any personal effects—watches, glasses, dog tags, wedding rings—for clues.

The lab’s final report can be hundreds of pages long, sometimes far bulkier than the remains themselves. A whole life—proms and birthdays, dreams and diplomas—might, in the end, be reduced to a sliver of calcium and phosphorus. For some families, it is not enough. Recently, a tooth recovered in Laos was identified as a molar from the lower jaw of Sergeant Major George Brown and returned to his family in Texas. “I refuse to accept it as a body fully recovered,” Brown’s grown daughter, Ronda Brown-Pitts, told the local newspaper days before the tooth was buried with full military honors. “I can deal with closure, but I think this is a dishonorable way.”

Yet Major Brian DeSantis, public affairs officer for JPAC, points to a recent case—six or seven bones and some teeth—in which the wife and daughters of a pilot took solace in the recovery. “It wasn’t about the amount of remains,” DeSantis says. “It was that they finally had something. Something to grieve over. Something to put in the ground.”

Compared to the soil of Westville, in Hawaii things decay with alarming ease. Leave a tomato on the counter, and it will quickly develop a sunken mark. Berries seem to sprout gray fuzz before you can get them home from Safeway. The soil, high in iron, is an oxidized orange, because it, too, is rusting.

From the soil of the Koolaus, the JPAC team pulled an undeployed parachute and a survival kit inscribed with the name “Warnke.” Investigators also located nine teeth, three toenails, some vertebrae, and bone fragments from the arms, legs, right foot and cranium. DNA sampling showed the remains were indeed Warnke’s.

In the Iliad, after Hector is killed, Achilles drags his body behind a chariot and rides around the gates of Troy. The body is then burned, and when Hector’s father Priam recovers the remains 12 days later, his son’s body is ravaged beyond recognition. Yet the gods prevent Priam from seeing the wounds, and to his father, Hector’s body appears whole and unblemished.

When the remains of 20th-century soldiers are returned to their families—often as fragments—JPAC searchers hope the survivors will experience a similar kind of transformation, viewing the teeth and bones as something whole, with dignity.



Also please check out this site for further information and photos
HARRY WARNKE, May he Rest In Peace
FROM THE HAWAII AVIATION PRESERVATION SOCIETY




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