Airmen MIA from WWII identified, returned

  • Published
WASHINGTON (AFNS) --  Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office officials announced Oct. 27 that the remains of two Airmen, missing in action from World War II, have been identified and are being returned to their families for burial with full military honors.

Army Air Forces staff sergeants Claude A. Ray, 24, of Coffeyville, Kan.; and Claude G. Tyler, 24, of Landover, Md., were buried October 27 - Sergeant Ray in Fallbrook, Calif., and Sergeant Tyler in Arlington National Cemetery.
The two Airmen, along with 10 other crew members, were ordered to carry out a reconnaissance mission in their B-24D Liberator, taking off from an airfield near Port Moresby, New Guinea, Oct. 27, 1943.
The crew's assigned area of reconnaissance was the nearby shipping lanes in the Bismarck Sea. During their mission, however, they were ordered to land at a friendly air strip nearby due to poor weather conditions. They never landed at the air strip.
The last radio transmission from the crew did not indicate their location, and searchers were unable to locate the aircraft in spite of multiple searches.

Following World War II, searchers with the Army Graves Registration Service conducted investigations and searches for 43 missing Airmen, including Sergeant Ray and Sergeant Tyler, in the area but concluded in June 1949 that they were unrecoverable.

In August 2003, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command received information on a crash site from a citizen in Papua New Guinea. He also turned over an identification card from one of the crew members and reported that there were possible human remains at the crash site.
Twice in 2004, other JPAC teams attempted to visit the site, but were unable to do so due to poor weather and hazardous conditions at the helicopter landing site. Another team was able to successfully excavate the site from January to March 2007, where they found several identification tags from the B-24D crew, as well as human remains.

Among other forensic identification tools and circumstantial evidence, scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory used mitochondrial DNA, which matched that of relatives of Sergeant Ray and Sergeant Tyler, in the identification of their remains

Of the 16 million Americans who served in World War II, more than 400,000 died. At the end of the war, the U.S. government was unable to recover and identify approximately 79,000 Americans. Today, more than 74,000 are unaccounted-for from the conflict.