The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced
today that the remains of a U.S. serviceman, missing in action from
World War II, have been identified and are being returned to his family
for burial with full military honors.
He is 1st
Lt. Archibald Kelly, U.S. Army Air Forces, of Detroit, Mich. He
will be buried on May 12 in Great Lakes National Cemetery, Holly, Mich.
Representatives from the Army met with Kelly’s next-of-kin in his
hometown to explain the recovery and identification process and to
coordinate interment with military honors on behalf of the Secretary of
the Army.
On July 22, 1944, Kelly was the navigator on a B-24J Liberator on a
bombing raid of the oil fields at Ploesti, Romania. Returning to
Lecce air base in Italy, the plane was struck by enemy anti-aircraft
fire and crashed in what is now Croatia, approximately 430 miles
southwest of Ploesti. Of the ten crewmen on board, eight survived
and bailed out of the aircraft before it crashed. The rear gunner
died and his body was later recovered. One of the surviving
crewmen saw Kelly bail out before the crash, but said he struck a rocky
cliff face when the wind caught his parachute. His body was not
found at that time.
After researching information contained in U.S. wartime records,
specialists from DPMO’s Joint Commission Support Directorate (JCSD) in
2005 interviewed residents from Dubrovnik and Mihanici village who had
information related to WWII aircraft losses in the area. One
resident recalled a crash in which one of the crewmen landed on a pile
of rocks on Mt. Snijeznica after his parachute failed to open. He
said locals buried the individual. Based on witness descriptions of the
burial location, the team searched the mountaintop, but was unable to
locate the burial site.
Additional
JCSD archival research in Croatia confirmed the earlier information
found in U.S. records. In June 2006, the Dubrovnik resident
reported to JCSD that he had continued the search and found the grave
site of the American serviceman. He sent pictures of both the site
and the remains to DPMO. In September 2006, a Joint POW/MIA
Accounting Command (JPAC) team excavated the burial site, confirming
with local villagers that it was the same site photographed by the
Dubrovnik resident. The team recovered human remains at the site.
Among
other traditional forensic identification tools and circumstantial
evidence, scientists from JPAC also used dental comparisons in the
identification of Kelly’s remains.
