USAAF aviator's long-lost remains to rest in Tucson

Kyt · Dec 16, 2007

Morlock: WWII aviator's long-lost remains to rest in Tucson | www.tucsoncitizen.com Â®

Tucson never met Hyman Stiglitz. Bad luck and the German Luftwaffe saw to that.

Tech. Sgt. Stiglitz might have been discharged from the U.S. Army Air Corps and might have settled with his sister and parents in Tucson. Or he might have done as his brother did and found his own way in his own place of American terra firma.

Instead, Stiglitz's first trip to Tucson will be his last - and it will never end.
His remains will arrive Saturday after having been entombed for 61 years in the wreckage of his B-24 Liberator bomber south of Berlin. The Fort Huachuca Honor Guard will meet his casket, and he will be buried next to his parents and sister at Evergreen Mortuary.

His post-mortem journey to Tucson required the luck of salvage hunters, the skill of a forensics team and the will of a niece afraid of needles. It starts at his end on July 7, 1944.

Stiglitz's crew had a reputation for getting shot up during missions. It was known as "the hard-luck crew of the hard-luck squadron of the hard-luck group" in the armadas of U.S. bombers flying out of eastern England during World War II, according to his unit's Web site. Nine days after D-Day, the crew safely landed because Stiglitz dangled on a small catwalk in an open bomb bay 20,000 feet up and released bombs fused to detonate that hadn't dropped as planned.
It bought them three weeks, during which Stiglitz's crew enjoyed one more seven-day pass in London.

The day they died, hard luck struck again and left his group of Liberators unprotected by U.S. fighters busy elsewhere in the sky. The German fighter pilots attacked. The crew was doomed.

They fell to earth so violently, no one could crawl out escape hatches and parachute to safety. The plane crashed into the German countryside.
After the war, U.S. recovery crews scavenged Germany, looking for missing air crews, but Stiglitz's crew had gone down in the Soviet sector, which later became known as East Germany. Americans were not allowed to search freely during the days of the Cold War, said Maj. Brian DeSantis, spokesman for the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii.

In 2001, after reunification, German wreck hunters heard about the crash site and called German authorities, who contacted the U.S. military. The Accounting Command took over the crash site in November 2002, DeSantis said.
One of the investigators was forensic anthropologist Greg Berg, a University of Arizona graduate.

The challenge immediately was to sort out the remains after the violence of the crash in 1944, Berg said.

"You end up with commingled remains mixing plane, equipment, ammunition and remains all together," Berg said.

The problem in identifying the MIA soldiers from World War II is the backtracking needed to find the next of kin with contact information dating to the 1940s.
Some 78,000 U.S. troops are still MIA from World War II.

The Stiglitz family lived in Boston at the time its son was shot down. It subsequently moved to Chicago before settling in Tucson in 1959.

It took five years to sort through the remains, get DNA matches and identify the dead. Stiglitz and seven other crew members were identified.

Sorting the remains meant forensics experts needed mitochondrial DNA, unchanged from mother to daughter, Berg said. They needed a female relative. From that they could confirm his identity.

Stiglitz never met his niece Casonti McClure, but she proved to be his only living female relative. They needed her DNA, but that meant facing her fear of needles and blood.

She agreed and gave the blood, but it didn't go well.
"It was a big needle with a big bag of blood," said McClure, a high school dance teacher in Tucson, the daughter of Berta Wright. "I passed out."

At first she heard it wasn't a match. Her cousin in San Diego later told her she was a match.

"Uncle Hymie" was coming home - or some place like it.
McClure's father, Adolph Wright, said Stiglitz was a fine violinist and a kind man.
"He was an artistic type," Wright said. "He kind of kept to himself."

The family went on without Stiglitz, whom it long ago stopped talking about. The dead can get left behind as the living go on with their lives. He'll be buried next to the people who knew him best.

His sister, Berta Wright, made a name for herself as owner of a chain of art shops.

His mother, Anna Stiglitz, popular in the local Jewish community, was known as a prodigious fundraiser. The Tucson media recognized her volunteer work at Handmaker Foundation.

They lived into their 80s.

Hymie died at 25 after a final bout with hard luck.
Click to expand...

Antipodean Andy · Dec 16, 2007

Well written story.

Kyt · Dec 17, 2007

B-24 44-40145 lost 7th July 1944.

Those lost were:

1st Lt. David P. McMurray, of Melrose, Mass.1
st Lt. Raymond Pascual, of Houston, Texas;
2nd Lt. Millard C. Wells, Jr., of Paris, Ky.;
Tech. Sgt. Leonard J. Ray, of Upper Falls, Md.;
Tech. Sgt. Hyman L. Stiglitz, of Boston, Mass.;
Staff Sgt. Robert L. Cotey, of Vergennes, Vt.;
Staff Sgt. Francis E. Larrivee, of Laconia, N.H.;
Staff Sgt. Robert J. Flood, of Neelyton, Pa.;
Staff Sgt. Walter O. Schlosser, of Lake City, Mich

Full details and a picture of the crew:

492ndBombGroup.com - McMurray 801 Crew

Kyt · Dec 28, 2007

Service is today for crewman on B-24 in WWII | www.azstarnet.com Â®

Kyt · May 27, 2008

Citizen.com - Laconia NH, Dover NH, Rochester NH, Portsmouth NH, Sanford ME

morse1001 · May 27, 2008

Its all ways nice to see the remains of the fallen, returned to their relatives for a proper burial. it also indicates the skills that have been aquired over the years in order to identify.

The most recent RAF Historical Society Journal No42, had a article about the Royal, Dominion and Allied Air Forces Missing Research and Enquirey Service 1944 - 1952.

David Layne · May 27, 2008

And four from the Vietnam War.

IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 447-08
May 27, 2008

U.S. Department of Defense
Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs)

On the Web: DefenseLink News: News Release

Media Contact: +1 (703) 697-5131/697-5132
Public Contact: Department of Defense Contact Us or +1 (703) 428-0711 +1

GovDelivery, Inc. sending on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense · 380 Jackson Street, Suite 550 · St. Paul, MN 55101 · 1-800-439-1420
Airmen MIA From Vietnam War are Identified

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of four U.S. servicemen, missing in action from the Vietnam War, have been identified and will be returned to their families for burial with full military honors.

They are Maj. Barclay B. Young, of Hartford, Conn.; and Senior Master Sgt. James K. Caniford, of Brunswick, Md. The names of the two others are being withheld at the request of their families. All men were U.S. Air Force. Caniford will be buried May 28 in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C., and Young's burial date is being set by his family.

Remains that could not be individually identified are included in a group which will be buried together in Arlington. Among the group remains is Air Force Lt. Col. Henry P. Brauner of Franklin Park, N.J., whose identification tag was recovered at the crash site.

On March 29, 1972, 14 men were aboard an AC-130A Spectre gunship that took off from Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, on an armed reconnaissance mission over southern Laos. The aircraft was struck by an enemy surface-to-air missile and crashed. Search and rescue efforts were stopped after a few days due to heavy enemy activity in the area.

In 1986, joint U.S.- Lao People's Democratic Republic teams, lead by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), surveyed and excavated the crash site in Savannakhet Province, Laos. The team recovered human remains and other evidence including two identification tags, life support items and aircraft wreckage. From 1986 to 1988, the remains were identified as those of nine men from this crew.

Between 2005 and 2006, joint teams resurveyed the crash site and excavated it twice. The teams found more human remains, personal effects and crew-related equipment. As a result, JPAC identified Young, Caniford and the other crewmen using forensic identification tools, circumstantial evidence, mitochondrial DNA and dental comparisons.

For additional information on the Defense Department's mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO Web site at http://www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call (703) 699-1169.
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USAAF aviator's long-lost remains to rest in Tucson

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