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WWII Kin Still Seek Closure

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By NINA BERNSTEIN, The New York Times

Published: February 3, 2008

The military telegram arrived in Peekskill, N.Y., on a springlike day in February 1945. The parents put it down unopened, falling to their knees to pray. Three of their five sons were pilots fighting overseas, and they were afraid to learn which of their boys was dead.

Their firstborn, Joseph Huba, 27, was the one named in the telegram. His transport plane had crashed in a jungle in Burma, now Myanmar. And like tens of thousands of other American servicemen who died in World War II, he remains officially missing - a fate that has haunted such families ever since.

"My poor mother would say, 'If they could just find him so I could bury him - I don't want the birds picking on his body,'" recalled Francis Huba, 84, who remembers Joseph as "the best big brother anyone ever had."

But it was a nephew - born 15 years after his uncle's plane went down - who combed military records, interviewed witnesses and is now weighing a third-hand report that hunters in Myanmar have stumbled upon the wreckage of the doomed plane.

More than six decades after World War II ended, the families of men such as Joe Huba are making a new push to find and bring home the remains of their missing and dead.

After years when survivors accepted the solace of mass memorials and unknown-soldier graves, a younger generation is seeking something more personal. The relatives are spurred by strides in DNA matching, satellite mapping and Internet archives, and by a new advocacy group impatient with the pace of the military unit that tracks down remains.

"We owe these men for giving their lives - we can't just leave them in jungles, on mountainsides," said Lisa Phillips, 45, president of the group World War II Families for the Return of the Missing, which was formed in 2006, joining organizations that press for recoveries from Vietnam and Korea.

Searching has pitfalls, Phillips admits. Discoveries about how a loved one died can prove disturbing. International swindles and treasure hunters complicate the challenge of identifying remains after so many years.

The numbers are daunting. Of more than 88,000 American servicemen missing in 20th century conflicts, 79,000 are casualties of World War II, and though many of them were forever lost at sea, the government classifies about 35,000 as recoverable. The unit responsible for all recoveries, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, identifies about 75 remains a year. Yet the unit's forensic successes keep raising expectations.

In 2006, the unit confirmed the identity of a World War I doughboy, Pvt. Francis Lupo, discovered in a construction site near Soissons, France, matching mitochondrial DNA from his bones with a niece's saliva swab. He was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

"Things that weren't possible for identification of remains 10 years ago are possible now," said Gary Zaetz, 53, of Cary, N.C., who has been pressing for a recovery from northern India, where a World War II B-24 bomber nicknamed "Hot As Hell" was found a year ago.

280,000 Remains Found After WWII

The government created a military recovery unit in the 1970s in response to an outcry after the Vietnam War, but its mission was expanded to all wars in 2000.

"We're doing our best to be as fair as possible, with frankly limited manpower, limited resources," spokesman Troy Kitch said.

The government's graves identification effort after World War II was enormous, he noted, citing 280,000 remains recovered worldwide between 1945 and 1954, more than 171,000 of them returned to the United States for burial.

The rest were buried in cemeteries around the world maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission - places such as the Cemetery of the Pacific, which draws millions of visitors, and memorial tablets record the names of "comrades in arms whose earthly resting place is known only to God."

But such collective memorials do not satisfy searchers such as Phillips, who has consulted meteorologists and aviation experts about wind currents over Bangladesh, trying to pinpoint the site of a 1946 crash. The plane was carrying the remains of dozens of men, including her great-uncle, 2nd Lt. Joseph Rich.

Refugee Reported Plane Discovery

Tips from hunters can be crucial, and with immigration, leads also surface in the United States. It was through a Myanmar refugee that a report recently reached Joseph Huba's family about a wreck bearing his plane's serial number.

Joseph's nephew, William Huba Jr., a supervisory agent with the FBI in Syracuse, N.Y., had unearthed disturbing answers about his uncle's fate, summarized in the minutes of a 1947 military board that abandoned recovery efforts for the plane's crew of four.

The plane lost an engine, then radio contact. Three parachutes were spotted not far from the wreck, caught in a canopy of 100-foot trees. Three of the crew had perished in the jungle, the board concluded, and if one went down with the plane, his body likely had been dragged away by wild animals.

"My parents never saw that documentation," said William Huba Sr., 73, who was in grade school when the telegram arrived. "Maybe, in a sense, it was better that they didn't."

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