US searches for WW2 dead in East Europe

Kyt · Jul 15, 2008

The Associated Press: US searches for WW2 dead in East Europe

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — For more than six decades, the family of U.S. Army 1st Lt. Archibald Kelly had no way of being certain he was killed when his bomber smashed into a rocky cliff in Croatia in World War II.

They didn't know his bones lay under a makeshift cairn cobbled together by villagers. Without a body or a proper burial they could never completely convince themselves he was dead.

"We didn't have anything confirmed," the navigator's brother, Samuel Kelly, 85, recalled. "My mother always thought he got knocked in the head and had amnesia and was wandering around Europe somewhere. She never gave up thinking that he would come home. My dad was the same way."

Last year, Kelly was finally buried back home in Michigan in a ceremony with full military honors after his remains were located and identified by U.S. investigators — the latest success in a renewed push to recover the bones of missing WWII servicemen in Eastern Europe.

The work comes as families of missing soldiers have increased pressure on the U.S. government to find their remains, and as Eastern Europe has become more accessible and receptive to American military researchers.

Countries like Croatia, Albania and Poland were isolated behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. And though communism ended nearly 20 years ago, it took several more years for the U.S. to establish a working relationship with local authorities that would allow real progress.

"It took a while for it to get ramped up," said Master Sgt. Cory Damm, a U.S. Army analyst investigating cases in Eastern Europe. "The mid- to late-1990s is when it started building and now we've gotten to the point where family groups are crying out 'Yes we are interested, we want you to look!' So now the government is devoting more resources to this."

He and another field researcher from the U.S. Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office arrived in Poland this week to chase leads in cases where they believe there is hope of finding remains — an effort under way in Poland since 2006, where there are 109 Americans believed missing.

For the next three weeks, they will probe the memories of villagers, pore through town and church records and search crash sites for plane wreckage or other clues that could lead to the recovery of remains.

One case involves a search for four Army Air Force officers whose B-17 went down near Wroclaw, a city now in western Poland. After the war, American officials located the crash site and found the plane, but could never locate its crew.

There is great urgency to the work because witnesses are quickly dying off. But there are also factors working in the investigators' favor.

One is the soil in Europe, which is much less acidic than places like Southeast Asia, where thousands of American soldiers and airmen died.

"That type of soil is going to eat away the bone," Damm explained. "But the soil in Europe preserves the remains much better, so even after 60 years you can find much more of the skeleton intact than in other parts of the world."

Also, World War II did not yet have the high-speed jet crashes of later conflicts like Vietnam, which tended to destroy human remains beyond recognition. As a result, it's possible to find skeletons and teeth still intact, greatly helping in the identification work — as was the case with Kelly.

There are still 78,000 Americans missing from World War II — far more than from any other subsequent conflict. By contrast, there are 8,100 people missing from the Korean War, and 1,757 from Vietnam, according to figures provided by the Pentagon.

Another figure underscores the difficulties of making an identification: the military's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, the forensic lab which identifies war dead, has identified only 453 World War II servicemen since 1978.

But Chief Petty Officer John Gray, a Navy researcher working in Poland alongside Damm, says there are still dramatic breakthroughs.

Last month in a Bulgarian village, an elderly man led him to an attic containing the wreckage of a bomber. He found the engine's serial number, which allowed him to correlate it to a B-17 crash near the village of Veslets in northeastern Bulgaria.

"From there, we were able to clarify what happened to the crew," Gray said. "It was a very good find for us."

He said all 10 crew aboard the plane were killed, but couldn't reveal anything more. He and the other investigators refuse to divulge much about their searches until they can make positive identifications because they don't want to increase the suffering of family members by raising hopes in vain.

For most families, the truth may never be known.

"In some cases, you just run out of witnesses, you run out of documents," Damm said. "You get to a certain point where you're close but you still can't go and say 'X marks the spot.'"
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Antipodean Andy · Jul 15, 2008

That must be an amazing job that can be frustrating one moment and then eminently satisfying and rewarding the next.

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US searches for WW2 dead in East Europe

Kyt Άρης

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