Crewman Served On A B-24D Liberator Which Went Down On A Recon
Mission
The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO)
said Thursday that the remains of a serviceman, missing in action
from World War II, have been identified and are being returned to
his family for burial with full military honors.
B-24 Liberator File Photo
Army Air Forces 2nd Lt. Martin P. Murray, 21, of Lowell, MA,
will be buried on April 16 in Marshfield, MA. Murray, along with 11
other crew members, took off on Oct. 27, 1943, in their B-24D
Liberator from an airfield near Port Moresby, New Guinea. Allied
plans were being formulated to mount an attack on the Japanese
redoubt at Rabaul, New Britain. The crew’s assigned area of
reconnaissance was the nearby shipping lanes in the Bismarck Sea.
But during their mission, they were radioed to land at a friendly
air strip nearby due to poor weather conditions. The last radio
transmission from the crew did not indicate their location.
Multiple search missions in the following weeks did not locate the
aircraft.
Following World War II, the Army Graves Registration Service
conducted searches for 43 missing airmen, including Murray, in the
area but concluded in June 1949 that all were unrecoverable.
In August 2003, a team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command
(JPAC) received information on a crash site from a citizen in Papua
New Guinea while it was investigating another case. The citizen
also turned over an identification card from one of the crew
members and reported that there were possible human remains at the
site of the crash. 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 the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and
the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory also used dental
comparisons and mitochondrial DNA in the identification of
Murray’s remains.
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.