Honoring Lost Airmen of World War II

On November 13, 2005 an article on page 21 of Sunday's New York Post caught my eye. It was about a six-decades-late memorial service for Lt. Murray Weiss, a U.S. Army Air Corps bombardier and navigator lost over the China Sea on November 22, 1943. I was very familiar with the facts because Lt. Weiss was a close personal friend of my father's when he and my dad were growing up in The Bronx.

The article, authored by New York Post criminal justice editor Murray Weiss, the late airman's nephew and namesake, states that Lt. Weiss, a member of the 357th Bomber Squadron, 208th Bomber Group (Heavy), flew more than 350 hours in combat in a B-24 over enemy territory in the Pacific. His awards included the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and Distinguished Flying Cross.

After the B-24 was severely damaged by enemy fire, five of nine crew members, including Lt. Weiss, bailed out in accordance with the pilot's recommendation. The jumpers died, but the pilot was able to land, and all who remained on board survived.

Lt. Weiss left a daughter whom he never met.

The New York Post article, "Hero's Honor For My Uncle At Long Last", is retrievable from The Post's archives at http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/nypost/advancedsearch.html.

The circumstances surrounding Lt. Weiss's disappearance are also discussed in my late father's 2004 memoir, Dear Mom, Dad & Ethel: World War II through the Eyes of a Radio Man, of which I am a co-author. In Dear Mom, Dad & Ethel, my father, Eli Ellison, observed that when the pilot visited Lt. Weiss's bereaved mother, she became enraged and threw the pilot out of her house. She felt that he should have told the crew to stay put. But the lieutenant's brother Jerry, a tech sergeant aerial gunner who also flew in a B-24, understood the vicissitudes of war and never blamed anyone for Murray's death.

My dad and the Weiss brothers were part of a tight group of Bronx residents who joined the Army shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, the surviving members formed the Murray Weiss Fraternal Order which met in New York City during the second half of the 1940s.

According to the Post article, a sister of editor Weiss's discovered that the lieutenant's name was inscribed in a Manila memorial honoring fallen American soldiers. She also learned that Arlington National Cemetery had reserved ground for missing airmen. Thus, over 60 years after his death, a stone for Lt. Weiss was erected at Arlington, and on November 14, 2005 a memorial service for him took place there.

According to a March 24, 2006 New York Times article, about 88,000 U.S. military personnel are MIAs. About 78,000 of them served during World War II, and most of those were lost at sea.

The Times article describes the extensive forensic efforts necessary to identify airman Leo M. Mustonen, whose training flight crashed on California's Darwin Glacier on November 18, 1942. Mustonen's unrecognizable body was found in October 2005 by two hikers. Using special photographic lighting techniques, a team of anthropologists at the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Honolulu were able to identify four letters in Mustonen's decomposed dog tags. Although no DNA sample from Mustonen's family was available for comparison with DNA from Mustonen's body, subsequent tests eliminated other members of his crew. The combination of the partial dog tag identification and the genetic exclusion conclusively identified the remains as those of Mustonen.

Nearly sixty-four years after the death of Leo Mustonen, a funeral ceremony with full military honors took place in his hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota.

According to The Times, MIA recovery teams regularly visit Southeast Asia, Korea, and the Pacific and Atlantic theaters of World War II. Leo Mustonen's body was found. Lt. Weiss's was not. The search for the missing continues.

According to the Times article, thousands of unidentified boxed remains are typically on hand at the Accounting Command. The identification process, which includes use of computer technology matching skulls with facial photographs, is painstakingly slow. The Command's 425-person staff identifies about six soldiers a month, returning each with a flag-draped coffin to a family member.

In providing families with closure, the Command is doing God's work , even when it's decades after a military person has made the ultimate sacrifice. Although their bodies may have perished in a watery grave or an icy tundra, the identification and honoring of these brave individuals is truly heartwarming. May they rest in peace.